A general view of the hazardous waste train derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 23, 2023.
Alan Freed Reuters
Federal environmental authorities have ordered a temporary halt on the shipment of toxic waste from the site of a fiery train derailment earlier this month in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania state line.
Region 5 Administrator Debra Shore of the Environmental Protection Agency said Friday the agency ordered Norfolk Southern to “pause” shipments from the Feb. 3 derailment site in East Palestine but vowed that removal of the material would resume “soon.”
“Everyone wants this contamination to disappear from the community. They don’t want to worry, and they don’t want to smell, and we owe it to the people of East Palestine to move out of the community as quickly as possible,” Shore said.
Until Friday, Shore said, the railroad company was solely responsible for waste disposal and provided Ohio environmental officials with a list of disposal sites it had selected and used. Going forward, disposal plans including locations and transportation routes for contaminated waste will be reviewed and approved by the EPA, he said.
“The EPA will ensure that all waste is disposed of in a safe and legal manner in an EPA-certified facility to prevent the release of hazardous materials and impacts to the community,” Shore said. He said officials have heard concerns from residents and others in several states and are looking into “transporting some of this waste over long distances and finding sites that are permitted and certified to take the waste.”
The Ohio governor’s office said on Saturday that out of twenty trucks (about 280 tons) of hazardous solid waste transported, 15 trucks of contaminated soil were disposed of at a hazardous waste treatment and disposal facility in Michigan while five trucks were returned to East Palestine. .
The liquid waste that has been brought out of East Palestine will be disposed of at a licensed hazardous waste treatment and disposal facility in Texas, but the facility will not accept any other liquid waste, the Ohio governor’s office said.
“Currently, about 102,000 gallons of liquid waste and 4,500 cubic meters of solid waste remain stored at the site in East Palestine, not including the five trucks that return to the village,” the governor’s office said. “Additional solid and liquid waste is generated during the cleanup process.”
No one was injured when 38 Norfolk Southern cars derailed in a fire, a mangled mess on the outskirts of the city, but there are huge fears about a potential explosion because of dangerous chemicals in five train cars, officials evacuated the area. He then chose to release and ignite toxic vinyl chloride from the tanker truck, sending flames and black smoke billowing into the sky again.
Shore said the EPA was not involved in the decision to use controlled burning, but he called the decision a “well-founded” one by local and state officials based on information available at the time “to deal with highly explosive toxic chemicals. . . .”
Federal and state officials have repeatedly said it is safe for evacuees to return to the area and that air tests in the city and in hundreds of homes have detected no levels of contamination from the blaze or chemicals burned. The state said local municipal drinking water systems are safe, and that bottled water was available during testing for those with private wells.
Despite these assurances and many news conferences and visits from politicians, many residents still express disbelief or have questions about what has been done and how it will affect the future of their families and communities.