EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — About FIVE DOZEN LOADED TRAIN CARS derailed at about 9 p.m. EST on Friday, February 4 on the edge of East Palestine near the Pennsylvania border. The NORFOLK SOUTHERN train, carrying many products—with full documentation of the cargo still undisclosed—included large loads of toxic VINYL CHLORIDE, and was en route from Madison, Illinois, to Conway, Pennsylvania. Disturbing pictures of the derailment can be found on Twitter posted by accounts such as @Justice314Lady—I’ll just share a photo I took of one of the closed businesses (Leake oil company) adjacent to the wreck.
I arrived in East Palestine on Saturday, February 11, on a sunny day with wispy clouds. Despite the near freezing weather, young people were out and about in this little town, and they were in shape and healthy. The downtown drag pristine—it was like taking a time machine to 1985—truly, and point blank: the town is healthy, white, and relatively young. Census data shows East Palestine fertility to be about DOUBLE the average rate in Ohio. Over 50% of the population are in their PRIME working years (18-64), and NEARLY 20% of people are ages 0 to 9. White (non-hispanic) makes up 93.5% of the population.
Stopping in the local eatery, The Original Roadhouse, and seated, I ordered steak and potatoes. About a dozen young men—all strong and in shape—dropped in, one of which was wearing a cowboy hat. While they got comfortable, the elderly couple sitting across the room enjoyed their food; the old man in suspenders and looking like he could still do a hard day of work (and probably still does). I received my food and dug in, and the waitress turned to take the order at the table of essentially natural bodybuilders, and one of the young men asked, “Do you fry fries in seed oils?” Yeah, these are my kind of guys.
The elderly couple stood and walked to talk to some friends who happened to sit next to me. I overheard them discussing the NORFOLK SOUTHERN wreck. They said they had moved about a dozen horses to a different facility to get them away from the contamination, and also reported that they had been able to SMELL the VINYL CHLORIDE. “We were in Florida when it all went down, I was down with my Dad,” said the patron, “…and about as soon as they get there, it all happened. My son (name redacted) who’s 16 witnessed it, I told him to stay off the streets. We came up the day of and arrived on the day after.”
The patron’s wife remarked, “We were helping at the church—when we came home we didn’t smell anything—but helping at the church, you could SMELL it.” One of their main concerns was the water treatment facility, which is near the location of the derailment, because of the potential for circulating poisoned water throughout the town. The water treatment and sanitation facility is roughly located under the blue cross I’ve added to this diagram, which was apparently produced by the company (can anyone verify the accuracy of the red and yellow gradients?):
After dinner, I met with a local practicing chemical engineer, (name redacted), and discussed the toxicity of VINYL CHLORIDE, the train’s design, and the derailment. We started by reviewing the history of VINYL CHLORIDE, which is a compound used in the production of PVC and other plastics (Sass, Castleman, and Wallinga 2005).
In 1959, private industry experiments demonstrated cancer in rabbit livers after repeated exposures to 200 ppm gaseous VINYL CHLORIDE (Markowitz and Rosner 2002) leading Dow Chemical toxicologist V.K. Rowe to admit to his counterpart at BF Goodrich: “We feel quite confident…that 500 ppm is going to produce rather appreciable injury when inhaled 7 hours a day, five days a week, for an extended period.”
Sass et al. subsequently documents a long history of industry coverups, apparently unable to deal with the fact that they would have workers inhaling the chemical, even though they had since learned that concentrations as low as 250 ppm were deadly. It wasn’t until 1974, after the deaths of three workers at a BF Goodrich plant in Louisville, Kentucky, that the public learned of the hazards of VINYL CHLORIDE. All the deceased had liver cancer.
These are low concentrations: 250 ppm is only 250 parts per million. MSDS toxicology reports the odor threshold at 3,000 ppm so if you can SMELL it, you are in danger. Current OSHA safety standards put the legal permissible exposure limit at only 1 ppm averaged over an 8-hour work shift, and 5 ppm not to be exceeded over any 15 minute interval. These are incredibly low concentrations that are difficult to measure without special equipment, and demonstrate how toxic this chemical is.
He went on to explain that the vinyl chloride was contained in double walled vessel cars, designed specifically to carry flammable and toxic chemicals, and that the train had been “on fire since Salem.” As you can see from the map, that means the train was on fire for practically 20 miles.
The chemical engineer testified that in the evening on the day of the vent and burn, as the sun set, the neighbor’s lights on their house were fuzzy, blurred and star rayed by the hazy, toxic fog.
This isn’t NORFOLK SOUTHERN’s first violation. In fact, if this company had been operating accordingly to sensible procedures and following proper maintenance schedules, it’s possible the wreck (and a potential new superfund site) could have been avoided. For goodness sake, check out this YouTube video from Central Penn Rail Productions depicting a NORFOLK SOUTHERN train ON FIRE 15 years ago. The comments as of this writing are all many years old.
A similar kind of axel & bearing fire may well have LED TO THE DISASTER being reported on today.
Again, NORFOLK SOUTHERN is no stranger to violations. In 2014, a case was brought against them: Fulk vs Norfolk Southern Railway Company (Sizemore 2016). Fulk, a safety inspector at their Linwood Yard in North Carolina, was a whistleblower.
As part of his duties, defective cars were tagged with orders listing what required maintenance must be done. Over time, he became uncomfortable with NORFOLK SOUTHERN MANAGEMENT’s policies towards compliance with the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA). The management IMPROPERLY set violation quotas for the inspector to stay under, and if he didn’t follow these (illegal) rules, he was subject to HARASSMENT OPERATIONS perpetuated by what I may accurately term an ELITE INNER CABAL at the company.
On January 6, 2011, Fulk was accused by the cabal of sabotaging the braking system on one of the rail cars (NOTICE HOW THIS CABAL GASLIT FULK AND SUBSEQUENTLY SET HIM UP FOR FAILURE BY INVERTING THE BLAME—WHO ELSE DOES THAT?). A formal hearing was scheduled for January 19, 2011, (Sizemore 2016), and Fulk prepared and sent letters to the FRA and OSHA.
A week before the hearing, Fulk arrived at work and ALLEGEDLY COMMITTED SUICIDE, found DEAD in the parking lot of NORFOLK SOUTHERN.
And that’s all for Part 1 of this exclusive investigation. Stay tuned for Part 2 because this story is FAR from finished, and I suspect the troubles have only just begun for Norfolk Southern and their cabal of managers.
Works cited:
Census data gathered from datausa.io and censusreporter.org
Markowitz G, Rosner D. 2002. Evidence of an illegal conspiracy by industry. In: Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1689-194.
Sizemore, Jonathon. “Fulk vs Norfolk Southern Railway Company,” New York Law School, Volume 60, issue 3, article 7.
Sass, Jennifer Beth, Barry Castleman, and David Wallinga, “Vinyl Chloride: A Case Study of Data Suppression and Misrepresentation,” Environ Health Perspect. 2005 Jul; 113(7): 809-812