It’s been two years since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, by the Pennsylvania border, and industrial chemicals contaminated the community, making hundreds of residents sick. While many have tried to put this incident behind them, some still worry about developing health issues, like liver disease. Researchers are stepping in to track how low-level, long-term environmental exposures affect their health.
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Zsuzsa Gyenes’ story
On the night of February 3, 2023, Zsuzsa Gyenes and her 9-year-old son watched from their apartment window in East Palestine at the flames and explosions from the train derailment. Her son was excited and scared but eventually fell asleep.
Then around 3:00 in the morning, she heard a strange, loud noise coming from his room. She rushed in, and a powerful bleach smell hit her right away.
“My son is up in his bed coughing, vomiting, like projectile vomiting, shaking. He’s gasping for air, begging for water,” she said.
Gyenes was terrified and could feel it in her body, too. She decided within minutes that it was too dangerous to be there.
“That’s all it took. And then, I was like, ‘We got to go,’” she said.
They drove 20 miles east to a hotel in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, near her son’s grandmother. The next morning, he seemed fine and back to his usual self but developed rashes on his arm.
Zsuzsa Gyenes, pictured here on January 7, 2024, at a hotel in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, where she and her son stayed for months. Photo: Renee Rosensteel for The Allegheny Front
- Read our 6-part series: “East Palestine: One Year Later“
- Read all of the reporting on the train derailment by The Allegheny Front and our partners.
The chemical vent and burn leads to health issues
Video screenshot of the vent and burn operation in East Palestine, Ohio, February 6, 2023. Photo: Columbiana County Board of Commissioners via NTSB.
A couple of days later, as a pile of train cars smoldered in East Palestine, emergency responders decided to vent a million pounds of vinyl chloride from five of the tankers and burn it. Otherwise, they told residents the cars could explode. Vinyl chloride is used to make polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a common plastic.
The investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent governmental agency, found that the vent and burn of vinyl chloride from those rail cars was not necessary.
Shortly after that chemical burn, Gyenes, still 20 miles away, was leaving her son’s grandmother’s house.
“I stepped outside, and it was literally like a black wall in the middle of her street. It looked like fog, but very, very dark,” she said.
She went back inside. “I said, ‘We have to go, we all have to go,’” she told her family, and they drove further away. Gyenes and her son never came back to East Palestine to live.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy met with East Palestine residents on June 24, 2024, before the board voted on its investigation findings. Photo: Ella Katona for The Allegheny Front
In the months that followed, Gyenes started having menstrual issues, and her son had unexplained rashes on his face.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted what’s called an ACE survey of 700 area residents conducted after the chemical exposures. It found that people had headaches, coughing, difficulty breathing, and other symptoms.
At a meeting in East Palestine that June when the CDC reported the results, Gyenes and other residents brought urine test results to the meeting, which showed the presence of vinyl chloride in their bodies.
A CDC toxicologist told them there was no treatment to remove those chemicals and advised them to track their health with a medical provider in case they develop cancer.
“My jaw dropped,” Gyenes said. “They came in and said these ACE surveys showed that you guys are sick and that the symptoms match chemical exposure, and then we’re just not doing anything about it.”
CDC toxicologist Arthur Chang speaks to residents at a church in East Palestine, Ohio, on June 6, 2023. Photo: Julie Grant / The Allegheny Front
Researchers step in
Since then, university-based researchers have initiated at least 10 studies. For example, one project looks at the breakdown of chemicals that contaminated the local streams, which could help track whether those chemicals make their way through the soil into people’s drinking water wells.
Juliane Beier, an assistant professor of medicine and a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, is investigating the long-term health impacts from the derailment and its aftermath.
She’s been interested in the connection between chemicals in the environment and health since her childhood in rural Germany, on a street with about 20 homes.
“Fifteen or so of the people that lived there developed gastric tumors, some pancreatic tumors, some liver tumors, and some stomach cancer,” she said. “And I always thought there must be something in the water.”
Later, as a medical researcher at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, she learned about a case in the 1970s where a cluster of workers at a nearby chemical plant had developed liver abnormalities. Some workers had been sent into reactors where vinyl chloride was being made into polyvinyl chloride or PVC.
“So they were exposed to these really, really high concentrations,” she said. “They actually passed out within those tanks.”
Federal safety standards for vinyl chloride were quickly created. It was considered a seminal event in occupational toxicology.
Decades later, in 2010, Beier joined researchers working on biosamples collected at rubber plants in Kentucky. They identified a specific form of liver disease in those samples linked to vinyl chloride exposure.
More recently at Pitt, Beier has been studying the impact of lower-level environmental exposures to vinyl chloride and its connection with liver disease.
For example, her team exposed mice to vinyl chloride in amounts currently considered safe in the U.S., and 100 percent of those mice developed tumors.
“Eighty percent of those cases were hepatocellular carcinoma, HCC, that’s the major malignant liver cancer,” she said.
Safety limits for vinyl chloride have not been updated since they were first created, even though its use is growing. At any given moment, an estimated 36 million pounds of vinyl chloride are transported on U.S. railways, moving along tracks that pass through densely populated residential areas and small towns like East Palestine.
Now, Beier’s team is collecting blood and urine samples from about 300 people in East Palestine and testing their liver function. They’re also sampling the air and water indoors and outside to see whether residents are still being exposed to vinyl chloride.
“So if there are homes with higher concentrations of chemicals in the air or water, we predict that these residents will also have or may progress faster in their liver disease,” she said.
Of course, they hope people do not develop liver disease, but Beier wants more attention on the health impacts of chemicals like vinyl chloride and updated safety standards.
“I’ve been fighting for this to be recognized for years, actually in the liver field, because this is not what medical students learn,” Beier said. “Most of the physicians that I speak to have no idea what to do. If somebody thinks that their liver disease comes from environmental exposures, they don’t know what to look for. I think we need to need to figure this out.”
Changes and settlements
In December, the U.S. EPA designated vinyl chloride as a high-priority chemical for risk evaluation, which could lead to tougher safety standards.
After the derailment in East Palestine, members of Congress were quick to condemn Norfolk Southern and the rail industry and introduced a rail safety bill, which eventually stalled and was never passed.
This week, U.S. Representative Chris Deluzio (PA, 17th District) of western Pennsylvania announced new rail safety legislation and called on Vice President Vance for support in getting it passed.
In recent days, East Palestine and Norfolk Southern have announced a $22 million settlement resolving all of the village’s claims against the company in connection with the derailment and recognizing about $13.5 million that Norfolk Southern has already paid to the village.
Many people in the community joined a class action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern, which led to a court-approved $600 million settlement last fall. Currently, half of the money is on hold because some residents have appealed.
Jami Wallace (far left), Zsuzsa Gyenes (second from left), and other residents affected by the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, outside the federal courthouse in Youngstown, Ohio, after the settlement was approved. Photo: Julie Grant / The Allegheny Front
Health concerns persist
Zsuzsa Gyenes, who is now living with her son in another town, agreed to the “personal injury” portion of the settlement, which could mean a payment of up to $70,000. She expects much of that money will be used to pay off months of hotel bills after the derailment.
But Gyenes did not sign the portion of the settlement focused on health concerns to retain her right to make future health claims against Norfolk Southern.
She and her son still have health issues like his unexplained rashes that she links to the derailment. Gyenes worries about what their exposures will mean for their health in the future.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering, ‘what if,’” she said. “And it’s like we all have to ask ourselves that the rest of our lives every single day, ‘Is this from the derailment? What do I do? Who can help me?”
