Hazards unleashed by East Palestine derailment are ‘the worst I’ve ever seen,’ toxicologist says

Last year, toxicologist George Thompson began raising an alarm about the hazards created by the Norfolk Southern train derailment.

The situation is worse than officials have indicated, he said. The chemicals unleashed by the disaster created a stew of dangerous agents with the potential to reach much farther than the immediate area in and around the Ohio town of East Palestine. People in Pittsburgh, 50 miles southeast, should be concerned. So should people in Washington, D.C. In fact, after studying weather models, Thompson estimated the toxic fallout from the train crash could cover more than 126,000 square miles.

Despite Thompson’s experience — he’s now retired after working as a toxicologist for more than five decades — few people knew of his warnings. That’s changing.

Thompson will present his detailed report at two Ohio town hall meetings next week. The first begins Saturday, Sept. 28, at 1:30 p.m. at the Nazarene Church in East Palestine. That will be followed at 5:30 p.m. by another presentation at the Columbiana Arts Theater in Columbiana. The meetings are free and open to the public.

In addition, Thompson’s information will be detailed in an affidavit he hopes will be admitted into a final hearing Wednesday, Sept. 25, before a federal judge in Youngstown, Ohio, who will decide whether to approve Norfolk Southern’s $600 million class action settlement offer.

Thompson’s findings may surprise people who’ve been paying only casual attention to the disaster and its aftermath. Indeed, the report is at odds with the message from the Environmental Protection Agency, which has maintained that residents face no danger from contaminated drinking water, soil or air. (The EPA has not responded to a request for comment.) But his information comes as little surprise to many of those affected by the derailment. They say they’ve known all along that something wasn’t right.

Thompson’s concerns began as he sat in his home in Sussex County, New Jersey, and watched TV images of the black smoke rising over East Palestine 20 months ago, when officials intentionally burned tons of dangerous chemicals in damaged railcars. Thompson wondered about the agents carried aloft in that roiling mass of ash and soot.

A few days later, when government officials told residents they could safely return to their homes, Thompson thought, “That can’t be true.”

So he went to his computer and found on the Norfolk Southern website a description of the contents of the damaged rail cars. The “manifest,” as it is known, indicates 52 cars were involved in the derailment.

Those cars contained 24 different chemicals and products — from seemingly harmless products such as flour, frozen vegetables and paraffin wax to chemicals with names that sound ominous, such as vinyl chloride, diethylene glycol and ethylhexyl acrylate.

Eight of the derailed cars contained cancer-causing chemicals, Thompson said, although news reports focused on only one: vinyl chloride.

“Then I asked, ‘What happens when you burn the contents of these cars?’” he said.

For more than three decades, Thompson ran a company that specialized in hazardous materials management and health and safety compliance. He holds a doctorate in toxicology and pharmacology from Oregon State University and has written 21 books on hazardous chemicals. In addition, he has acted as an expert witness in 56 lawsuits. But he said he was not prepared for what he found when he examined the effects of combustion on the chemicals involved in the East Palestine derailment.

“Frankly, I was a bit stunned,” he said.

Burning the eight cancer-causing chemicals in East Palestine generated even more cancer-causing agents, he said. Thompson identified a total of 119. Exposure could cause up to 21 different types of cancers.

“I’ve been a toxicologist for 55 years, and this is the worst event I’ve ever seen,” he said. “And I’m talking about worldwide. None are as dangerous.”

Cancer isn’t the only potential problem. The chemical “stew” created that day, he said, can cause dozens of other health issues, including seizures, memory loss, mood and behavioral changes, joint pain, a tingling in the mouth, tooth pain, bloody stools and hair loss. This list closely matches the symptoms that a number of residents have complained about since the derailment.

Thompson estimated up to 8.5 million pounds of chemicals were burned during and after the derailment. He’s basing this number on the 200,000-pound capacity of each car that Norfolk Southern said was emptied during the intentional burning, as well as the capacity of those cars that were listed on the Norfolk Southern site as “impinged.”

The chemicals created and released by the fires in East Palestine on Feb. 3 and Feb. 6, 2023, attached themselves to ash and became airborne, Thompson said. How far did those particles travel?

“A cloud of 8½ million pounds of dust isn’t all going to fall out in the first 5 miles or 20 miles,” Thompson said. “Fine particles will go further, and if they get caught up in moisture — rain or snow — it’ll come down in high concentrations.”

Thompson used a HYSPLIT trajectory model to determine where the particles from the East Palestine fires traveled. HYSPLIT, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is “one of the most extensively used atmospheric transport and dispersion models in the atmospheric sciences community.”

The plume created by the initial fire on Feb. 3 first headed southeast toward Pittsburgh, Thompson said. By 10 p.m. the following day, it had expanded to the northeast, as far as Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. This plume spread across parts of New York State and southern Canada through Sunday, Feb. 5.

The plume created by the Feb. 6 intentional burn reached farther. It created three separate plumes, Thompson said. One drifted across northern West Virginia, Virginia, central Pennsylvania and into Maryland and Washington, D.C. Another headed over New York state, northeastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and western Vermont. The northernmost plume crossed eastern Ohio and Lake Erie and drifted into southern Canada. 

Thompson estimated the affected area to be as large as 126,000 square miles in at least eight states. That figure doesn’t include the parts of Canada that Thompson said also were affected.

One of the most concerning aspects of the disaster is that residents were exposed to a slew of hazardous chemicals in a single incident. Little is known about this type of exposure, Thompson said. Safe limits of exposure are based on studies of single chemicals, not dozens of agents. What happens when a population is bombarded with hundreds of hazardous chemicals and substances simultaneously, even if the level of each is below the established safe limits? 

