Linda Gruber drove from her Youngstown home to East Palestine on Friday in hopes of hearing President Joe Biden speak during his first visit to the town since a Norfolk Southern toxic train derailment last year. Shortly before 3 p.m., she stood on North Market Street and stared across the street at a crowd of people displaying flags reading “Trump 2024,” “Trump Won” and “F*** Biden,” a sentiment the crowd delivered in a more family friendly manner with the occasional chant of “Let’s go, Brandon.”
“I don’t see any Biden people,” said Gruber, 75. She’s accustomed to being alone in her support for the current president. “I’m the only one in my whole family for Biden,” she said. Then she glanced across the street again. “I don’t see one Biden person.”
Biden supporters were, in fact, gathered in a hardware store parking lot a few blocks away. A dozen or so in number, they held homemade signs: “We love you Joe and Jill,” “We know you care” and “Welcome President Biden.” North Market, however, the town’s main drag, was the territory of Trump folks.
Gruber’s daughter lives near Darlington, Beaver County, one of several communities impacted when 38 cars flew off the track on the night of Feb. 3, 2023. She remembers watching a menacing black cloud drift toward Pennsylvania three days later, when officials dumped and burned tons of hazardous vinyl chloride. She became frightened for her daughter.
Gruber said the railroad company should be held accountable for causing the derailment that has upturned the lives of so many. Hers was an opinion shared by a number of others, though such points of commonality were buried in the avalanche of conflict that now defines American politics. The town seemed, like the rest of the country, a hopeless mess.
And yet, while the divisions are real and often bitter, brief discussions with people in each of the groups represented on East Palestine’s streets revealed some common refrains.
At an intersection a few blocks north of the Trump gathering, near a Dogs on the Run hot dog joint, a crowd of about 20 held signs reading “Free Palestine,” “End the war on Gaza” and “Where is the humanity?” Palestinian flags flapped in the wind. This group caught the attention of a cluster of passing Trump supporters, who yelled at them from across the street.
A man in the Free Palestine crowd looked over at the Trump supporters and shrugged. “This is beyond party,” he said. “The people in East Palestine are hurting. We’re sending all our money overseas and benefiting the 1%. We’re here in solidarity with the people of East Palestine.”
Melody Johnson, 62, drove 2½ hours from Corry, Erie County, to join the Trump crowd. Nearby, a woman talked about immigration, but Johnson had East Palestine residents on her mind. “These people need a voice,” she said. “They need help.”
Jamie Nuntwick of the non-partisan group River Valley Organizing walked through the Trump crowd hoisting a sign that read, “Help our sick kids. Think of Beau’s chemical exposure.” Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer in 2015, and the president has said the illness may have been linked to Beau’s exposure to burn pits during military service in Iraq.
Nuntwick yearned for the president to acknowledge residents’ concerns and assure them he’d stick up for their interests “and not for anybody else’s agenda.”
Without such a statement, she said, “Hope is just going to continue to dwindle.”
A young man accompanied Nuntwick. He passed out flyers from the organization. “President Biden, take action!” they read. The flyer included a black-and-white picture of the president. One woman in the Trump crowd took a flyer and said, “I can use this as target practice.” It was a challenging day for those trying to focus the day’s events on the needs of residents.
As cars passed by, Tim Moore raised a sign that read “Biden stole 2020.” Next to him stood his brother Mike. Tim is 51. He voiced frustration that the administration was sending money to Ukraine but not East Palestine — another common sentiment on the street. Tim lives in Darlington. Mike, 60, lives in East Palestine. “They tell us the creek is safe, but there’s dead fish everywhere,” he said. Sulfur Run flows past the derailment site. “You can still smell the chemicals,” he said.
Tim voiced a suggestion that would be heard throughout the town. “Norfolk Southern should be made to provide fair market value on every house within a 5 mile radius [of the derailment site], plus 10% for moving expenses,” he said. “People can decide to stay or go.”
“I’d go in a minute,” Mike said. “I’d have left yesterday.”
Another Darlington resident, Mike Young, stepped into the conversation. He held out his phone and showed photographs of bloody tissues.
“I take a picture every day,” he said. “I get bloody noses. That cloud settled over our houses. Whoever was in charge of setting those chemicals on fire should be charged criminally. They should be in jail. All summer, winter, I get out of the shower, blow my nose and it’s bloody. But they say everything is OK.”
Over on East Taggart Street, Beth Carson, 61, stood with other Biden supporters in the hardware store parking lot. She seemed genuinely excited about Biden’s visit. “The president of my country is coming to my town,” she said. What did she want to hear from him? “That he will continue his efforts to hold Norfolk Southern accountable and continue to work for railroad safety.”
Biden backs a bipartisan rail safety bill, but it’s stuck on Capitol Hill. One of the bill’s co-sponsors, U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Aspinwall, whose district includes Darlington, said the bill has support from both parties but is being held up by Republican House leadership. In the U.S. Senate, the bill lacks support to overcome a Republican filibuster.
One of Beth’s friends, Jan Douglass, 70, stood nearby. She lives on a farm 3½ miles from the disaster site. The evening of the chemical burn-off, the wind shifted and sent the ominous dark cloud over her property. She has concerns but believes Biden is doing a good job as president. “He give us a lot of hope,” she said.
A few people with Trump flags walked down East Taggart and approached the small Biden group. Biden supporter Klaryce Dell, 53, waved to one of them, a woman. She waved back and the two smiled at each other.
“We’re all in this together,” Dell said. “Even if we don’t agree.”
It was a fragment of unity, lonely and fleeting, on a day dominated by division. As both groups stood side by side on East Taggart, each displaying competing loyalties, a portion of a large Trump flag blew into a Biden supporter, covering her head.
“I don’t like flags in my face,” she said to the Trump supporter. “Could you move down a little bit?”
And so the two groups stepped farther apart.
RELATED STORY: Biden visits East Palestine, where residents ask for his help, and Darlington, but he doesn’t declare disaster
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.