Will Biden use Ohio Catastrophe to announce environment crisis

About two weeks after a train carrying toxic and combustible materials derailed just outside a small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and filled the skies with black smoke, questions abound over the health and environmental impacts of the disaster.

The February 3 derailment of the train, operated by Norfolk Southern, near East Palestine, Ohio, sparked a massive fire that sent fumes from several toxic chemicals into the air. To reduce the risk of an explosion, on February 6 officials released at least one chemical from five derailed tanker cars. (About 50 of the train’s 150 cars were involved in the accident.) Some of the substances were diverted into a designated trench, where they were burned off, the Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a February 10 letter to the train company.

But even now scientists are still struggling to understand the chemicals’ short- and long-term health implications for residents of the 5,000-person town and its surrounding region. Many reports have focused on vinyl chloride—a clear, flammable gas used to produce polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic, which is used in everything from piping to packaging to flooring. Scientists have known for decades that high doses of vinyl chloride can cause liver cancer. And even lower doses, particularly over long periods of time, may be dangerous to a person’s health. People can be exposed to the chemical as a vapor or from drinking contaminated water.

“We study concentrations that are currently considered safe, and in our studies, what we have observed is that these low doses can enhance underlying diseases—talking about liver diseases here,” says Juliane Beier, a hepatologist at the University of Pittsburgh, who studies vinyl chloride exposure in animals.

It’s not clear how much risk vinyl chloride might pose at this point, now that much of what was on the train has burned away. Of course, setting a hazardous material on fire is far from an ideal method of disposal. The problem is that by the time a train car full of vinyl chloride actually derails, there usually aren’t any better options available. (Investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board continue to search for answers about what caused the derailment in the first place.)

“In environmental risk assessment, we have to make a lot of decisions that we don’t want to have to make,” says Kim Garrett, an environmental toxicologist at Northeastern University.
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