Five weeks after the Norfolk Southern train disaster in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio, the company’s CEO Alan Shaw was grilled on Capitol Hill Thursday about the February 3rd derailment and so-called controlled burn that blanketed the town with a toxic brew of at least six hazardous chemicals and gases, including vinyl chloride, which, when heated, becomes phosgene, the World War I chemical weapon. Shaw testified before the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee just days after the third derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in the U.S. since that derailment in East Palestine.
the governor — the government needs to do so much more, starting with: Why are we producing so much vinyl chloride? That is used for one purpose, and that is to manufacture plastic, PVC plastic. And so, part of that is risks associated where the manufacturing takes place, mostly in Black and Brown communities in Louisiana and Texas. You put this vinyl chloride on the train tracks. We know that there are, unfortunately, many derailments a year. And so, this accident happened.
I question whether it was smart to drain this known carcinogen into local ditches and set it on fire without evacuating enough people — the evacuation zone was only one mile by two miles — without putting testing in place, and then, just a few days later, lifting the evacuation order, telling people that it was safe for them to return, with very limited testing. Dioxin testing didn’t happen until a month later, after pressure from the public and media cycles calling out the EPA. And then, unfortunately, the EPA asked the polluter here, the rail company, to do the testing.
— source democracynow.org | Mar 13, 2023