Image Credit: Xinhua News Agency / Contributor / Getty Images 
Until 3 February 2023, East Palestine, Ohio was an utterly unremarkable place. One of those countless little urban settlements—population south of 5,000–where basically nothing has ever happened, except maybe someone who did something that nobody remembers was born there a hundred years ago.
As I scan Wikipedia, I see that probably the most interesting thing about East Palestine was that it was once called Mechanicsburg, which makes it sound like somewhere out of Warhammer 40K, a place dreadnoughts and baneblade tanks are built for the Adeptus Astartes in the grim darkness of the far future where there is only war.
Apart from that, zip—nothing. Zilch. Unless apple orchards are your thing, or the making of synthetic ice.
But all that changed on 3 February 2023, when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed as it passed through the city.
Of the train’s 38 cars, 11 were carrying hazardous materials including five cars of vinyl chloride, as well as butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, isobutylene, 1,1,2-trichloroethane and napthalene.
Three days later, as fires still burned, it was determined that a “controlled burn”—a misnomer if I ever heard one—would be necessary to prevent a catastrophic explosion of the tanks containing vinyl chloride. A trench was dug, and vast quantities of the chemical—115,580 gallons, to be precise—were deliberately set on fire.
You may recall the apocalyptic photos that resulted from that fateful decision—the smouldering train cars bent and broken, the enormous roiling dark mushroom cloud unfolding over the tiny city like the wrath of God himself.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve totally forgotten the whole thing either. The story dominated the news for maybe a week or two at best, and then it disappeared, as even the biggest stories—like the first Trump assassination attempt—do when it’s not expedient for them to be kept in the news cycle.
President Biden took a whole year to visit the city after the disaster. He had better things to do, like snoozing in the sun on the beach in Delaware or having his butt wiped. Then, a few months later, Norfolk Southern quietly reached a $310 million settlement with the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make good for the derailment and its effects.
And so what was probably the worst environmental disaster in US history became as insignificant a footnote in the chronicle of events as East Palestine’s apple orchards and synthetic-ice factories.
Until this week, that is. On Thursday, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Director of the National Institutes of Health Dr Jay Bhattacharya vowed that the disaster at East Palestine would not be forgotten.
In a video posted to X, the three men announced a new multi-million-dollar multi-year study into the health effects of the massive chemical spill on the residents of East Palestine.
Such a study is necessary, the Vice President noted, because we simply don’t know what these chemicals do when people are exposed to them, especially over months or years.
Do they cause cancer? Do they cause depressed fertility and reproductive defects? Thyroid problems? Reduced IQ?
We just don’t know. And of course we should know.
Secretary Kennedy said a new $10 million study will focus on the “long-term health impact” of the disaster, over a period of five years.
“The programme will support robust community-engaged epidemiological research to understand the impacts of exposures on short and long term injuries,” Kennedy explained.
“It will also support public health tracking and surveillance of the communities’ health conditions to help us make informed health care choices and take appropriate preventative measures.”
This is unequivocally good news. It’s the least the residents of East Palestine deserve, beyond the money—scarcely commensurate—that Norfolk Southern is paying for cleanup and to improve the safety of its trains.
But let’s be real: a $10 million, five-year study can only begin to touch the true nature of the disaster, and it certainly can’t prevent it from happening again.
As I said, this is probably one of the worst environmental disasters, if not the worst, in American history. Because of East Palestine’s position in the Ohio Basin, pollution spread to at least 16 other states and probably also Canada. High chloride and pH levels were detected in precipitation as far away as Wisconsin, Maine and North Carolina. East Palestine may have been the epicenter, but it’s not the only community that has suffered or indeed will suffer as a result.
How will we know who else, tens or hundreds of miles from East Palestine, has also contracted cancer or suffered a stillbirth because of this disaster?
Will finding out be a priority of the study, or will the study be confined to East Palestine? Why—or why not?
We also shouldn’t be misled by the study’s focus on the unknown health effects of exposure to the chemicals released and created by the disaster. Yes, we don’t know what it looks like for a person to be exposed to ethylhexyl acrylate at elevated levels for five years, or napthalene or any of the other chemicals in question, but we do already have plenty of data indicating the toxicity of these chemicals, and these data were known before the disaster.
This was true particularly for vinyl chloride, the chemical that was deliberately burned. Its carcinogenic properties were well established, and yet still the decision was made to set fire to huge quantities of it and ensure they were spread over a vast area.
The National Transportation Safety Board later deemed the “controlled burn” to have been unnecessary, based on incomplete and misleading evidence provided by Norfolk Southern about the state of the tank cars containing the chemical. Contrary to what Norfolk Southern said, the cars were cooling down, not heating up.
Why would Norfolk Southern do this? Vice President JD Vance, then still Senator JD Vance, suggested the decision was made to ensure the tracks could be cleared quicker, to minimize the company’s losses. Local residents agreed.
The funny business doesn’t end there either. Recently, it was revealed that officials from the Biden administration lied to residents of East Palestine about the risk of cancer, in order to get them to return home and start drinking the water again. These officials included Michael Reagan from the EPA, who said in a written statement in October 2023 that “ongoing science-based reviews show that residents of East Palestine are not in danger from contaminated drinking water, soil, or air from the derailment.”
Private emails, however, show persistent warnings from government workers about adverse health effects, including cancer, for the residents of the town. These previously hidden communications were obtained by the Government Accountability Project through freedom-of-information requests.
“The occurrence of a cancer-cluster in EP [East Palestine] is not zero,” FEMA recovery leader James McPherson wrote in an email to colleagues on 29 March 2024.
“As you all are aware, the first 48 hours of the fire created a really toxic plume,” he said.
Admin officials discussed the need to develop a “tripwire to identify cancer clusters” associated with the disaster.
As far as I’m concerned, there could be no more noble goal for RFK Jr., as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, than to prevent another disaster like East Palestine from ever happening again. And to do that, the disaster must be swept back out from under the rug. Fully. Yes, we need scientific studies, but we need a whole lot more besides.
