The unfinished business of East Palestine, Ohio

Four months after a Norfolk Southern train carrying a toxic cocktail of hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, the town is back in the news.

Chemical company CEOs, union officials, railroad lobbyists and federal investigators are descending upon the village of 5,000 for a two-day field hearing this week to dig deep into the causes and outcomes of the Feb. 3 derailment.

There’s a lot of unfinished business to discuss.

But before the hearing kicks off Thursday, spanning 19 hours over two days, community members will have their chance at the microphone.

The community meeting scheduled for Wednesday night is supposed to be a venue for residents to learn more about the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigative process. But residents could also raise concerns about water quality, dead fish, declining home values and their kids’ unexplained nosebleeds.

“There are some people in town who didn’t evacuate at all,” said Misti Allison, an East Palestine parent who became the face of the community after she testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in March about the disaster. “But then you still have some people, even months later, that are still relocated. And some of those people, they even come to their house, they’re there for an hour or so and they’re starting to get eye irritations or starting to get rashes.”

In the months since the cameras — and everyone from Donald Trump to Erin Brokovich and everyone else who used East Palestine as a political stage — have left town, anxieties and resentments have continued to fester. Many continue to feel that the federal response was “lackluster,” in Allison’s words, or that Norfolk Southern’s repeated promises to “make it right” have been haphazardly honored.

A family assistance center run by the railroad sometimes reimburses people for water filters and lodging away from home — and sometimes doesn’t, Allison said.

Norfolk Southern said it has provided $17 million in assistance to nearly 10,000 families to date and that some of the confusion might stem from who is and who isn’t inside the evacuation zone.

And after initially resisting the idea, Norfolk Southern has agreed to help compensate East Palestine homeowners for the decline in their home values — especially important to those who feel unsafe and are eager to move but can’t sell their house for anything close to what it was worth before the derailment.

Even if the cameras are gone, the politics are never far from the surface. Republicans continue to whack President Joe Biden for not visiting the site of the toxic derailment — on Tuesday, on the eve of the field hearing, the Republican National Committee accused him of lying about his intention to go to East Palestine, and noted that the president was instead in California attending a fundraiser.

Back in Ohio, Gov. Mike DeWine is resisting calls from some protestors to declare an emergency — his office says FEMA has made it clear they’d reject it — and Norfolk Southern is fighting state and federal lawsuits trying to force the railroad to cover more of the costs of the cleanup. Some residents have called for the CDC to do a long-term health study, amid fears that a “cancer cluster” could hit the community down the line. When the CDC sent a team to East Palestine in March to study the health effects of the disaster, half of the team got sick.

If Wednesday night’s community meeting goes off script and becomes a forum for residents to vent their frustrations and fears, this is the sort of dirty laundry that might get aired.

The investigative hearing that follows will feature testimony about the full gamut of technical details involved in the derailment — tank car specifications and the proper temperature setting for alarms to start sounding about overheating wheel parts — but one focus will likely be on the decision to vent and burn toxic chemicals.

DeWine’s press secretary, Dan Tierney, said the choice was between a controlled release or “an uncontrolled release with a catastrophic failing of the railcars that could have led to shrapnel being sent a mile in any direction.” NTSB will examine the decision-making and the result of that process.

Hundreds of pages of evidence will be released as part of the NTSB docket as the hearing begins Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, railroad safety legislation could come to the Senate floor next month. Ohio Republican Sen. JD Vance, who has been working to get nine Republicans to support the bill for a filibuster-proof majority, has said he’s confident he has the votes to pass the bill.

A version of this initially appeared in the June 20 edition of POLITICO Nightly.