Former EPA Official Calls Agency’s Response in East Palestine Too Weak
Reid Frazier | March 24, 2023 | The Allegheny Front
After the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, officials decided to burn 100,000 gallons of highly toxic vinyl chloride, rather than risk a catastrophic explosion. While the company has absorbed much of the blame for what happened in East Palestine, many have criticized the response from government. That includes Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration, and head of the environmental group .
Enck criticized EPA’s response in East Palestine in an op-ed in The New York Times criticizing the EPA’s response to East Palestine. She spoke with the Allegheny Front’s Reid Frazier.
Reid Frazier: You wrote about how the EPA responded to this derailment, especially after the intentional burning of vinyl chloride, which has the potential to create dioxins, the toxic group of chemicals. Yet the EPA waited weeks to begin testing for dioxins. How should they have acted differently?
Judith Enck: Well, first, I think the EPA should have been in on the decision on whether or not to burn the vinyl chloride.
If someone had told me two months ago that there would have been a train derailment and over 100,000 gallons of liquid vinyl chloride was in train cars, and a decision was made to drain the toxic vinyl chloride into ditches and then take a match to it, I would not have believed that.
So the first question is why was the decision made and was the federal EPA signing off on this?
This came up during the U.S. Senate hearing on the train derailment. And Senator (Markwayne) Mullins (R-Okla.) specifically asked the CEO of the railroad, Alan Shaw, ‘Who decided to take this pretty dramatic step? And Shaw said ‘the incident command,’ which means every agency that was in the room. Sen. Mullin drilled a little deeper and said, ‘Who in Incident Command?’ And the CEO said the decision was made by Fire Chief (Keith) Drabek of East Palestine.
That is incredible because it is a very small community. And what does the fire chief really know about the toxic and ecological impacts of burning large amounts of vinyl chloride? I mean, I appreciate his service. He did amazing work responding to this emergency.
But quite honestly, that should have been a decision by the U.S. EPA. They have toxicologists. They have the ability to quickly mobilize testing and monitoring equipment. In addition, I think the EPA should have required much more comprehensive testing and sampling before people were told it was okay to go back into their homes, particularly in pregnant women, young children, people with respiratory disease.
There was some testing first for volatile organic compounds inside people’s homes. But these were handheld devices, and they only tested the air. And the thing about going in late on indoor air testing is we know that volatile organic compounds volatilize — they dissipate over short periods of time. The surfaces inside people’s homes need to be tested. That has not happened.
Frazier: Norfolk Southern hired an environmental consulting firm, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, which has been called by ProPublica, the ‘go-to contractor’ for companies responsible for industrial disasters. In the past, it’s been accused of downplaying health risks. Norfolk Southern hired this firm to do a lot of its testing, and the EPA has signed off on this. What are your thoughts on that? And would you have done anything differently had you been in charge of the EPA’s response here?
Enck: This is a private organization answering to their private client. So I think there is a built-in conflict of interest, a built-in desire not to identify problems. Now, as a former EPA staff person, I can tell you there’s not enough staff at the EPA [to do all the testing], but there is technical expertise. And what could happen in a situation like this is EPA hires their own contractors and marry them up to their existing staff and do the work.
I don’t think, given the early missteps, that it’s smart to have the contractor for the rail company out doing all of this work, even if there is some EPA oversight.
Frazier: Does the EPA have the authority to tell residents or local governments that that zone is not safe, that they’re not sure if it’s safe enough to live there?
Enck: Yes. Everyone knows the Superfund law does clean up of toxic waste sites. But it’s also an emergency response law. So EPA certainly had the authority. You know, they can’t be arbitrary and capricious. They have to have a basis for their judgment.
I would say the largest black plume of toxic chemicals that I’ve seen in recent memory is justification for EPA saying, ‘Hold up, we just had this massive uncontrolled burn of vinyl chloride; scientists tell us that when you burn vinyl chloride, sometimes you get dioxin, benzene, other contaminants formed by combustion. We’re not going to have folks come back until there’s a comprehensive testing protocol implemented.’
