THE controlled burn of toxic chemicals in East Palestine filled the air the residents breathe, and covered the waters in and around town and the soil too with chemicals. Dead fish are floating in the creeks and a frightening smell lingers.

The story unfolding here is shot through with corporate greed. The executives of the criminally negligent railroad company Norfolk Southern (NS) manipulated the political system to maximise profits from that train — and others — to satisfy their Wall Street investors, at the expense of safety, workers and now a small town in Ohio.

It’s a story not just of the wreck of the 150-car, 9,300-foot freight train, where 50 cars jumped the tracks, but the widening variety of toxic chemicals that escaped from them. It’s a story of dying plants, 3,500 dead fish in an Ohio River tributary, and a mass evacuation of the town of 4,700 people.

It’s a story of residents afraid to come back to their homes. Some haven’t. It’s a story of a town meeting in East Palestine where stricken people vented their frustration and where representatives of its cause, the Class 1 freight railroad NS, were no-shows.

It’s a story of the government turning a blind eye to NS’s abuses, notably not classifying the freight as a “high-hazard flammable train,” which requires extra precautions and inspections in advance.

That’s on Biden administration transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s watch, though prior deregulation which let NS get away with its excesses occurred under Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao.

And it’s a story of NS turning its own blind eye to workers’ warnings of problems even before the train reached Ohio, after it began its run in Madison County, workers are saying. It broke down at least once long before it ever reached East Palestine.

Here, courtesy of various sources, most notably Railroad Workers United (RWU), are further details about the East Palestine wreck.

The list of chemicals escaping from the wrecked train cars dedicated to carrying hazardous liquids includes vinyl chloride, phosgene and hydrogen chloride. All were in large plumes of smoke that hung over East Palestine and rose into the air.

The railroad told the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that other chemicals released by the wreck included ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate.

The Centres for Disease Control said the last two cause skin, eye, nose, and throat irritation and burning. Ethylhexyl acrylate is also a carcinogen. Monobutyl ether can cause dizziness, drowsiness, blood in the urine, headaches, and vomiting.

After officials lifted the evacuation order, calling the air and water in East Palestine safe, returning residents reported sore throats, burning eyes, and respiratory problems, and wildlife was found dead, RWU co-chair Ross Grooters said.
 
EPA also reported “a controlled burn” to get rid of the chemicals after they leaked from the NS tank cars. Since then, “there have been no concerning levels of toxins in the air,” the agency says.

The Ohio EPA says some of the released chemicals reached tributaries of the Ohio River, which serves 25 million people. The agency claims the river’s volume dilutes any chemicals so much that they’re not a downstream hazard. The people of Ohio and Pennsylvania have good reason to be sceptical.

East Palestine is a stone’s throw from the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, south of Youngstown and midway between there and the Ohio River point where Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania meet.

Fourteen days after the disaster the head of the EPA came to the town with promises of federal help but was faced with angry residents, many of whom did not believe him.

He was faced with questions from residents demanding to know if he would allow his children to drink the water in the town. The state and local officials surrounding him assured the disbelieving residents that the testing showed the water was safe. It was difficult for people to accept that. Only days earlier Mike DeWine, Governor of Ohio, had told them not to drink that water.

A customer at the town pizza shop said that he did not expect the visit from the EPA to result in anything. “We are getting headaches and have to deal with strong odours — and I saw dead fish in the creek near my house,” he said.

The pizza shop and other businesses in town were closed last week but some have reopened.

People in town are heard telling younger people to pack up and leave permanently and to make a life somewhere else.

There was an angry gathering at a town meeting where residents literally begged town leaders to help them after they were jilted by the railroad which failed to appear at the meeting as promised. After having little concern for the safety of the residents along its route, the railroad said it failed to show because it was concerned about the safety of its representatives.

NS got the Republican Trump regime to repeal rules governing the quality of train brakes — rules that, no matter how low their prior standards, could have prevented the disaster.

The Class 1 freight railroads, including NS, have cut 30 per cent of their workers — tens of thousands of jobs, including safety jobs — starting in 2015, all in pursuit of ever-greater profits. The result in East Palestine, one worker told CBS: “The workers are exhausted, times for car inspections have been drastically cut, and there are no regulations on the size of these trains.”

While cutting corners on workers and leaving safety short-staffed, NS invested billions in profits in stock buybacks and high executive pay, again at Wall Street’s command.

But NS is getting a blind eye, too, from Biden’s current transportation secretary Buttigieg, whose department regulates both rail traffic and rail safety.

Progressives, safety advocates and social media commenters all accuse Buttigieg of being slow to respond to the wreck and, more importantly, refusing to restore, or better yet, strengthen the safety rules Trump repealed. Ilhan Omar, representative for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district, is now seeking a congressional investigation of the wreck and its aftermath.

As if NS didn’t have enough exposure of its corporate greed, now it must handle a second smaller wreck of 31 railcars, in Van Buren Township, Michigan, on February 16. The difference, so far, is it’s a smaller train, with only one hazardous material car.

All this has led RWU to renew its dual goals for the future of US railroads: tighter regulations to protect workers and communities and nationalisation of the freight railroads as public utilities to put an end to their Wall Street-driven corporate greed.

“We hope to build support for safety regulations and legislation to stop the carriers’ worst excesses and abuses,” said RWU, which has 15 members — all experienced rank-and-file railroaders — investigating the East Palestine wreck.

“At a minimum, the wreck and its aftermath should mandate a standard two-person crew, which NS and other big freight railroads want to cut to one, the engineer,” RWU adds. The wreck could have been fatal, as the fiery Lac Megantic, Quebec, downhill wreck was a decade ago — killing 47 and destroying that town’s centre — had the NS train had only an engineer.

The NS freight had three crew members: the engineer, the conductor, and a trainee, who together were able to decouple the three engines from the freight cars, preventing an even worse explosion.

Other safety measures would restrict train length, provide “adequate time off work to mitigate fatigue and adequate and proper staffing to get the job done safely and efficiently” and mandate the installation of new, tighter brakes on all railcars and trains. The brakes that failed on the NS train did so because a 19th-century brake assembly could not handle 21st-century conditions on a downhill slope.

Reforms must also include “real safety programmes that pinpoint hazards, not worker behaviours,” RWU adds. “Achieving any of this ambitious programme will be tough. That’s just one of many reasons why the railroads need to be publicly owned and run in conjunction with the railroad workers themselves.”

This article appeared on Peoplesworld.org.