Why Our Trains Are Toxic: The Dioxin Backstory
By Peter Montague, SEHN Fellow
Transportation in East Palestine -Derailment Site Norfolk Southern Columbiana County-OH. February2023. Photo citation: Ted Auch, FracTracker Alliance, 2023.
In recent days, dozens of news reports have described the February 3, 2023 train derailment that devastated East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border. Many reports have asked, “Why doesn’t our government require railroads to install the best available safety equipment?”
A better question might be, “Why is any train allowed to criss-cross farms, towns, suburbs and cities carrying a cargo so toxic that a derailment requires everyone for miles around to evacuate their homes and businesses, then to worry forevermore whether they, their families, and their unborn children and grandchildren may have been permanently poisoned?”
Since 2015 in the United States, 106 train derailments have released hazardous chemicals, about one each month for the last eight years.
Passing through East Palestine February 3, the locomotive was pulling 150 rail cars, 38 of which suddenly thundered off the tracks, including five that carried a total of 116,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. Vinyl chloride, a poison known to cause cancer in humans, is the raw material for plastics that now contaminate the ocean, the air, the food supply, and human babies.
When the enormous heap of train wreckage caught fire, railroad officials feared the five vinyl chloride tank-cars might explode, so they dumped all the vinyl chloride into a ditch and set it afire, producing the gigantic cloud of toxic smoke pictured above. With that, things went from bad to worse.
When you burn any chlorine-containing chemical, like vinyl chloride (or household trash, as in municipal incinerators), the most toxic by-product is a chemical called 2,3,78-TCDD dioxin. This dioxin is the most toxic chemical that anyone has ever discovered. At extremely low levels, it can cause cancer and horrific birth defects in animals and humans, but it also interferes with the immune system and the hormone system. Hormones are chemical messengers that travel through the blood stream switching on and off bodily processes—so dioxin may disrupt essentially every part of the human body. Worst of all, some effects caused by dioxin may be passed to future generations, so your unborn children and grandchildren may be poisoned by exposure today.
The extreme toxicity of dioxin is hard to grasp. In 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a one-year study to establish an acceptable daily dose of dioxin for humans. Twenty-one years later, EPA finally announced its conclusion (called “a reference dose”) for dioxin, based on non-cancer effects, like birth defects and hormone disruption. (EPA has never published an acceptable dose of dioxin based on its potential to cause cancer.)
To appreciate EPA’s 2012 “reference dose,” we can compare it to a single aspirin tablet, which typically weighs 325 milligrams (mg). There are 1,000 milligrams in one gram, and there are 28 grams in one ounce.
If you could divide one aspirin tablet evenly into one billion (109) minuscule pieces, EPA says it would be OK for an adult to ingest one and a half of those pieces every day. That’s how much dioxin is considered safe. For a child, the safe dose would be far less. As Yale biologist Arthur Galston said as early as 1979, the acceptable dose of dioxin for animals is “vanishingly small.”
During any fire involving chlorinated chemicals (including trash incineration), tiny particles of dioxin waft downwind. When the dioxin falls to the ground, it persists in its toxic state for many years. During that time, it gets ingested by wild and domestic birds and mammals, or it washes into streams and rivers where it gets into insects, frogs, fish, and other critters. As dioxin moves up the food chain, it concentrates in domestic animals (cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys) and in the largest predators—large birds, big fish, and humans.
Naturally, the 4700 people living in East Palestine (many of whom operate farms, grow their own food, raise livestock, and catch fish) are worried about their health and the health of their descendants. They fear for their families’ future and for their way of life. Will anyone ever again visit their town or buy any of the products they make or grow? What about their property values? Will anyone ever again buy a home or a farm in their community?
Early regulation of toxic substances
The East Palestine train wreck might not have harmed anyone if the U.S. chemical safety system had stayed true to its origins in the 1950s. But it didn’t.
As our chemical regulatory system developed between 1950 and the early 1990s, it started to take a “prevention” approach by eliminating toxic chemicals rather than trying to control them. But the oil, gas, and chemical industries wanted a different system. They wanted chemicals declared harmless until proven harmful to a scientific certainty. Ruthless money eventually prevailed.
