by Sandra Steingraber, SEHN senior scientist

Before East Palestine, Ohio became a headline, a hashtag, and the new Love Canal, it was a little-known municipality, population 4,761, near Ohio’s border with Pennsylvania.

In 2011, its status was downgraded from “city” to “village” due to declining population.

And in that way that many Midwestern towns can be heavily industrialized and intensely rural at the same time, East Palestine, in its pre-Rust Belt days, both made a lot of stuff and grew a lot of stuff.

There were ceramics plants and tire manufacturing plants, along with foundries and factories that produced steel tanks, fireproofing materials, and electrical wiring.

At the same time, there were—and still are—lots of surrounding orchards, with all the attendant infrastructure, storage and preserving facilities to process apples, peaches, and pears.

And, as is typical of most Midwestern towns, a railroad runs through East Palestine.

Even before the Civil War, the central Midwest had built a prolific network of tracks that connected all the cities together and traversed countless neighborhoods in cities and villages alike. By 1860, 80 percent of Corn Belt farms were located no more than five miles away from a railway.

What the low whistle of a freight train in the night signaled was grain, lumber, hogs, cattle, and coal on the move.

More than 160 years later, the same railroad tracks of the Midwest still bisect the region’s backyards, but what the railcars carry has changed greatly.

Each year in the United States, 3.1 billion tons of hazardous materials travel the rails—a number that keeps rising as the fracking boom keeps filling up more and more clanking tanker cars with oil and gas as well as the petrochemical feedstocks that oil and gas are turned into.

Like vinyl chloride, which is used to make PVC plastic. Vinyl chloride is a human carcinogen. And it’s explosively flammable.

The hazardification of America’s freight trains did not receive much attention at all until 9/11. Suddenly, the specter of a hijacked tanker train speeding towards a metropolitan area or a suicide bomber riding the rails with vinyl chloride prompted some new thinking.

Two months after 9/11, then-New Jersey senator Jon Corzine drafted the Chemical Security Act. Among other things, the bill would have compelled chemical plants to assess the availability of safer alternatives to inherently dangerous technologies.

Had it prevailed, the trains passing through East Palestine on February 3, 2023 might have been ferrying less hazardous cargo.

But it didn’t. After intense lobbying by the chemical industry, the bill foundered.

In fact, everything went quickly backwards. We could have mandated inherently safer chemical processes and incentivized the manufacture of alternative, less toxic materials so that trains would be less full of cancer-causing, exploding substances. But we didn’t. Decisions were made instead, in the name of homeland security, to make information about which chemicals are used where and how they are transported more secret. So the terrorists can’t find them.

The result was that databases once available to researchers about, say, accidents at U.S. chemical plants, were pulled off the internet.

In 2002, architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart, published Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which argues for biomimetic chemical production processes that are designed for closed loops and result in non-toxic materials. Among other things, the book refers to the manufacture of PVC plastic from vinyl chloride as a form of chemical harassment.

And yet, Cradle to Cradle, a handbook for 21st century chemical innovation, did not prompt a widescale reevaluation of our materials economy.

Ten years later, in November 2012, a train hauling vinyl chloride derailed when a bridge collapsed over a creek in Paulsboro, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Response and Restoration: “Four rail cars fell into the creek, breaching one tank and releasing approximately 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. Local, state, and federal emergency personnel responded on scene. A voluntary evacuation zone was established for the area, and nearby schools were ordered to immediately take shelter and seal off their buildings.”

Cue second round of public conversation about hazardous materials chugging through densely populated areas.

This time, no one proposed, “what if we just don’t manufacture this stuff and swap in some less toxic materials?” Instead, the U.S. Department of Transportation proposed stricter safety protocols and advanced braking technology for all trains classified as “high hazard flammable trains.”

Chemical industry lobbyists quickly went to work picking the new rule apart and were successful in greatly curtailing the scope of its scrutiny and narrowing the number of trains to which it would apply.

Subsequently, during the Trump Administration, the requirement for electronically controlled pneumatic braking systems on high-hazard trains was famously lifted.

And that’s how the 38 rail cars of the Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous and flammable material that derailed in East Palestine on February 3 to catastrophic effect did not even meet the definition of a high-hazard flammable train.

Nor was that train equipped with the good kind of brakes. However, because the train didn’t meet the high-hazard definition, advanced brakes wouldn’t have been required anyway, even if the Obama-era rule had not been reversed during the Trump era.

It was a plastic train with bad brakes. And it burned. And people ran away. And fish went belly up. And it’s not clear right now how, or if, the mess can be cleaned up.

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The rePercussion Section: Plastic Train