Podcast: Impact of human-made disasters on Flint and East Palestine years later

Tragedies in the communities of Flint, Michigan, and East Palestine, Ohio, continue to affect residents 10 years and 1 year on, respectively, from the initial events. Residents of both cities continue to rebound and rebuild despite ongoing issues revolving around the toxic chemicals that were introduced to their towns through human decisions.

C&EN physical sciences reporter Priyanka Runwal traveled to both Flint and East Palestine to speak with residents about how they are recovering, how the actions of their representatives have fallen short, and their hopes to return to something of a “normal” existence in the future.

C&EN Uncovered, a project from C&EN’s podcast, Stereo Chemistry, offers a deeper look at subjects from recent stories. Check out Priyanka’s cover story on Flint after 10 years at cenm.ag/flint; Check out Priyanka’s cover story on East Palestine at cenm.ag/eastpalestine.

Cover photo: Residents of Flint, Michigan, march arm in arm as they demand justice and accountability for their community 10 years from the beginning of the water crisis.

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Credits

Executive producer: Gina Vitale

Host: Craig Bettenhausen

Reporter: Priyanka Runwal

Audio editor: Ted Woods

Copyeditor: Bran Vickers

Story editor: Laura Howes

Episode artwork: Brittany Greeson

Music: “Hot Chocolate,” by Aves

Contact Stereo Chemistry: Contact us on social media at @cenmag or email cenfeedback@acs.org.

The following is a transcript of the episode. Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Craig Bettenhausen: Welcome to C&EN Uncovered. I’m Craig Bettenhausen. C&EN Uncovered is a podcast series from Stereo Chemistry. In each episode, we’ll take another look at a recent cover story in Chemical & Engineering News and hear from C&EN reporters about striking moments from the reporting, their biggest takeaways, and what got left on the cutting room floor. In this episode, we’re talking about two recent cover stories on the lasting effects of human-made disasters on the people of East Palestine, Ohio, and Flint, Michigan, two communities, separated by less than 300 miles, that have faced continued hardships after tragedy struck. Our story of 2023’s Norfolk Southern freight train derailment in the Ohio town of East Palestine appeared in the Feb. 26th issue of C&EN. Our piece on Flint appeared in the May 6th issue. We’ll put links to each story in today’s show notes. I’m here with C&EN physical sciences reporter Priyanka Runwal, who wrote both articles. Hi, Priyanka.

Priyanka Runwal: Hi, Craig. Thanks for having me.

Craig: So for anyone that hasn’t had a chance to read these stories yet, can you give a brief recap of what’s in each article?

Priyanka: So the two stories, like you mentioned, are about the two environmental disasters that have deeply impacted communities living in towns where these disasters unfolded. Now, in East Palestine, Ohio, a freight train carrying a whole bunch of things, including hazardous chemicals, derailed from its tracks in Feb. 2023 and upended the lives of many people. And in a very controversial move, authorities released and burned vinyl chloride. This is a chemical that’s flammable, carcinogenic, used for making PVC [polyvinyl chloride] plastics. And this chemical, vinyl chloride, was present in five train cars. Now, while the EPA [US Environmental Protection Agency] has maintained that the air, the drinking water, and the soil [are] safe, local people have reported feeling sick, and they’ve been worried about lingering contamination and adverse health effects.

Now, the second story is about Flint, Michigan…where bad decisions were made involving the city’s drinking water, and that caused lead and other metals to leach from the city’s aging pipes. Now tens of thousands of residents were exposed to dangerous levels of lead, a known neurotoxin, along with potentially carcinogenic compounds like trihalomethanes and a waterborne bacterium that caused outbreaks of life-threatening Legionnaires’ disease. Ten years on, the community is still grappling with physical and mental health problems that [were] unleashed by this environmental disaster. So earlier this year, I traveled to East Palestine, and then in March to Flint, to meet people who’ve been living through these crises, talk to scientists who’ve been doing independent environmental and health monitoring in the areas and government officials who are in charge of protecting people in these situations.