Modern chemical regulation began in the 1950s in reaction to two developments—public fear of radioactive fallout from atomic bomb tests, and fear of carcinogenic (cancer-causing) pesticides in food.
Atomic Fallout: “Death Dust”
The first test of an atomic bomb, in New Mexico in 1945, spread radioactive fallout as far away as New York. Then, between 1951 and 1963 the government conducted about 100 more above-ground atomic bomb experiments, showering the entire nation (and far beyond) with radioactive particles that became known as “death dust.”
In April 1957 the New York Times reported that the federal Public Health Service had become “concerned” about the presence of radioactivity in milk. Characteristically, the Times assured its readers that the “investigation was not prompted by any official fears that radioactive materials, such as deadly strontium-90, were reaching dangerous proportions in milk…” Nevertheless, milk with a dash of death dust got people’s attention.
Milk contamination demonstration at the White House, 1958. National Geographic.
By 1958, radioactive contamination of milk—considered a particularly wholesome food—propelled the public to protest in front of the White House against atomic bomb tests.
In 1961, Physicians for Social Responsibility and the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information published their famous “baby tooth survey,” showing that strontium-90 from atomic fallout had quadrupled in the teeth of young children between 1951 and 1954. Radioactive children? People woke up.
To protect the world’s children, in 1963 President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev signed a treaty banning above-ground nuclear experiments. By the stroke of a pen, the major source of radioactive fallout was eliminated—a true prevention approach.
Cancer-causing chemicals in food
During World War II (1939-1945), the chlorinated insecticide DDT and the chlorinated weed killers 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were developed. (“Chlorinated” means “contains chlorine,” which is one of the 92 naturally occurring elements.)
DDT protected military and civilian personnel from insect-borne diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and typhus, saving countless lives. After the war, DDT was sold as a miraculous cure for insect nuisances in the home and garden. At first, DDT seemed to pose minimal toxicity to plants and mammals, it killed a wide range of insects, and it retained its effectiveness for a long time because it persisted for years in the environment without breaking down. U.S. production of DDT grew from 4,366 tons in 1944 to 81,154 tons in 1963, an 18-fold increase in 19 years.
DDT “fog” being spread by the Long Island State Park Commission after World War II. The sign on the truck reads “DDT Powerful Insecticide Harmless to Humans.” Audubon.org.
Only later did scientists learn that these “desirable” traits created deadly problems. Because chlorinated chemicals persist in the environment for many years, they enter water, soil, plants, and animals, eventually ending up in beneficial insects, fish, birds, and mammals. Once they enter food chains, chlorinated chemicals undergo “biological magnification” and become highly concentrated in top predators like large birds, big fish, bears, and humans.
In 1958, Rachel Carson—a former government wildlife scientist and a talented writer—received a letter from a friend horrified by the large number of birds killed by DDT sprayed across Cape Cod. Carson got interested and four years later, in 1962, published Silent Spring, in which she drew parallels between radioactive fallout and toxic pesticides: “Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the Earth without making it unfit for all life?” she asked. It was a stunning question for anyone to have to ask.
By 1958 fear of cancer-causing chemicals in food propelled Congress to enact the “Delaney amendment” (named for Congressman James Delaney), which prohibited the use of any food additive (including pesticide residues) known to cause cancer in animals or humans—another example of the elimination or prevention philosophy. (A Republican majority in Congress eliminated the Delaney Amendment in 1996.)
In 1959, just before Thanksgiving, the wider public was jolted awake to carcinogens-in-food when Arthur S. Fleming, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, announced that a portion of the cranberry crop from the Pacific Northwest had tested positive for the presence of aminotriazole, a weed-killer that caused abnormal growths in laboratory rats.
Secretary Fleming recommended a precautionary approach: he said to the American consumer (read: housewife), if she couldn’t determine the origin of her cranberries, “to be on the safe side, she doesn’t buy.” Following a nationwide cancer scare, the cranberry industry collapsed, and Secretary Fleming was hanged in effigy by Miss Cranberry in Modesto, California.
