After the Norfolk Southern train derailed along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border last year, releasing 1.1 million pounds of vinyl chloride and other chemicals into the environment, the National Science Foundation responded quickly. The independent, federal agency funded university-based research, including a study by Andrew Whelton, Professor of Civil, Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University.
His team tested for chemicals in and outside of homes and buildings, in waterways, and even bee hives near the derailment site six times over four and a half months.
Whelton spoke recently with The Allegheny Front’s Julie Grant about his study, published in the journal Environmental Science: Water Research and Technology, and another recently published NSF-funded study.
Julie Grant: Why don’t we focus first on your study? What did you look for, what did you find, and what are its implications?
Andrew Whelton: In our study at Purdue University, our goal was to better understand what chemicals were released, where did they go, what exposures were there, and how to reduce or remove those exposures completely.
Grant: Can you talk about how you went about this?
Whelton: We sent a team to the area to document what types of contamination were present, collected water samples and air samples, and soil samples, and brought them back to Purdue University in Indiana. We then characterized these materials for a whole host of chemicals, some that officials had said might be present, and others we went hunting for because we have a theory that they were present, but potentially officials weren’t testing for them.
Grant: In the study, you mentioned chemicals like 2-chlorophenol and 2-ethylhexanol. Did you find these chemicals?
Whelton: We identified a number of chemicals in the waterways, in soil and sediment that officials claimed were there from the spill. So our data kind of supported their discoveries. But we also found a number of other chemicals in places where officials were not necessarily testing. That’s because we designed our sampling approach based on the needs of the community that were being messaged and told to us by those community members.
Grant: And these were places like inside and outside of buildings, even bee hives, that were nearby where the derailment and the vent and burn happened?
Whelton: Yes, we focused close to the area where the chemical burn occurred, but because the chemicals moved 270 miles, we sampled further down the waterways towards the Ohio River.
Grant: And how far away did you find contamination?
Whelton: We found contamination more than two miles downstream of the derailment site. At the time, officials were telling people that had all been contained at the derailment site. But we found, when we initially arrived, contamination openly flowing in the creeks farther downstream than officials were claiming it was.
Grant: I was struck by one thing I saw in your paper that described contractors from Norfolk Southern testing inside a building. What happened there?
Whelton: Well, one of the major failures of this response to protect public health here was that the evacuation order was lifted, and people were sent back into their homes and businesses and got sick.
It’s partly because Norfolk Southern’s contractors were permitted to use devices that were incapable of finding chemical levels in buildings that could cause health effects. And so while their devices read that there was no contamination, Norfolk Southern’s contractors actually wrote down on their datasheet that they had to leave the building because the odors were so bad.
We also saw that some of the buildings that had been tested previously had been chemically contaminated. And the governor of Ohio admitted on their website that buildings were actually contaminated weeks after everybody had been told that the buildings were safe to go back into when, in fact, some of them weren’t.
Grant: So is there anything you take from this, from your study in particular?
Whelton: When disasters, natural disasters, and man-made disasters happen and chemicals are released, you have to have people in positions of authority who can make decisions about selecting the right equipment and using the right tests. And so when you have that failure, then you have people and businesses reopening where everybody starts getting sick, and you just have a failure at multiple levels of agencies acting on behalf of the public.
And that then prompts number two, which is, as you know, in East Palestine, not only did railroad workers get sick, residents got sick, business owners got sick, visitors to town got sick, politicians got sick. And even the CDC workers that came in to conduct a public health investigation got sick. You have this cascading effect of injury and harm.
All of that could have been prevented if agencies were compelling Norfolk Southern to test correctly, and also the agencies themselves were receiving all the feedback that they could handle from experts and then adjusting their approach to test correctly.
Grant: One of the other studies in this group looked at two of the main chemicals people have been concerned about, and was recently published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology. What did researchers do, and find there?
Whelton: The study, led by Professor Frank Löffler at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, evaluated the fate of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate in the environment.
The research team collected water samples from Sulfur Run, Leslie Run, and other waterways, as well as sediment samples and private drinking water well samples, brought them back to their laboratories with their collaborators, and characterized the chemistry and microbiology in those samples. They then took the material and dosed it with specific levels of vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate to see what type of degradation speed or degradation rates would occur.
His study is critically important because it indicates that chemicals can break down in the environment under specific conditions that are representative of the area around East Palestine.
Grant: It sounds like his finding could be positive news for people who are worried about these chemicals in their water.
Whelton: Their findings are in fact positive because they imply the chemicals could potentially break down in the environment, and they may not pose such a long-term risk as one might expect.
What we don’t know is are they [actually breaking down], and to what degree they are. And if they do break down, is that enough so that they never reach the drinking water wells? So the study shows that there’s potential, but a number of other questions have to be answered.
Grant: Would describe the way water moves, and what you’re talking about there?
Whelton: Many of the community members get their drinking water from the ground. And the way they do that is they have these wells. So what happens is if you’re standing next to a creek and you look down your well, let’s say 50ft from that creek, that water level is about the same height as the water level in the creek. So anything that’s in that creek might get dragged through the ground between the dirt particles and sand particles and then make it to the well, and then that would be sucked out and put into somebody’s home.
So if there’s contamination of that creek, those contaminants like butyl acrylate, vinyl chloride, and other things, may have already made their way into the sand between the creek and the well. And what we don’t know is, whether it going to reach the well. Is it going to degrade before it gets there? Or are we talking five years or ten years before we start detecting contamination at the home?
Grant: From all of these studies, is there anything that you learned that you feel like we didn’t know, that changes how we look at the disaster in East Palestine?
Whelton: Many of these studies show the importance of evidence-based decisions in asking the right questions after a disaster. Certainly, mistakes will be made, but I think what we haven’t yet seen is the adoption and formal integration of this external scientific expertise in the disaster response decision-making realm. The efforts that these four teams collectively put together were made possible because of the National Science Foundation providing rapid support, but also because of our ability to work with community members to help them answer the questions that they had in do so rapidly. What I’m hoping for is that the existing disaster response decision-making system, whether it be through the ICS, which is the Incident Command System or the decision-making protocol that goes all the way up to the state levels, adopts some sort of external scientific expertise to help inform them when they need to make these really tough decisions or have to reevaluate their decisions.
Andrew Whelton is Professor of Civil, Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University.