Craig: Central to the lasting problems in East Palestine is this decision that the company made to drain the chemicals into a pit and then set the pit on fire. What was the point of setting the pit on fire? Why not just drain it and haul it away?

Priyanka: Well, that was certainly one option. But Norfolk Southern and its contractors proposed to the decision-makers that the release and burning of the vinyl chloride was the only viable option. An on-ground team had noted an increase in the temperature of one of the railcars’ shells, and they concluded that the stabilized vinyl chloride in the tank had started to polymerize. Now, another worry was that the pressure-relief devices on these railcars had malfunctioned. So if the polymerization was occurring, pressure buildup could lead to an explosion, which would send toxic gasses and shrapnel in all directions. Now, experts say that such polymerization cannot happen without an initial compound that would trigger such a reaction. Also, the temperature the ground crew noted wasn’t high enough to indicate that this exothermic reaction was occurring. But there is another important aspect: the temperature did continue to rise, as one would expect to see when polymerization occurs, but the temperature had started to decline before the vent-and-burn decision was made. Now, in recent hearings where the National Transportation Safety Board presented the findings of their investigation into this derailment, they concluded that this vent and burn was unnecessary and that Norfolk Southern provided incomplete information to decision-makers who had few minutes to make that call. Now, the theory goes that the train company did this to clear the tracks as soon as possible so they could start moving stuff again. But Norfolk Southern defends its actions by saying that other options to remove vinyl chloride were unfeasible because the derailed cars had sustained damage and that the conditions on the ground were pretty dangerous.

Craig: So let’s turn to Flint. Flint, as you know, is a big story that was in international news when the lead level spiked in Flint. How has the water contamination affected the community there?

Priyanka: The interesting thing in Flint is that several people initially, and especially children, got their blood lead levels tested. When that happened, there was indication that their lead levels are well above—they’re dangerous lead levels—they’re well above, you know, what is considered OK or not less problematic. One of the things that has been documented to a very large extent is mental health issues. Now, living through a water crisis like this—where you have people in power that are essentially supposed to protect people and be transparent about environmental issues at play, why people may be experiencing certain symptoms that they do—the initial years of the water crisis, or the initial months of the water crisis, people in power were really not being transparent with folks living in those communities. People were on the ground protesting, and you had people in power tell them, you know, It’s all fine and it’s safe. And then you had independent researchers coming in and testing their water and telling them, you know, otherwise. And so people have lived through a lot of trauma. Parents, extremely worried that the high levels of lead that physicians in their town were testing [in] the blood lead levels of the children, the high levels that they were detecting, what would that mean for their children’s health? Parents, having lived through a lot of this, have experienced mental health issues. Initially, some studies had also documented reproduction-related issues in Flint women that they’ve linked to the water crises. So you have a whole range of things that the community has experienced initially, and issues like hypertension in adults that people are still continuing to document.

Craig: So in both articles, especially the Flint one, but both of them, you had these frank and honest discussions about the impact of race and class on what’s happening. Tell me about how you approach writing about some of these culturally fraught topics.

Priyanka: In the case of Flint, I mean, I spoke to a community member who had been impacted by the Flint water crisis, who has been an activist in the community ever since the crisis unfolded. And one of the first things he told me was that, you know, this is both a race as well as a class issue. Flint is a community where it’s majority Black. It’s also a community that’s heavily poor. So I sort of approached the Flint story keeping in mind that this is a larger community that is dealing with the water crisis.

In the East Palestine case, again, it’s a poorer community. The socioeconomic dynamics in this community are very different. And so the way I sort of reported the story was talking to several people and really understanding who was impacted most by the disaster in whatever way that they were, and just really trying to write it from that lens.

Craig: So in Flint, the effects are clearly about the water. But in East Palestine, where did the chemicals end up? Is it in the dirt, the air, the water?