By 1963 the Department of Agriculture had approved some 500 different toxic chemicals for use in more than 54,000 pesticidal products. That year the President’s Science Advisory Committee issued “Use of Pesticides: A Report,” which offered some prevention-oriented recommendations:
“Elimination of the use of persistent toxic pesticides should be the goal,” the Committee wrote. [Emphasis added.]
In 1965 the President’s Science Advisory Committee issued a much longer report titled, “Restoring the Quality of Our Environment.” It contained several far-reaching recommendations for controlling toxic chemicals, including:
“The public should come to recognize individual rights to quality of living, as expressed in the absence of pollution, as it has come to recognize rights to education, to economic advance, and to public recreation.”
“Federal agencies should give special attention, in all operations they conduct, support, or control, to avoiding and managing pollution, both to reduce it and as an example to others.” [Emphasis added.]
In 1972, after hundred of studies had shown that DDT causes many kinds of harm to animals and humans, it was banned, demonstrating that pollution elimination was still possible in the United States.
That same year, 1972, Congress enacted (after overriding a veto by President Richard Nixon) the Clean Water Act of 1972, which established "the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.” [Emphasis added.] So “zero discharge” of pollutants into water became official national policy in 1972.
A secondary goal of the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to improve water quality sufficiently to protect fish and other aquatic life and to allow safe public recreation in and on the water by 1983 (the so-called “fishable and swimmable” goal).
Two philosophies of regulation: Zero discharge vs. allowable limits
The alternative to “zero discharge” is the philosophy of “allowable limits.” The “allowable limits” system requires regulators to determine—for each body of water (or even for an individual human)—how much pollution is too much, and then to set an “allowable limit” for each of several thousand chemicals so that, together, the allowable limits will not add up to “too much” pollution.
Then, in the case of a body of water such as Lake Michigan, the total allowable limit of pollution will be allocated, via individual pollution-discharge permits, among all the hundreds or thousands of dischargers into that body of water. Then each discharger must be monitored to make sure they don’t exceed their permitted limit.
This system requires regulators to know the current ecological condition of the water body and what its condition should be, the various effects of a particular quantity of each individual pollutant, and the “cumulative effects” of all pollutants taken together.
As you might imagine, the “allowable limits” system is rife with scientific unknowns, all of which are subject to debate and dispute over what facts are “true” and what assumptions are “reasonable.” In such debates, the deciding factor is often money.
In contrast to “allowable limits,” a true “zero discharge” system is simple, clear, and understandable to everyone. As Barry Commoner used to say about toxic industrial chemicals, “If you don’t put them into the environment, they aren’t there.”
The national goal of “zero discharge” was established in 1972 but it was never seriously pursued, at least not by EPA. The “zero discharge” goal was sabotaged by EPA administrators appointed by Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s and by all subsequent EPA chiefs who did little or nothing to resurrect the “zero discharge” goal.
Most importantly, “zero discharge” faded away because ruthless big money favored the unworkable “allowable limits” system of chemical regulation, which they could (and still can) manipulate for their own purposes. Unless and until it can be silenced by law, money rules.
In 2022, 50 years after “zero discharge” of pollutants into water was declared national policy, EPA still labeled as “impaired” 50 percent the nation’s rivers and streams, 55 percent of lakes, ponds and reservoirs, and 25 percent of bays, estuaries and harbors. “Impaired” means they are either not swimmable or not fishable or both. The “allowable limits” system has failed.
Waking up to dioxin
Even though DDT was banned in 1972 because it was toxic and persistent, many other toxic, persistent chlorinated chemicals continued in widespread use.
When the U.S. military adventure in Vietnam was first ramping up, in 1961, the chlorinated weed killers 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T were combined into a chemical warfare weapon known as “Agent Orange.” The chemical components of Agent Orange were produced mainly by Dow Chemical and Monsanto. According to information revealed by the New York Times, in 1965 these chemical companies held a “secret meeting” to discuss the serious health hazards posed by the presence of dioxin in Agent Orange. However, according to attorney Victor Yannacone, Dow and the other manufacturers of Agent Orange then covered up that information and withheld it from the government and from the public.
