At 8:54 p.m. on February 3, 2023, William Hugar was at his home on the outskirts of East Palestine, Ohio, doing what he always did: watching videos on YouTube.
He heard a “very loud noise,” but continued doing his thing.
Years as a waiter in a “very lively” bar taught him to behave like “a master of calm in the midst of chaos,” he said last Thursday, barefoot at the door of his house.
Only the insistent sound of the fire sirens made him go out into the street.
That was when he learned that a few meters from his backyard, a train loaded with toxic substances and conspiracy had derailed.
Also, that nothing would ever be the same in the town of 4,700 inhabitants on the border with Pennsylvania where he lives.
On the first anniversary of that fateful day, his neighbors are divided between those who want to turn the page and those who are still looking for answers.
A year later, the noise is still at Hugar's house: cleanup crews paid by the Norfolk Southern railroad company, responsible for the accident, are still working, “24 hours a day, seven days a week,” to clean up a huge portion of contaminated land.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 177,000 tons of solid waste and 166 million books of wastewater have been removed.
“There are people who have left the town,” says Hugar.
“Would I have followed them if I had the money?
It's possible.
Will I get cancer in a few years as a result of that?
I can not know it".
On the frigid night of the derailment, Zsuzsia Gyenes followed authorities' orders to stay in her home a mile from ground zero.
At around three in the morning, she smelled a “penetrating chemical smell, like a nail salon.”
Soon, she recalls, her nine-year-old son became “violently ill.”
“So, we only knew that there had been an accident, not that the train was loaded with those horrible substances,” she explained Friday in a telephone interview.
Although she was not in the area whose evacuation was immediately ordered, Gyenes took the child, who suffers from asthma, and went to a hotel with what she was wearing.
A year and several hotel changes later, they live in Pennsylvania, an hour's drive away.
They haven't returned home yet.
William Hugar, neighbor of the place where the train derailed.
I. SIX FINGERS
In the 38 cars of the convoy of 150 (and almost three kilometers long) that left the track after one of them caught fire due to overheating of a bearing, carcinogenic chemicals and combustible materials were traveling, such as vinyl chloride ― which is used to manufacture PVC and appeared two months later in a urine test of Gyenes' son - or substances that in the past were used for chemical weapons, such as phosgene, one of the products that was released into the air, soil and surface waters with the controlled explosion that the authorities decided to carry out to avoid a greater evil on the following Monday.
That controversial measure is still under debate because it was taken in haste, according to those who criticize the management of the disaster, grouped in East Palestine around an organization called Unity Council.
The company also hid the complete list of what the train was moving for too long, despite the fact that the action protocols consider it essential that the emergency services immediately have all the information about what they are facing.
Gyenes says that in these 12 months the boy has had periodic rashes and that so much provisionality is affecting his education.
That she has not been able to work, that as soon as she sets foot in East Palestine, the smell of that night makes her “dizzy and nauseated” and that she has had to throw away almost all of the “furniture and memories” of a lifetime, because the The plague doesn't go away no matter how much I wash things.
She also says that Norfolk Southern had told her that on February 9 they would turn off the tap on the aid they provide her, but calls from reporters to verify that information led to an extension.
For her, “it is evident that the company downplayed the harmful effects of the derailment” and that the spill caused mixtures of substances whose effects “have not been sufficiently studied.”
As for the local doctors, who she remembers were instructed in a public Webinar meeting not to subject their patients to “toxicological tests” because they were not “necessary,” it seems to her that “they simply do not know how to help.” .
“I need a permanent solution, that allows me to move at once, so I can't live,” she says.
On the streets of East Palestine, one of those forgotten places in the United States where nothing ever happens until it suddenly does, and a legion of reporters come to turn everything upside down, a score of neighbors and business owners shared this week stories very different from those of Gyenes.
The most repeated wish was the desire to turn the page.
After all: Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) measurements spoke from the beginning (and still speak) of normal toxicity levels in water and air, although officials also warned them that they can It may take years or decades before knowing the real consequences of what happened that day.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Department of Health is preparing a new study on the symptoms experienced by residents in the area.
Controlled detonation of substances on February 6, 2023.Gene J. Puskar (AP)
An older man, accompanied by his wife, who was using a respirator, said that he did not know “sick people,” but he did know “people who claimed to be sick.”
In front of a sign that declared “We are East Palestine;
Prepare for the greatest resurrection in the history of the United States,” another blamed the media for always looking for “the same bearers of bad news, and not the people who have overcome the accident.”
A third clarified that he has never felt as safe as he does now, that there is “great scrutiny over the water we use.”
“Keep in mind,” he added, “this was always a polluted place: just outside there is a stream called 'the sulfur stream.'”
And Kat Smith, who opened a gem store on Main Street three months after the derailment, said for her part that the town is “pretty polarized” about the best way to confront the collective trauma.
It is impossible to know how much, but the mayoral elections last November may help: in them, Trent Conaway obtained 792 votes that allowed him to renew his position, compared to 605 for his rival, Matti Allison, who testified in March in Washington before the Senate “on the dangers of releasing petrochemicals into playgrounds, schools, ballparks and towns across the country.”
