The EPA is Covering Up Chemical Hazards in East Palestine

Over a year after the EPA told residents of East Palestine that it was safe to return to their homes the residents have succumbed to a plethora of mysterious symptoms ranging from rashes, diarrhea, headaches, fatigue, and muscle cramping to brain fog and shortness of breath. Dr. Beatrice Golomb, who has been conducting research in the town, funded by a 3 year NIH grant, has found that many of the residents’ multi-symptom health problems are reminiscent of Gulf War Syndrome that afflicted soldiers and marines ordered to man burn pits in the early 90s. Dr. Golomb has reported that 60% of participants in her research have experienced concentration problems, brain fog and shortness of breath.

“We are really seeing strong commonalities between the symptomatic profile reported in Gulf War veterans and what we’re seeing in East Palestine. We are seeing people become symptomatic that have never had symptoms before.”

Elevated rates of cancer are another prospect in East Palestine’s future. Carcinogens such as dioxins, released after burning off 116K gallons of vinyl chloride, have been found in soil samples at levels several fold higher than safety limits set in some states. Instead of testing the soil themselves, the EPA outsourced it to the company responsible for the spill and burn-off that created the dioxins. The EPA characterized the dioxin levels in the soil as “low” and “safe” because they fell below the federal limit to initiate clean up of 1,000 parts per trillion and used this metric in their decision not to declare a state of emergency. However, at 700 parts per trillion, the dioxin concentrations in East Palestine soil are several times higher than the levels set by states like California (50 ppt) and Michigan (90 ppt). Even these state levels are much higher than what EPA toxicologists found to be the cancer risk threshold for dioxins in 2010: 3.7 parts per trillion which the agency recommended raising to 72 parts per trillion at the time.

“When you run the numbers and do your best state-of-the-art risk calculations, that’s the number you get for the cancer risk,” said Stephen Lester, a toxicologist who has researched dioxins for 40 years and is science director for the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. “That’s why dioxins are described as one of the most toxic chemicals ever created.”

In a sworn affidavit, EPA whistleblower Robert Kroutil, who until January of this year was the quality project manager for Kalman & Co., an EPA contractor that developed the software and sensors for their remote sensing aircraft deployed to chemical spills, intimated to the Government Accountability Project that the EPA had delayed deployment of the aircraft until four days after the train derailment and a day after the fire had been extinguished because the EPA program manager in charge of the operation had turned her phone off for a few days due to a “migraine” and didn’t see the text messages and calls about the incident from her supervisor. By the time the plane flew over East Palestine on February 7th the smoke plumes were gone. Kroutil has been involved in 180 different deployments of the remote sensing aircraft since 2001 and states that the aircraft is typically deployed within a few hours of a train derailment or other chemical spill. The EPA program manager ordered the crew to turn the remote chemical sensors off on the plane as they flew over the creeks in East Palestine without explanation, which Kroutil notes has never been done before. Kroutil wasn’t just any other project manager. He was one of the senior scientists who developed both the hardware and software for their remote sensing technology known by the acronym ASPECT at Los Alamos Nation Labs during the Bush Admin and received an award for it in 2005. In spite of having written the code for the ASPECT software and being tasked with analyzing the data from the flight at Kalman & Co., the EPA ASPECT program manager claimed that the standard operating procedures used to collect data over East Palestine are proprietary information and refused to disclose them to Kroutil and his colleagues at Kalman & Co. They did not find out until 3 weeks after the flights over East Palestine that they did not have approved standard operating procedures. The ASPECT program manager also told Kroutil and his colleagues not to use East Palestine in the subject line or body of their emails because it would make it easier to discover through FOIA requests. Kroutil resigned this year after his supervisor threatened to fire him for submitting a FOIA request for the flight.

One would expect this amount of gross negligence and corruption from the EPA pesticide program where managers harbor career aspirations in the pesticide industry but not for a program that has no documented revolving door with any industry I’m aware of. The only company that stands to benefit from covering up the chemical hazards and cancer risks afflicted on East Palestine is Norfolk Southern who has already agreed to pay a $600 million settlement to resolve all claims within a 20 mile radius of the incident which only amounts to $6,000 per resident, much less than what they will need to cover future medical expenses.