More than 200 residents of East Palestine and environmental activists from across the country signed a letter urging President Joe Biden and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan to take action to help residents in East Palestine.
The letter comes one day before Biden is expected to make his first trip to East Palestine, more than a year after a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous materials derailed in the small town on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Three days after the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment, officials on the ground decided to vent and burn the vinyl chloride, a carcinogenic gas used primarily to make PVC pipes, in five derailed tanker cars, emitting a huge plume of black smoke seen for miles.
Since then, some residents have reported health symptoms they say are related to the derailment. Trust has waned between residents and federal agencies like the EPA and calls for Biden to step in have gone largely unanswered.
The letter urges Biden and Regan to help residents get answers to the unknown outcomes of exposure to the chemicals on the train both on human health and the environment.
"The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] has stated that people were exposed to a broad mixture of toxic chemicals and confirmed that the combined and cumulative effects are unknown; however, the CDC also attempted to console the community with assurances that their anticipated cancers were treatable," the letter states.
The letter then draws parallels between survivors of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City and soldiers exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, where people were also exposed to toxic chemicals, to East Palestine.
"In both of these situations, the federal government recognized that critical scientific information linking exposures and health outcomes was impossible to assess, missing or incomplete," the letter states. "To address the needs of the victims/survivors, the federal government decided to use a presumptive approach that exposures were likely to be the cause of the health problems suffered by these people."
The federal government was able to help both victims of 9/11 and those exposed to burn pits by providing healthcare, treatment, compensation and other assistance, the letter argues, further stating that the federal government should take similar action in East Palestine.
The letter urges Biden to issue a major disaster declaration, which Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, Sen. Sherrod Brown and East Palestine residents have been demanding for months. In September, Biden issued an executive order to protect residents of East Palestine, which included designating a Federal Disaster Recovery Coordinator to oversee long-term recovery, directing the EPA to continue overseeing cleanup, ordering the Department of Health and Human Services to monitor public health outcomes and asking the Department of Transportation to take action to hold major railroads like Norfolk Southern accountable. The executive order did not include a major disaster declaration but did leave the door open for one if the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator recommended it.
Other recommendations outlined in the letter include providing immediate and long-term healthcare for residents, setting up long-term medical monitoring, providing financial resources for relocation, including reimbursement for items lost due to the derailment; conducting comprehensive indoor air testing, conducting long-term testing on drinking water and expanding sampling for dioxins and furans in residential soil, indoor dust, fish, farm animals, wildlife and other areas of the environment.
The recommendations build on some residents' longstanding calls for the federal government to provide more resources to monitor human health and further test the environment. Residents worried about their health have said their doctors don't know how to treat the mix of toxic chemicals they were exposed to.
Indoor air testing was done by a Norfolk Southern contractor, but some residents have said they don't trust the results and don't think the tests were comprehensive enough. Soil and plant matter testing was done on nearby farms and came back with good results, but residents have demanded testing also be done on residential land. The U.S. and Ohio EPAs have maintained that the air and water are safe in East Palestine.
Earlier this month, Norfolk Southern ended hotel and living reimbursements for dozens of residents still displaced after remediation work began in East Palestine.
In addition to these recommendations, the letter also called for a ban on vinyl chloride. The EPA recently announced it will be evaluating vinyl chloride under the Toxic Substances Control Act.
"As you prepare to visit East Palestine this week, now is the time for you to adopt and aggressively put these common-sense recommendations into practice," the letter concludes.
The White House and the EPA have not yet responded to a request for comment.
