EPA's East Palestine response to face internal review

The Environmental Protection Agency's handling of the February 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine is under review by the agency's Inspector General, an investigation announced this week after residents and Vice President JD Vance asked for it. The review will assess whether the EPA met its obligations and whether it had "sufficient data to support the agency's public communications" telling residents it was safe to return home, the Inspector General's office said.

The derailment happened on a Friday night in February 2023 when a failed bearing sent a Norfolk Southern train off the tracks near the Ohio-Pennsylvania line, spilling chemicals that caught fire. Residents left town, and three days later officials opened five rail cars and burned the vinyl chloride inside. The resulting black plume drifted across several states. The National Transportation Safety Board later determined the vent and burn was unnecessary, though the responders at the time worried the tank cars could explode.

Jami Wallace, an East Palestine resident who pressed for testing of cancer-causing dioxins after the derailment, said she cried when she learned of the review. Wallace has tracked more than 80 people in the area who have developed cancer since the crash, though she said it is difficult to prove any single illness ties directly to it.

"It's like we've had to push them along the way for every single thing they did, and then they didn't even do it right," Wallace said. "We're not going to stop when you poison our kids."

Requests from Vance and the head of the EPA helped bring the review about, and the Inspector General's office said multiple complaints from residents and whistleblowers have arrived in the years since the derailment. Testing experts have questioned whether the data the EPA released to the public obscured the risks and whether the agency could say how dangerous exposure to the mix of chemicals is, since health standards generally rest on exposure to one chemical at a time.

Norfolk Southern reached a $600 million class action settlement with residents, but that money has been tied up in courts amid questions about how the initial settlement administrator handled the funds. A group of residents also sued, arguing class action attorneys misled them and pressured them into signing the deal. A separate federal settlement carrying a $15 million fine for the railroad and $55 million for decades of medical exams and groundwater testing has sat under review for more than two years without a judge's approval.

Norfolk Southern is also seeking to merge with Union Pacific in an $85 billion deal that would create the country's first transcontinental railroad. The Surface Transportation Board review of that merger is still underway.

The EPA Inspector General's office did not set a date for when the investigation will conclude.