Derailment awakens memories of a tragic fire years ago as the losses pile up

Amy Dettmer woke her husband, Kevin, around 9:30 that night. Something bad is happening, Amy said to him. Kevin was groggy; he’d gone to bed early because he had to rise at 4 a.m. for work. At Amy’s insistence, he got up and was making his way downstairs when he noticed the orange glow reflecting from a window at a landing. A few steps later, he glanced through that window, and saw the inferno, 300 feet from his home. The flames rose higher than telephone poles.

Like so many others in East Palestine, Ohio, Kevin’s memories of the Norfolk Southern train derailment on Feb. 3, 2023, remain sharp and clear. There’s the seemingly never-ending wail of sirens; the insistent banging at the front door of sheriff’s deputies, informing residents to leave immediately; the sharp stench of chemicals as Kevin and Amy stepped outside. At one point, Amy looked out at the burning railcars, the blaze edging ever closer to their house, and noticed the dry leaves on a neighbor’s tree were aflame.

“Oh my God,” Amy thought, “Kevin is going to lose another house.”

This is where the Dettmers’ derailment story differs from so many others. Kevin’s experience that night, beginning with the orange glow he saw at the landing, awakened devastating memories. When they emerge in conversation, those memories sound like vignettes from a nightmare, but they are very real — the details can be found in newspaper clippings more than three decades old. For Kevin, the Norfolk Southern train disaster reopened grievous wounds.

He and Amy are part of a community of people damaged in ways that can be difficult for others to see or understand. They see before them a fractured community, homes they consider poisoned, futures filled with financial problems. They wrestle daily with thoughts that threaten to drag them into an abyss. And they wonder when the healing will begin. For them, the anguish remains and the losses mount, even as neighbors debate among themselves the worth of a $600 million class action settlement against the railroad.

• • •

Kevin, 50, and Amy, 55, no longer live in East Palestine. They moved out of their home on East Taggart Street and now rent an apartment in Canfield, 15 miles northeast. This means they don’t have to worry so much about daily contact with any toxic contaminants remaining in their house. Kevin’s flashbacks, however, are another matter.

They yank him back to the frigid, dark early morning hours of Dec. 29, 1990. Kevin was then 16 years old, frightened and standing on a porch roof to escape the flames consuming his family’s New Waterford home. Kevin’s 10-year-old brother, Brian, stood with him.

As the house behind the boys filled with smoke and fire, Kevin wondered about his parents and other siblings. Maybe they’re trapped. Kevin thought he should reenter the house and search for them, but when he peeked into an open window, the intense heat forced him back. He knew if he went back inside the house, he would not make it out. Kevin turned to Brian and said, “I’m sorry I can’t do anything; you have to get off the roof.”

Kevin jumped. Brian followed.

Before going to bed the night before, Kevin had loaded up a wood-burning stove in the family’s living room and stoked the fire — a routine. Kevin closed the stove door, but it wouldn’t latch securely. This had been a problem for some time, and on a number of occasions Kevin had urged his father to make a repair. For now, Kevin did the best he could, then went upstairs to bed.

Most of the family slept upstairs. That included Kevin, his sister, Nicole, 18, and 10-year-old twins Chris and Brian, as well as parents Carl and Margaret. Kevin’s twin, Keith, slept downstairs.

Shortly after 1 a.m., Kevin awoke to his father’s urgent voice. “Everybody get out! Everybody get out!” Carl bellowed. “Find whatever window you can and get out.”

Kevin and Brian climbed through a window to the porch roof. Margaret, too, made her way to the roof. In the chaos, she lost her footing and tumbled over the edge. After Kevin and Brian jumped to the ground, Kevin learned both Chris and Nicole remained inside the burning structure. Kevin attempted to climb an antenna tower so he could reach the second floor and help his siblings, but his mother screamed at him, “No, no, no!”

Fire devoured the house and an automobile and everything the family owned. Christopher and Nicole perished.

His feet freezing in the snow and wearing only underwear, Kevin walked with his parents and surviving siblings Keith and Brian to a neighbor’s house. Somehow, his father had found, or had been given, several beers. “He was trying to drown whatever was going on in his mind,” Kevin said. Carl sat on a couch near his three remaining children and told them they’d never see Christopher and Nicole again. “You might as well say goodbye,” Carl said.

For a month, Kevin sat in the basement of his aunt and uncle’s house. When visitors arrived, Kevin turned them away. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody or meet anybody,” he said. “There’s nothing like feeling helpless.”

That feeling of helplessness would return years later.

• • •

Upon hearing the evacuation order on Feb. 3, 2023, Kevin and Amy quickly packed a few items to take with them. Kevin grabbed only a set of work clothes. The couple did not yet know of the toxic contaminants burning behind their home and believed they’d return in a day or so.

Kevin carried grandson Zane out of the house, shielding him as much as he could from the sight of the fire. Once he’d placed Zane in a car seat, however, the child turned his head toward the flames, then rising a hundred feet into the air.

“I can’t even explain how scary it was for an adult, let alone for a child,” Amy said. “It was so close to our house.”

