New research sheds light on pollution and response to crash in East Palestine

After a Norfolk Southern train derailed at the Pennsylvania-Ohio border last year, releasing 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride and other chemicals into the environment, National Science Foundation answered quickly. An independent federal agency funded the university’s research, including that of Andrew Welton, a professor of civil, environmental and environmental engineering at Purdue University.

His team tested for chemicals inside and outside homes and buildings, in waterways and even in beehives near the crash site six times over four and a half months.

Welton recently spoke with Julie Grant of The Allegheny Front about his researchpublished in the journal Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology, as well as another recently published NSF-funded study.

Welton will moderate an upcoming webinar on the research and lessons learned on November 6 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Find the link here.

Julie Grant: Why don’t we focus on your research first? What were you looking for, what did you find and what are the consequences of it?

Andrew Welton: In our study at Purdue University, our goal was to better understand what chemicals were released, where they went, what exposure they had, and how to reduce or eliminate those exposures.

Can you tell us how you did it?

We sent a team to the area to document what types of pollution were present, collected water, air and soil samples and brought them back to Purdue University in Indiana. We then characterized these materials for a range of chemicals, some of which officials said might be present, and others we went hunting for because we had a theory about their presence, but officials may not have tested for them.

In the study you mentioned chemicals such as 2-chlorophenol and 2-ethylhexanol. Did you find these chemicals?

We found a number of chemicals in waterways, soil and sediments that officials say resulted from the spill. So our data seemed to confirm their findings. But we also found a number of other chemicals in places where officials weren’t necessarily testing. This is because we developed our sampling approach based on the community needs that were communicated to us and by these community members.

And it was the places inside and outside the buildings, even beehives that were nearby, where the derailment, vent and fire occurred?

Yes, we focused on the area where the chemical burn occurred, but because the chemicals had moved 270 miles, we sampled further down the waterways toward the Ohio River.

And at what distance did you detect the contamination?

We found contamination more than two miles downstream from the crash site. At the time, officials told people they were all detained at the crash site. But when we first arrived, we discovered that pollution was flowing openly in streams further downstream than officials had claimed.

One thing that struck me was something I saw in your article describing contractors from Norfolk Southern doing testing inside the building. What happened there?

Well, one of the major failures of these measures to protect public health here was that the evacuation order was lifted and people were sent back to their homes and jobs and got sick.

This is partly due to the fact that Norfolk Southern contractors were allowed to use devices that were unable to detect chemical levels in buildings that may be harmful to health. And although their devices showed there was no contamination, Norfolk Southern’s contractors actually wrote on their data sheet that they had to leave the building because the odors were so bad.

We also saw that some of the buildings that were previously inspected were chemically contaminated. And the governor of Ohio admitted on his website that the buildings were actually contaminated weeks after everyone was told it was safe to return to the buildings, when in fact some of them were not.

So, is there anything you took away from this, particularly from your research?

When natural, natural and man-made disasters occur and chemical releases occur, you need people in leadership positions who can make decisions about selecting the right equipment and using the right tests. And so when you have a failure like that, people and businesses reopen and everyone starts getting sick and you just fail on multiple levels of agencies acting on behalf of the public.

And then question number two arises: as you know, in East Palestine not only railway workers were sick, residents were sick, business owners were sick, city guests were sick, politicians were sick. AND even CDC employees who came to conduct a medical investigation fell ill. You have a cascading effect of injury and harm.

All of this could have been prevented if the agencies had forced Norfolk Southern to do the testing correctly, and the agencies had gotten all the expert feedback they could and then adjusted their approach to get the testing right.

One of the group’s other studies looked at two major chemicals that bother people and was recently published. published in the journal “Environmental Science and Technology”. What did the researchers do and find there?

A study conducted by Professor Frank Loeffler of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville assessed the fate of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate in the environment.

The research team collected water samples from Sulfur Run, Leslie Run and other bodies of water, as well as sediment samples and samples from private drinking water wells, brought them with their collaborators to their laboratories, and characterized the chemical and microbiological properties of these samples. They then took the material and dosed it with specific levels of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate to see what rate of decomposition or decomposition would occur.

His research is extremely important because it indicates that chemicals Maybe break down in the environment under certain conditions typical of the area around East Palestine.

It looks like his discovery could be positive news for people who are concerned about these chemicals in their water.

Their findings are actually positive, as they imply that the chemicals have the potential to break down in the environment and may not pose as much of a long-term risk as might be expected.

What we don’t know is whether or to what extent they actually break. And if they do break, is that enough to prevent them from ever reaching drinking water wells? In summary, the study shows that the potential exists, but a number of other questions need to be answered.

Would you describe how the water moves and what are you talking about there?

Many community members get their drinking water from underground. And this is how they do it: they have wells. So what happens is if you are standing next to a stream and you look down at your well, say 50 feet from that stream, the water level is about the same height as the water level in the stream. So whatever is in that stream can be pulled through the ground between the dirt and sand particles and then end up in the well and then be sucked out and put into someone’s house.

So if that creek is polluted, pollutants like butyl acrylate, vinyl chloride, and others may already be in the sand between the creek and the well. And what we don’t know is whether he will reach the well. Will he degrade before he gets there? Or are we talking about five or ten years before we start detecting infestations in the home?

From all this research, is there anything you’ve learned that you don’t think we knew that changes the way we look at the disaster in East Palestine?

Many of these studies show the importance of making informed decisions to ask the right questions after a disaster. Of course, mistakes will be made, but I think we have not yet seen the adoption and formal integration of this external scientific expertise into disaster response decision making. The effort that brought these four teams together was made possible because the National Science Foundation provided rapid support and because of our ability to work with community members to help them quickly answer questions they had.

My hope is that the current system of decision making for disaster response, whether through Xwhich is an incident command system or a decision-making protocol that goes down to the state level, uses some sort of outside scientific expertise to help inform them when they need to make those really tough decisions or re-evaluate their decisions. .

Andrew Welton is a professor of civil, environmental and environmental engineering at Purdue University.

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