Priyanka: So the EPA has been monitoring the air, the water, and the soil. I mean, the testing sort of indicates that the pollutants definitely went into the soil and into the water along the railway track. So when I was there, you could see this large area that’s cordoned off along the railway tracks that is, you know, sort of called ground zero, where the train derailed, where the train cars were sort of lying derailed for a long time before the authorities sort of cleaned up that space. There are two important local waterways, Sulphur Run and Leslie Run. These are creeks that run through East Palestine. And they were especially heavily contaminated by chemicals that were spilled from the train cars. Now, over time, the amount of contaminants in the water have gone down, but the sediments at the bottom of these creeks are still potentially contaminated. The sediment has been a huge source of tension between the community and the authorities that are overseeing these cleanup efforts. Often, community members would see a rainbow-colored sheen on the water, potentially indicating the presence of lube oil that leaked from one of the train cars and potentially other stuff. But a lot of the focus currently is to clean up and continue testing the area that’s sort of around that ground zero location.

Craig: So what have been the biggest discrepancies between what the agency reports are showing and what the residents are reporting and experiencing?

Priyanka: I think, especially in the initial few weeks after the train derailed, you had the EPA sort of saying, It’s all fine. The air is safe based on what we’re testing. The drinking water is fine.

And they had cordoned off around the ground zero area that they knew was contaminated, and they were taking care of that. But on the other hand, you had people who had come back to their homes, and they were experiencing several symptoms: skin rashes; nosebleeds; tingling of the lips; irritation of the nose, eyes, throat.

And that was, I guess, one of the biggest discrepancies, you know, you have people with these symptoms and they don’t really understand why suddenly they’re experiencing all these health symptoms that they hadn’t seen before. You know, you had people experiencing all of this, while on the other side, you’re hearing things are OK, it’s fine. And yes, you can have some short-term symptoms, but even when chemicals are present at lower levels, and especially when there are several chemicals present at lower levels, we don’t really understand, or science doesn’t really understand so well, how exposure to chemicals at low levels, and multiple such chemicals at low levels, their presence together could be problematic for people’s health. We just don’t have very good answers to those questions. A toxicologist I spoke with said that, you know, testing for single chemicals in itself is not enough.

Craig: So you and I have moved around and lived in a lot of places in our lives, but both East Palestine and Flint are more multigenerational communities. A lot of the people, if not most of the people, live in the same houses even that their grandparents and great grandparents lived in. How is the recovery going for that community, that culture in these two towns, you know 1 year on and 10 years on?

Priyanka: You know, in Flint, there are people who have left because of the water crisis. There are people who have stayed despite the water crisis. So Jamie Davis, who is the lead in my story, one of the things that she told me was that, you know, often she’ll have people tell them, You know things are bad. You can see things are bad. You’re worried for your children. Why don’t you leave?

She said that, you know, it’s not really easy for people to just leave. They’ve lived in that town for years. You know, multigenerations have lived in that town for years. That place has been home for them. But it’s the economics of it also that she explained to me. For a, I think it was a two- or three-bedroom apartment or house that she had in Flint, she paid $600 a month for rent, but ask her to move somewhere else, outside of Flint, she was going to pay a lot more. And she just doesn’t make that kind of money. And just asking that question—you know, Why don’t you just leave?—is not something that a lot of people can do. In the case of East Palestine, Krissy Hylton, for instance, who is the lead character in my story, Krissy has lived in the house ever since she was born, and her family has owned it, I think, since the 1970s. It pains her to not be able to live in that house again, but she’s so worried about the contamination. It pains her to not be able to go back to that home again, But at the same time, just moving out of East Palestine to another place where she can buy a home, she worries that she may not be able to afford it, or she probably cannot afford it. So for a lot of people, when you think about recovery, one thing that we have to understand people despite knowing that there are many environmental challenges that they’re concerned about, worried about, people can’t just move.