Kevin and Amy spent a few days at the New Waterford home of Amy’s sister. After the “controlled burn” on Feb. 6 — Kevin calls it “the nuking of our town” — the couple returned to their East Taggart Street house. Both noticed a chemical smell. A thin film covered flat surfaces. Authorities tested the air inside the home and told Kevin and Amy it was safe.

Over the next several days, as work crews cleaned up the mess, trucks rumbled up and down Taggart Street. Bulldozers moved dirt from the derailment site and piled it uncovered near the back of the Dettmers’ property. The mound rose above a chain-link fence. Workers with torches cut steel. Massive blue tanks storing contaminated water rose skyward.

Kevin and Amy soon experienced odd health symptoms. Welts rose on Kevin’s back. He developed a persistent sore throat and cough — at one point, he was coughing blood. Like a number of other residents, he suffered from nosebleeds. So did Amy. She’d wake up in the mornings with blood on her pillow. An ugly sore grew under her nose and extended to her lip.

Kevin grew suspicious of the air testing conducted in his house. He’d seen the fireball and the thick black plume produced by the burn-off of toxic chemicals just a few hundred feet beyond his back yard. He knew of at least eight chemicals that had been burned that day. Weather conditions kept the cloud from rising more than 3,000 feet, so it hung like a dark circular bruise over East Palestine and the surrounding communities. Kevin felt certain contaminants must have entered his house through vents in his attic and settled there. As for the air testing, Kevin and Amy had heard about problems with the calibration of devices used to test the air in East Palestine. And he wondered: How could 400 houses this close to an environmental disaster be determined safe?

So on Feb. 18, Kevin and Amy left their East Taggart Street home and moved back to New Waterford, to live with Amy’s sister. Life there was cramped. Kevin and Amy crowded into the house with Amy’s family and with Amy’s parents. After a few months, Amy and Kevin moved to a hotel in Salem, then to Kevin’s mother’s house in Boardman. They stayed there several months before moving to the Canfield apartment.

The place is clean and pleasant, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room with comfortable chairs. Fields and woods surround the property. Geese wander past a back porch. It’s costing the Dettmers $900 a month to live here. They’re draining their savings.

The couple recently sold their East Taggart Street house — and took a $60,000 loss, Amy said. It was a family home and not in Amy’s name, even though she and Kevin had paid off the mortgage. So the Dettmers did not qualify for a program that compensates homeowners for a loss in property value caused by the derailment.

At least Kevin had his job. He worked at an American Standard facility that produced bathtubs in Salem.

That changed on Oct. 1 of last year. Zane was visiting that day. Kevin had planned on taking him to an apple farm, but Zane wanted to jump on a trampoline set up outside the Canfield apartment. “That’s all he wanted to do on that day,” Kevin said. So the two climbed on the trampoline and were playing a game called “popcorn” when Kevin landed awkwardly and felt something snap in his leg. The pain was searing. “I just started screaming at the top of my lungs,” he said.

He’d shattered one bone in his lower left leg and fractured another. He spent two weeks in the hospital; his leg bears the scars of two surgeries and a number of screws and rods that kept the bones stabilized. Kevin continues to walk gingerly and somewhat stiffly. He hasn’t worked since the accident.

Amy says proudly that she’s worked since she was age 16 at a variety of jobs — mostly paralegal and legal secretary. Last year she took a job doing secretarial and reception work at a Boardman facility that assists people and families dealing with mental, emotional and behavioral problems. 

After a while, Amy developed memory problems. Her supervisor would teach her something new on the computer, and Amy could never remember the lessons. “It was every single time,” Amy said. “I could not retain new information.”

At home, she’d ask Kevin the same question over and over. Amy visited a memory care center. An employee there tested her by telling Amy short stories and then asking questions about the stories, and then asking her to spell various words backward.

Amy was diagnosed with dementia and could no longer work. A neurologist conducted a brain scan but found no atrophy. Amy began taking Aricept, a drug treatment for dementia. It didn’t help much, so doctors increased the dosage. Still, she experienced memory problems. So a few weeks ago, a doctor put her on Adderall. 

“Maybe the processing of information is a tiny bit better, but I really don’t know if it’s helping the memory issues,” Amy said. During recent conversations, she continued to have problems remembering when certain post-derailment events occurred.

Amy is also taking medication to deal with depression.

“I’m having a hard time, staying at home all day, not working,” she said. “I’m very depressed, and I’m not normally a depressed person. I’ve never been on antidepressants until now. Some days I cry a lot because a lot of the worth that I see in myself — that I did very good work — is gone. I was a paralegal for 20 years, and I was very good at it. And now I can’t function. It’s just one more loss.”

The couple kept tangible representations of their family’s past  — everything from their children’s kindergarten pictures to personal Christmas ornaments given to them as gifts — stored in plastic containers in the basement of the East Taggart Street house. Kevin has learned that dioxins can settle in the lowest part of a house. The couple fear these family treasures have been contaminated.

“We don’t want to get rid of them but don’t want to take them,” Amy said. “We lost more than just a house, we lost the memories.”

“It was a hard decision to leave,” she added. “We don’t have anything now, and we’re draining all of our savings. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next couple of months. It’s a very scary thing. We worked all of our lives to have a little bit of something. Now we have to start all over again. How do you do that?”