East Palestine's "Month Of Hell" Made Worse
Nothing Has Changed In Standards For Rail Safety For 160 Years, As Ohio Residents Fight For The Right To Exist Without The Threat Of Being Slowly Poisoned To Death.
Photo by Acton Crawford on Unsplash
When I moved from the relatively modern, suburban city of Virginia Beach, Virginia to the town of Mount Desert Island, Maine in rural New England in the 1990s, it was a culture shock in multiple ways, beyond the obvious one of moving to a place where I essentially had no close friends or family ties.
Maine, and more broadly, New England, was a place where, in everything from architecture to traditions of local government, nothing had seemed to change for hundreds of years.
I found the people of Maine and New England hard to warm up to, and to be fair, them to me as well.
It took years of adjustment.
The unwritten rules are that if you’re not born and raised in Maine, you’re status is, permanently, “from away,” and you must earn the native’s respect as a community member, especially if you hadn’t yet endured years of hard weather and lean economic times in the brutally cold Winters. Once you are embraced, you’re looked out for, especially during the most dangerous times of the year, where one traffic accident, house fire, or furnace failure can mean the difference between life and death. Your neighbors are, literally a vital lifeline.
I understand the valuable ties of community, and I feel a kinship with the people in East Palestine now that they are truly up against forces more powerful than they can fight, even collectively.
On Mount Desert Island, the literal history of class division in America was made obvious every single day. The descendants of the richest people in America made Maine their Summer long residence, arguably, the most famous being John D. Rockefeller, who made his vast fortune monopolizing cheap labor and the railroad system to bring his refined oil exclusively across the nation.
Many people don’t realize that John D. Rockefeller’s iron grip on rail transport rates, his conglomeration of oil refineries he owned, and the attainment of massive wealth, likely were a result of the fact that Rockefeller was born poor, and almost lost his business holdings to bankruptcy.
In fact, it was, in a weird irony, a train derailment, similar to the one that has upended the lives of East Palestinians in Ohio, that literally upended Rockefeller’s life.
That train, one that Rockefeller missed by pure fate, prevented an accident that could possibly have ended his life, yet, instead of being a morally inspiring, life-changing event, it instead became a major catalyst that propelled his future monopolistic greed. Rockefeller saw divine ordinance in “God’s intervention,” and thus, God’s purpose was, as he saw it, to use him as an instrument to monopolize the oil industry and the rail system.
“In 1863, at just 24, he invests everything into his first refinery. By 27, he’s on the verge of bankruptcy. To not only survive, but thrive, he agrees to meet with the railroad magnate Vanderbilt, hoping to secure competitive transport rates. But Rockefeller narrowly misses his 6:25 am train to New York.
The train crashes. Rockefeller would probably have been among the many dead. Already a religious man, he now sees his mission as ordained. When he does meet with Vanderbilt, he promises him 60 barrels a day in exchange for cheap shipping rates.
It’s a risky business; literally. Kerosene explosions are common. In 1870, to alleviate concerns, he creates Standard Oil, guaranteeing uniform quality. Rockefeller becomes the largest producer of refined kerosene in the country.”
In case it isn’t evident, nothing has changed in 160 years in terms of the rail companies’ motivation to maximize profit, monopolize distribution, and overlook safety in pursuit of the capitalist ideology espoused and practiced by John D. Rockefeller and the Vanderbilts.
The overcompensated CEOs of today’s rail companies are simply carrying on the tradition of exploiting labor and skipping safety inspections to maximize profit.
It’s hard to believe that the “common” kerosene explosions that made rail transport a “risky business” in 1870 make it an even riskier proposition in 2023, due to larger volumes of hazardous chemicals that transverse America’s landscape every day, combined with the “thousands of domestic derailments every year.” This high-risk scenario was casually admitted to recently, with little sense of alarm, by no less an authority than the Secretary of Transportation himself.
The residents of East Palestine appeared, to some degree, to finally have their say this past week when “team members” of Norfolk Southern, (with the notable, glaring exception of Norfolk Southern CEO and “quarterback” Alan Shaw) met with angry residents in a traditional town meeting format, where they expressed concerns about the future of their children’s health, property devaluations, their livelihoods, and mass relocation as a worst case scenario in an obviously increasingly poisoned environment:
“Frustration erupts at Ohio town hall over train derailment, Norfolk Southern CEO a no-show. Norfolk Southern's CEO did not attend an East Palestine, Ohio, town hall meeting where concerned residents detailed their health symptoms and grilled officials on why they have not been relocated away from the derailment site.”
If you haven’t seen the footage, it’s well worth the time to watch and listen to these people, trapped in a Hell of someone else’s making, victims of the concept of corporate personhood and intentional foot-dragging.
Some of the anger is a result of infantilizing the residents and insulting their intelligence as one resident after another stepped up to the microphone, reinforcing largely consensus opinion that something is very wrong, all while the rail company pretends not to know better. It’s not hyperbole when, as one resident noted, the derailment and purposeful actions that were taken since the event, affect her on multiple levels:
These people are understandably alarmed and outraged as a confusing axis of corporate media, government agencies, state officials, and town officials dole out conflicting information, and a generous portion of gaslighting, all while passing the buck on responsibility for what may yet turn out to be an enormously expensive mass evacuation event. All despite Norfolk Southern’s insistence that mass relocation is not part of the playbook.