This week, Conaway returned to the national media spotlight for the anniversary, but also because he made public his support in the presidential race for Donald Trump, who visited the town shortly after the derailment.
They are still waiting for President Joe Biden, who announced that he will finally attend in February.
That absence has had consequences.
“In East Palestine he is not a very well-liked person,” admits Chad Edwards, who holds a “non-political” position as second in command at City Hall.
In the 2020 elections, the people voted Republican (70%) en masse.
Rain of millions
“My neighbors live in a state of denial, because they have gone through trauma and fear the truth;
I don't blame them for it,” Gyenes considers.
“They accuse us of scaring people, but this is a horror story.”
He also believes that their spirit is influenced by the fact that the railway has showered East Palestine with 1.1 billion dollars (1.017 million euros): 836 in costs related to the environment and 381 in legal aid and community assistance.
“My aspiration is that Norfolk Southern's response will allow us to be proud in five or 10 years,” Alan Shaw, CEO of the Atlanta-based rail giant since November, told the local press in January.
The company does not seem to have been greatly affected by the derailment: its stock market value has fallen by a negligible 0.4% and its market capitalization amounts to $56.6 billion.
Don Elzer, owner of a nursery in East Palestine (Ohio), pictured last Wednesday in one of the greenhouses.I.
SIX FINGERS
The “generosity” of the company has meant that in this story of two cities, Don Elzer, owner of a nursery that last year only had one client on his big day, Valentine's Day, less than two weeks after the accident, Aim for the best-ever team.
“I think Norfolk Southern was right to pay quickly rather than embark on endless lawsuits and end up having to do it in a few years.”
His business has recovered “to 80%” and he remembers that one of the neighbors' biggest fears, apart from health, was in those weeks that the price of their homes would fall due to the image that the town was projecting to the world now that For once he had turned to look at them.
Real estate reports indicate that the market remains the same as last year, among other things, due to the hundreds of government and railroad workers who have moved here to work.
Despite these good data, Edwards confirmed last Wednesday at City Hall that the idea of commemorating the anniversary this Saturday had been discarded.
“It didn't seem like a cause for celebration,” he added.
Those who did call for an “evening of testimonies and a ritual of remembrance” was the organization Unity Council, which represents those who Elzer defines as “the angry ones,” to remember that a year ago “a chemical bomb exploded over the town and affected several miles around.”
Among its objectives is also to ensure that the derailment serves to change something in the petrochemical industry and in the freight trains up to five kilometers long that connect an unreachable country.
At the moment, they are not having success.
After the accident, congressmen from both parties promoted a law to prevent something like this from happening again.
Not only did this never come, thanks to the tenacious work of lobbyists in Washington, but the number of accidents recorded in the first 10 months of 2023 by the five large freight railroad companies increased by 11% (Norfolk Southern, which reduced number of accidents, is not one of them).
It is estimated that an average of three trains leave the tracks on any given day in the United States.
Many of these accidents do not have major consequences.
Others
forever
derail the life of a town where nothing ever happens.
The "Chernobyl of Ohio" that never was
In the deeply divided East Palestine, something makes everyone agree: the damage that the riders of the conspiracy apocalypse caused to the neighbors a year ago.
The image of the horrifying toxic cloud that followed the controlled explosion unleashed, repeated on social networks, wild speculation such as that the Biden Administration was hiding a “Chernobyl in Ohio”, that the accident served to distract attention from more serious issues or that there was a plot by the company and the Democrats to attack, under the theory of the great replacement, an overwhelmingly white town (98.2%) and majority Republican (the county gave Trump 71% support in the presidential elections of 2020).
Dan Shofstahl, owner of a metallurgical plant located on a hill in front of ground zero, a privileged vantage point over the cleanup work, lamented last Wednesday in his office that the image of the chemical fungus, “which lasted about five minutes,” is gone. to remain “forever identified with the people.”
Shofstahl assured that he has been watching Norfolk Southern and EPA workers work for a year, and that “from the very beginning they did it without protection.”
“That can only mean two things: either there is no danger, or they don't care about dying.”
Jesse Walker, author of the book
The United States of Paranoia: A
Conspiracy Theory, explained that it followed a classic model, the sum of two factors: “the superior enemy and the external enemy.” ”.
“The first part is plausible, because it has happened more times before: someone up there, the government or powerful capital, lies about the true extent of the damage caused,” explains Walker by phone from Baltimore.
“The second is the most absurd: someone from the outside, Biden or the Democrats, in this case, allies himself with the railroad and harms the community in order to contribute to the replacement of the white man by minorities more favorable to their interests.” .
This part always limps on the same side from the point of view of logic: it requires the complicity of too many people to be kept secret.”
The slow and clumsy responses of the authorities in the first days helped a lot.
And they created the perfect conditions for the spread of these conspiracies on platforms like TikTok, whose users seek immediate updates (gratifications).
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