Craig: So between these two cities, the root cause of the contamination is very different, but a lot of the dynamics around trying to get response from the agency and the responsible companies are similar. Flint’s been about 10 years, East Palestine has been about 1 year. Are there lessons for East Palestine in what Flint has accomplished and where they’ve struggled, and what are those lessons?

Priyanka: I think, like you said, you know, the sort of situations or the sources of contamination are different, how the situation played out are different. But the commonality here is the loss of trust between people in power who residents in these areas expected will protect them against anything that would go wrong and would harm their health. That lack of trust, it’s sort of central to how things have unfolded in both cases, Ten years on in Flint, that lack of trust still doesn’t feel restored. Having talked to a lot of people there, the city has, in many places, replaced the lead service lines, the galvanized iron service lines. But even though the levels of lead are below what are called, quote=unquote, “actionable levels,” you have scientists on one hand that say that, you know, any amount of lead exposure is not good, especially for children. At the same time, you have people whose trust was betrayed, you have lawsuits that unfolded, and people in power who were potentially considered guilty were let off the hook. And I suspect that even as things change, that lack of trust, which we now see in East Palestine, or we have seen in East Palestine, may continue to stay because, again, you have people in power who probably did not acknowledge some of the very real symptoms that people were describing or reporting, and people talking about this unpleasant odor in their house, and all of that stuff not being taken seriously or not acknowledged properly, has sort of really led to this lack of trust. And so I don’t know if there are clear lessons to be learned, but there are commonalities that I’ve seen play out in both places. Ten years down, if I go to East Palestine and you still see people talking about lack of trust in agencies that were supposed to protect people, I would not be surprised.

Craig: So as you walk the streets in these towns, do you feel like these are communities that are going to return to their pre-crisis vibrancy? Are they on the death knell? What is the feeling like actually on the streets of these towns?

Priyanka: In East Palestine, for instance, if I knew nothing about the fact that, you know, there was a train that had derailed, there was an environmental disaster that unfolded, I might not necessarily be able to say that there’s something strange or something eerie about the place. But you know, you spend a day or two, and you start seeing certain things that serve as very clear reminders of, you know, what happened. You have boards or placards that say “East Palestine Strong” in several places in town. You walk into the grocery store, or you walk into the local diner, and you have the pinup board with information about health studies one can participate in. You see trucks going in and out of East Palestine that are carrying, you know, either contaminated soil or contaminated water. It sort of becomes obvious.

In Flint, on the other hand, it has been 10 years, but you know, people still talk about the water crisis like it was yesterday. Again, just walking through town, you see certain reminders of the water crisis. I remember seeing a mural which has a robot in it on it, and it says, “Fresh produce.” And one of the things during the water crisis, public health officials, doctors told parents was to feed the children and their families fresh food, fresh fruit, fresh greens. And that sort of reduces the absorption of lead into the body, into the blood. You know, those little things sort of serve as reminders of that time. But again, for some people, the events are so traumatic that talking to them feels like yesterday that this happened.

Craig: Priyanka, thanks for diving deep on this with us.

Priyanka: Thank you so much for having me, Craig.

Craig: So for listeners, you can find me on social media as @CraigOfWaffles. Where can they find you?

Priyanka: You can find me on Twitter. I’m at Priyanka: P, R, I, Y, A, N, K, A, underscore, Runwal, R, U N, W, A, L. And sorry, that’s X now, that’s not Twitter anymore.

Craig: You can find Priyanka’s cover stories about revisiting East Palestine and Flint on C&EN’s website, or in the Feb. 26th and May 6th print editions of C&EN. We put links in the show notes along with the episode credits. We’d love to know what you think of C&EN Uncovered. You can share your feedback with us by emailing cenfeedback@acs.org. This has been C&EN Uncovered, a series from C&EN’s Stereo Chemistry. Stereo Chemistry is the official podcast of Chemical & Engineering News. Chemical & Engineering News is an independent news outlet published by the American Chemical Society. Thanks for listening.