The Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General said Tuesday that it plans to investigate the EPA’s response to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
On February 3, 2023, 38 Norfolk Southern train cars derailed in the small town. Eleven tanker cars were carrying hazardous materials and released tons of industrial chemicals into the air and water.
In a memo, the EPA Inspector General, an independent office within the agency, informed the EPA that it will investigate its actions, including how it evaluated and mitigated human health risks and communicated those risks to the public.
The IG’s office said the investigation was prompted by a letter from Vice President JD Vance and the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, as well as complaints to its hotline.
Former resident Jami Wallace, now a community activist, claims the agency made many missteps, including inadequate indoor air testing in homes near the derailment site.
“They can’t go back and correct the mistakes that they made at this point, but what they can do is, one, make sure those mistakes never happen in another community,” she said. “And two, at least looking for solutions that help remedy the issues that arose from the mistakes.”
According to the EPA Inspector General, its investigation may include interviews, data gathering and analysis of air and water monitoring.
- Ohio derailment reveals gaps in public health response to chemical emergencies
- Scientist questions EPA’s handling of East Palestine cleanup: ‘They should have tested correctly’
- Former EPA official calls agency’s response in East Palestine too weak
- See all of our reporting on the train derailment, including a special series at the one-year anniversary
What happened
On February 6, 2023, three days after the derailment, as tankers smoldered along the tracks, emergency officials evacuated nearby residents and purposely vented the chemical vinyl chloride from five tankers and burned it, which led to an explosion and chemical plume seen for miles.
An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found that the vent and burn operation was unnecessary.
On February 8, two days later, residents were told they could return to their homes. At the time, EPA officials said that the outside air had been monitored since the incident and found to be in the normal range.
“It’s literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of data points that we’ve collected over the time to show that the air quality in the town is safe,” said EPA’s James Justice at a press conference announcing the lifting of the evacuation order.
In an EPA report assessing its response in October 2023, the agency wrote that it had collected more than “100 million air monitoring data points and more than 35,000 samples (air, water and soil) in and around the community.” According to the report, “This data collection continues, and ongoing science-based reviews show that residents of East Palestine are not in danger from contaminated drinking water, soil, or air from the derailment.”
Despite these reassurances that the air was safe, residents reported strong chemical smells and health effects, including rashes and eye irritations in children.
Scientist questions the cleanup
Andrew Whelton, professor of civil, environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, started investigating water and air contamination in East Palestine soon after the incident.
“Over the course of my team’s involvement, I documented specific, recurring problems with the response,” he wrote in an email to the EPA Inspector General in September after reading the letter by Vance and Zeldin requesting the investigation.
Whelton witnessed clean-up workers in the streams around East Palestine “with no respirators, wading through and standing beside heavily contaminated creek water, and working near aeration units without being told what chemicals they were being exposed to,” he said in the email, noting that at least nine chemicals were identified as being present at the site.
Whelton also wrote that despite EPA officials telling them the air quality in their homes was safe, “some occupants reported being unable to stay inside their buildings more than a few minutes without symptoms.”
He found that when testing indoor air, EPA relied on devices that were not sensitive enough to detect relevant amounts of one chemical involved in the spill, butyl acrylate, a colorless gas that can target the eyes, skin and respiratory system.
The EPA later admitted in a draft document obtained by E&E News and Politico that the devices were not “sensitive enough” to measure butyl acrylate “at the public health air screening threshold for health and safety.”
“It is with that faulty information that the evacuation order was lifted. Residents and business owners were encouraged to go back into their contaminated buildings,” Whelton told the Allegheny Front, a year after the derailment.
Whelton has consulted on other disasters, including a West Virginia chemical spill in 2014, wildfires and fuel spills.
“The East Palestine chemical spill and fire disaster is the worst one that I’ve ever seen from a decision-making standpoint,” he said in response to the announcement of the investigation. “A number of people got sick, and it was all preventable. So we cannot let what happened there repeat again.”