Consider for example, that Ohio Governor DeWine, whose office is where the buck stops, and who bears ultimate responsibility for the public health and safety of his constituents in Ohio, has opted for obfuscating, denying, and skirting the truth in favor of Flint, Michigan style performative political theatrical stunts. This gathering around the kitchen sink of a female resident to allegedly reassure residents the water was safe saw DeWine joined by the relentlessly upbeat federal EPA director Michael Regan, all smiles and celebrating a return to “normalcy” and domestic tranquility.
It came off as a stiff and completely phony endeavor against the backdrop of toxic reality that continues to permeate the town. “That’s good! and completely cold coming from there” exclaimed Regan, as they clinked glasses as if they were drinking fine champagne and toasting each other on New Year’s Eve.
Far outside of the one-mile evacuation radius, one month later, residents still report persistent, life-threatening symptoms, and even more alarming, there are no doctors or medical personnel available that can specifically treat chemical poisoning, much less diagnose it as the cause. This is obviously due to Norfolk Southern's refusal to acknowledge that, in fact, poisonous dioxins exist in the environment, and may have increased to levels dangerous to human life and health. There are now eyewitness accounts of undisturbed dead wildlife like deer found near the poisoned water sources, with no wounds or evidence they were shot or hunted. Soft tissue remains intact.
Specifically, up until a couple of days ago, the EPA, at both the federal and state level, was not pressing Norfolk Southern to change tactics in testing, despite outlier expert opinion that hourly tests of water, air, and soil should be mandated amidst overwhelming anecdotal evidence from the residents themselves. It is now reported that as of March 23, 2023, the status has changed, that is, the EPA will mandate testing for dioxins, but, officially, and practically, it’s too little too late.
Bob Bowcock, an independent environmental investigator working with environmental activist Erin Brockovich, states that the response by Norfolk Southern and the EPA is “taking a bad situation and making it worse.” The process of mechanical aeration, basically sumping contaminated creek water and throwing the water into the air to separate it from the contaminants, using natural sunlight to kill those contaminants, is according to Bowcock, a good idea in concept.
Unfortunately, there are no groundwater protective layers like clay in East Palestine, therefore, the separated vinyl chloride can be carried quickly by the creekwater and seep back through the soil, eventually moving to the groundwater table and potentially contaminating private wells. According to Bowcock, the haphazard “quick and dirty response” may have the unintended effect of contaminating the drinking wells.
Perhaps the worst of the haphazard, “quick and dirty” responses occurred when Norfolk Southern decided to bleed off the vinyl chloride from the transport cars into burn pits and ignite it in a literal nuclear cloud that released contaminants into the air that could affect the area for decades.
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Air quality, according to the EPA, has been sufficiently monitored and is safe to breathe, although outliers and people with degrees in Chemistry vehemently disagree.
I was gobsmacked to see this YouTube video that was just posted, in which a degreed chemist unequivocally states that the transport cars carrying the vinyl chloride had, in fact, cooled sufficiently, and reached a state of what is known in physics as thermodynamic equilibrium. Specifically, the cars were never going to explode and shoot dangerous shrapnel as was feared and had reached a state where they weren’t getting any hotter nor colder.
The vinyl chloride was so cold, according to the chemist seen in this self-created YouTube video, there was no chance of explosive polymerization. The rail cars were never going to blow up.
So, the alarming takeaway from this, if it is a valid scientific observation from a degreed chemist, is that the rail workers and emergency response personnel for Norfolk Southern, again, made a bad situation worse out of haste to clean up the mess and get the train running as quickly as possible, disregarding the dangers inherent to another “quick and dirty” plan.
They subjected the residents to “Chemocide” without their informed consent.
While the focus on residents is of vital concern, the rail workers, long-suffering and abused, are also becoming victims of the toxins. In a letter sent to Governor Mike DeWine by Johnathan Long, General Chairman of the Americal Rail System Federation, it was stated that:
“Norfolk Southern instructed 40 of its maintenance employees to come to the site and begin cleaning up the wreckage. It also says that employees continue to experience migraines and nausea after being willingly exposed to the chemicals at the direction of Norfolk Southern. Long also wrote in his letter that workers cleaning up in East Palestine were not provided with the appropriate personal protective equipment such as respirators, eye protection or protective clothing.
Norfolk Southern has disputed the claims about the lack of PPE provided.
In a statement, the company said they were on-scene immediately after the derailment and coordinated their response with hazardous materials professionals who were on site continuously to ensure the work area was safe to enter and that the required PPE was utilized, in addition to air monitoring that was established within an hour.”
What is becoming clear by the hour is that the calvary, in the form of any major, coordinated, disaster response at the federal or state level is not forthcoming from the Biden administration or that of Governor DeWine. The government has always been, especially in the last 40 years or so, corporate-friendly, but the harm done here seems historically unprecedented.
There are 160 years of railroad barons and their modern-day equivalents working actively to skirt responsibility in the name of maximizing monopoly and profit for a select few.
It didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be this way, and it should be clear that the “quick and dirty” response, a haphazard mess of conflicting actions, is doing irreparable harm to both the residents and rail workers.
It’s as if we have learned nothing from the lies the government told to rescue workers at Ground Zero after 911.