Rail safety, ongoing concerns about East Palestine derailment dominate Deluzio event

We spent one of the few days remaining before the election traveling to Aspinwall Wednesday for a news conference called by U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, D-Fox Chapel, who’s facing a challenge by Republican state Rep. Rob Mercuri of Pine. A massive railroad bridge across the Allegheny River served as the backdrop.

The first speaker, Annie Lloyd of Darlington, got things started by talking about the 2023 toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, 5 miles from her home.

“Our entire world was turned upside down,” she said. “We’re going to be worried about our health for the next two or three decades.”

Her next thought was interrupted by, you guessed it, a train.

“We desperately need Congressman Deluzio’s rail safety act to pass,” Lloyd was saying when a locomotive roaring along nearby tracks blasted its horn. Lloyd stopped and waited patiently for several seconds while the train continued rumbling and blasting on tracks running through Aspinwall Riverfront Park.

It seems you can’t live in Western Pennsylvania and remain unaffected by the trains. Deluzio said 90% of those in his district – the 17th – live within 5 miles of a railroad line. And this was the reason for the news conference. Or one of them, anyway.

Talk of rail safety dominated the event, but because it’s election season, Deluzio and the other speakers slammed Mercuri as a pawn of corporate interests whose campaign is funded by groups who oppose the Rail Safety Act, a bill Deluzio introduced a month after the derailment. The legislation addresses safety requirements for trains carrying hazardous materials.

The bill has bipartisan support from an unusual coalition that Deluzio noted includes progressive Democrats and MAGA Republicans. He’s hoping to get enough Republicans on board to get the bill through the Senate.

“We know these railroads have treated communities like ours as collateral damage for years,” Deluzio said. 

“We have momentum, finally. We’ve gotten more co-sponsors, more Republicans willing to work with us. It includes the rail subcommittee chairman. That’s important support. I keep asking at these hearings, I ask [Transportation] Secretary Pete Buttigieg, I ask rail workers, I ask folks every time they’re before my transportation infrastructure committee, ‘Do you trust the railroads to regulate themselves?’ The answer is a uniform ‘No.’ And I don’t trust them either.”

Deluzio represents Beaver County, home to lots of conservative votes. He stressed his ability to work across the aisle.

He praised his conservative constituents as “good, decent, patriotic people. They love this country. We may be in different parties, but they want to be safe. They want our country to succeed; they believe in working hard and playing by the rules. They want an economy that rewards hard work and not just wealth.”

He later turned the conversation back to Mercuri, whom he slammed for promising not to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, which Deluzio called fiscally reckless, and for refusing to say the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. Deluzio said this “was weak, it was moral cowardice.”

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After the event, we chatted briefly with Annie Lloyd, who said she and her family moved to Darlington from San Diego after her husband completed his service in the U.S. Navy. The couple are raising two children, ages 10 and 12. Lloyd sees Darlington as a place where people have each other’s backs.

“I care about my community,” she said. “They always stood up for me when things went wrong.”

The derailment remains a big issue in the area. People feel Norfolk Southern, whose train derailed, is getting away “scot-free” after causing massive disruption in East Palestine, Darlington and the surrounding communities.

“You can’t go to a bar and not hear about the East Palestine train derailment,” she said. “It’s still a subject that comes up a lot. It’s still on our minds, and we’re all still affected by it. I don’t think a lot of people from the outside understand that.”

“I feel like the community is unified in our disgust with what happened,” she said. “We’re all still worried about what to expect with our health.”

Residents who have health issues wonder, ‘Was this caused by the toxic chemicals spilled and burned during and after the derailment?’ Getting answers is impossible.

“We don’t know, everything is in question,” Lloyd said. “None of our medical doctors know how to respond. It’s a big question mark.”