Between 1961 and 1971, 12 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed across large areas of Vietnam to destroy civilian crops and to defoliate the jungle to eradicate hiding places. Millions of Vietnamese civilians were sprayed, and U.S. troops were often soaked in Agent Orange.
Defoliating a riverbank in Vietnam. Military.com
By 1963 the President’s Science Advisory Committee became officially worried about the health consequences of herbicide spraying and by 1969, a National Cancer Institute study revealed birth defects in mice exposed to 2,4,5-T. Ten years later, in 1979, U.S. EPA banned 2,4,5-T, eliminating the chemical for all uses in the U.S.
In 1976, Congress enacted the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) to regulate toxic chemicals, but the new law exempted some 60,000 chemicals that were already being used in 1976, on the untested assumption that they were all harmless. TSCA kept the elimination philosophy slightly alive by banning PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), which were toxic, persistent chlorinated chemicals that Monsanto had been selling since 1929.
Despite this tip-of-the-hat to elimination, TSCA basically ended effective toxic chemical regulation in the U.S. As Steven Jellinek, EPA’s first assistant administrator for its chemical division, said in an interview, “The law was written by industry.”
The TSCA law established that chemicals are assumed harmless unless EPA can prove otherwise. Further, the law prevented EPA from even beginning to investigate a chemical unless and until its manufacturers or sellers alerted EPA to a hazard, which of course did not happen often. Then the law required EPA to select a method for regulating a chemical that was “least burdensome” to the purveyors of the chemical. In sum, TSCA was and remains an ineffective law designed by and for industrial polluters.
The asbestos ban that wasn’t
In 1975, EPA banned the toxic metal lead from gasoline, not because it poisoned people (which it definitely did for 50 years) but because it interfered with catalytic converters in newer automobiles. (Leaded gasoline is still legal today in farm equipment, racing cars, and small airplanes.)
Three years later, in 1978, EPA banned lead from paint; poisoning of U.S. children by lead-based paint had been first reported in medical literature in 1914 and by 1978 millions of children in the United States had had their IQs diminished by lead exposure.
Still, the banning of toxic lead in consumer products was clearly a step in the right direction. Next, EPA set its sights on asbestos.
Starting in 1979, EPA spent 10 years gathering evidence that could hold up in court to support a ban of asbestos, the fibrous mineral known to cause cancer in humans. In 1989, EPA announced it was banning asbestos. By that time many thousands of people in the United States—most of them workers—had already died horrible deaths from asbestos exposure, as Paul Brodeur documented in his 1985 book Outrageous Misconduct: The Asbestos Industry on Trial. However, in 1991, an appellate court in Louisiana overturned EPA’s ban, saying the agency had not considered the costs to industry.
After that defeat, EPA abandoned the elimination philosophy and contented itself with nibbling around the edges of the toxic chemicals problem. It essentially gave up and never tried to ban another chemical, remaining content to play the losing role in the “allowable limits” game.
Today, EPA does not even know for sure how many chemicals are in use. EPA maintains a list of about 85,000 chemicals but in 2020 the American Chemical Society estimated the true number at 350,000—about four times EPA’s best guess. In any case, since 1971, EPA has managed to ban only nine chemicals.
As a result, in the U.S. today, babies are born “pre-polluted” with toxic chemicals (see, for example, https://bit.ly/41YH9tq and https://bit.ly/41U991n). Then, during the first year of life, babies can increase their body burden of toxics by drinking breast milk, which is contaminated with toxicants. Then, if their family does not restrict its diet to “organically grown,” 70 percent of the vegetables they eat will be contaminated with pesticide residues.
Coincidentally, the incidence of childhood cancer has been steadily increasing since 1975 at an average rate of 0.8 percent per year. And, among adults, hormone-related cancers are steadily increasing—breast cancer among women and testicular and prostate cancers among men.