“We don’t know,” Thompson said. “Nobody has ever studied a fire with the high temperatures seen in East Palestine and the number of chemicals and products involved.”

Thompson is most concerned that those toxic agents would react together in a way to increase the hazards to people exposed.

“When I was growing up, a lot of people smoked,” he said. “Almost all smokers drank. When you smoke, it affects the lungs. When you drink, it affects the liver. When you smoke and drink together, your incidence of cancer quadruples. The combination makes it many times worse.”

In many ways, the situation in East Palestine is similar to that in New York City after the terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, he said. About 3,000 people died in the initial attacks. The World Trade Center Health program says that since the attacks, exposure to the dust, smoke, debris and trauma has claimed more than 4,000 lives. Another 71,000 have been diagnosed with physical and mental health conditions.

“This is absolutely unprecedented,” Thompson said. “The science of  toxicology and medicine has no way to account for the hazards or risks associated with simultaneous exposure to hundreds of chemicals. It’s never been researched. It’s not in the medical literature. We don’t know how to interpret it.”

Thompson’s concern is that the chemical stew will cause diseases that won’t be realized or diagnosed for another 10 to 20 years. He says Norfolk Southern should fund an East Palestine Health Program that functions in much the same way as the World Trade Center Health Program, which provides screening and treatment for a list of 9/11-related illnesses and conditions. The East Palestine version of this program, he said, should offer free enrollment to anyone in the exposure area for the next 30 years.

“There is still much research that needs to be done to fully understand the long-term effects of this apocalypse,” he said.

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Thompson presented his report to a dozen residents gathered in Darlington, Pennsylvania, in an early August live stream report by Status Coup News. Residents nodded their heads when they heard of Thompson’s findings, then discussed how the information lined up with their own experiences. A Pennsylvania resident living 16 miles from the derailment site described a chlorine smell the night of the train crash. Afterward, she developed a sore throat and rashes.

Thompson advised the residents to keep a journal of their symptoms, both physical and mental, and get a thorough physical exam.

Other residents who’ve become aware of Thompson’s findings say the news confirms their suspicions.

“It’s what common sense has told me all along,” said Christian Graves, who lives in Unity Township, about 1.2 miles from the derailment. “It’s in more scientific detail, but I knew nothing good would come of the derailment. I’ve been sitting here thinking, ‘What is wrong with all these people pushing the ‘everything is fine’ narrative?’’”

Residents had already been informed — in less technical terms — about the potential dangers resulting from environmental disasters like the one in East Palestine. “But it came in bits and pieces,” Graves said.

More than a year ago, for example, Marilyn Leistner, who served as the last mayor of Times Beach, Missouri, traveled to East Palestine and delivered a stark warning about the dangers residents could be facing. In 1983, the EPA evacuated Times Beach after a dioxin contamination, then bought out residents and demolished the town.

Former residents of Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, also reached out to the people in the East Palestine area. Long-buried toxic wastes were discovered in Love Canal in the 1970s. The result was one of the nation’s most appalling environmental disasters.

Thompson’s report raises residents’ level of frustration with agencies tasked with keeping people informed. It’s been a problem from the beginning, said Jess Conard, who lives in East Palestine with her husband and three children.

“We all heard from EPA officials that the smell was not toxic,” Conard said. “That could have been the first indication that we are not being fully informed. We know those chemicals are toxic. Every day we find more information that just confirms our intuition that something is not right. We are not getting all the information. And I will not consent to continue getting this type of treatment in my community.”

This constant release of new information “reopens the wounds and reopens that trauma” of the derailment and, she said, proves exhausting, because it forces residents to adjust their choices based on the revelations.

“As a mom, I have to make decisions for myself as well as my family, for our kids, our pets, and it’s hard to do that when you don’t have all the information,” Conard said.

Christina Siceloff of South Beaver Township, Pennsylvania, already had some familiarity with the chemicals involved in the disaster. She’s part of a community of locals known as Creek Rangers who document evidence of chemical contamination in Sulphur and Leslie runs, two waterways that flow through East Palestine. 

After spending time in and near the creek, Siceloff experienced a number of symptoms – tremors, rashes, headaches, a metallic taste in her mouth, and burning in her nose and throat. And “brain fog,” which other residents have experienced.

“You just feel like you’re walking around, and you know what’s going on in the world, but you feel like you’re in a cloud,” she said. “You’d be driving ’round, and you’d be aware but you don’t know how you got to where you are.”

She heard Thompson give a report about his findings this past summer, and said she’s grateful for his work. 

“I’ve talked to George Thompson on the phone about us being in the creek, and he really seems to care,” she said. “He was concerned for us. I told him the things we’ve experienced healthwise, and I feel like he’s really looking out for everyone.”

Chris Albright, who lives a few blocks from the derailment, is concerned that so much information is becoming available after a deadline to sign on to a $600 million class action settlement with Norfolk Southern. That deadline passed in August.

Lawyers who negotiated the settlement said last week that most residents within the agreement’s 20-mile radius signed up for the settlement, despite concerns that residents were required to give up their right to sue in the future if they develop cancer or other serious health issues.

A federal judge in Youngstown is scheduled to hear evidence whether to approve the settlement next Wednesday.

“They’re making a judgment on this settlement, and they don’t have all the information,” Albright said. “There are so many things they don’t know about. It’s really going to screw us over.”