One Last Try
In 1991, an obscure but important U.S. agency made one last attempt to establish the elimination philosophy as the gold standard for U.S. and Canadian chemical regulation.
The International Joint Commission of the Great Lakes (the IJC) is a government body responsible for maintaining and restoring environmental quality in the Great Lakes. (The Great Lakes are important—they hold about 20 percent of all the fresh water in the world.) In 1992, the IJC’s Sixth Biennial Report said “The principal problem is the presence and impact of persistent toxic substances on all sectors of the ecosystem.” Then the report laid out a series of blunt recommendations:
a) Ban incineration in certain areas near the Great Lakes; incineration is one of the major sources of dioxin.
b) Define many chemicals as "persistent toxic substances" and then eliminate them because recent history tells us persistent toxics cannot be safely managed.
c) Phase out the use of chlorine in manufacturing; chlorinated chemicals tend to be toxic and persistent, and to bioaccumulate.
d) Adopt a "weight of the evidence" approach, not waiting for scientific certainty to be established but taking action to protect against toxics as soon as the "weight of the evidence" indicates the need for action.
With these recommendations the IJC turned its back on the U.S. system, which was (and is) based on numerical standards (“allowable limits”) for each individual chemical. The IJC said the traditional regulatory system had failed and should be abandoned.
The 1978 Water Quality Agreement (between the United States and Canada) covering the Great Lakes, defined a "toxic substance" as any "substance which can cause death, disease, behavioral abnormalities, cancer, genetic mutations, physiological or reproductive malfunctions or physical deformities in any organism or its offspring, or which can become poisonous after concentration in the food chain or in combination with other substances."
The IJC recommended that a persistent toxic substance be defined as any toxic chemical that bioaccumulates, or any toxic chemical that has a half-life greater than eight weeks in any medium (water, air, sediment, soil, or living things). Substances with either of these characteristics should be eliminated, the IJC said. The "half-life" of a substance is the time it takes for half of it to break down or degrade into its less-harmful component chemicals. As a rule of thumb, a chemical is considered “gone” after about 10 half-lives.
In its Seventh Biennial Report in 1994, the IJC declared the U.S. chemical regulatory system “ethically unacceptable,” and called for adoption of the precautionary principle which says, wherever it is acknowledged that a practice could cause harm, even without conclusive scientific proof that it does cause harm, the practice should be prevented and eliminated.
Without making reference to the IJC, in September 1992, 13 European nations adopted the OSPAR Convention to protect the ocean by “eliminating and preventing” chemicals that are “toxic, persistent and liable to bioaccumulate.” It seems clear that the IJC’s elimination philosophy was gaining traction in Europe.
The United States abandons the philosophy of elimination
After 1980, the United States abandoned the elimination philosophy that had started to take hold in the 1960s and that the IJC tried to resurrect in the 1990s. If we had chosen to eliminate toxic chemicals that are persistent or bioaccumulative, or if we had banned chlorine as the IJC suggested, then train derailments today in places like East Palestine would be far less dangerous, frightening, and consequential for local people.
Given that the “allowable limits” philosophy has allowed toxic chemicals to pollute the entire planet, maiming and killing large numbers of people year after year, and given that elimination philosophy is still available to us, we can ask, what’s stopping us from doing what we know is right and just, ethical and moral?
The answer rests with the Supreme Court of the United States. Starting in 1976, the Court arbitrarily decided that a bundle of money injected into our political system is a form of “free speech,” protected by the Constitution. Now money effectively controls Congress, shutting out the concerns of ordinary people. As Kevin Drum puts it, “Nobody cares what you think unless you are rich.”
To maintain their power, the super-rich now keep the culture wars going to deflect attention away from themselves. Worse, big money has now weaseled itself into a position where it can perpetuate its own power; money is now so influential that all attempts to reduce its power in Congress have failed.
Today, only external pressure from organized people outside government can create the needed changes. Until social justice groups of every kind acknowledge this new reality and form a gigantic, aggressive coalition to eliminate the power of the ruthless rich, nothing can really change.
And that is why our trains are toxic.