Study: Train derailment in East Palestine pollutes 16 states

“I didn’t expect to see an impact this far away,” said David Gay, the study’s lead author. “There’s more going on here than most people would have guessed, myself included.”

From South Carolina to Wisconsin to New England, toxic chemicals rained down after the accident, according to a new analysis in the journal Environmental Research Letters.. In total, the pollution covered 540,000 square miles, or 14 percent of the United States land area.

People closer to the site of the accident reported rashes, nausea and headaches. However, Gay said the low chemical concentrations further away from the site of the accident were not “toxic, but quite unusual in many places.” Many of these contaminants can leach out and affect marine and plant life.

“It’s not about death and destruction. These are relatively low concentrations, but they are very high compared to what we normally see – some of the highest levels we’ve measured in the last decade,” Gay said.

The accident occurred at about 9 p.m. on February 3 near East Palestine, a town of nearly 5,000 people on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. The train, operated by Norfolk Southern, had a mechanical problem that caused more than 50 cars to derail. Some of the trains were carrying hazardous materials, including a known human carcinogen called vinyl chloride.

In an emergency decision, authorities approved a controlled burn of the dangerous chemicals to prevent a catastrophic explosion. But as the vinyl chloride burned, it broke up in the atmosphere into individual chloride and hydrogen ions, which were carried elsewhere by the wind.

As rain began to fall in various locations, the pollutants were knocked out of the air and deposited on the ground. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison collects these soil deposits weekly from 260 sites across North America. Gay, who serves as the program’s coordinator, analyzes the data regularly to monitor air pollutants.

“When the atmosphere is heavily polluted, there is also heavy pollution from wet precipitation on the ground,” Gay said.

He and his team analyzed soil deposits from the week of the train crash and the period following it (January 31 to February 14) and then compared them with samples from the previous decade. Many samples taken during the week of the crash in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York were found to be contaminated and contained soot, ash and dirt.

Gay initially expected only a few unusually high chloride concentrations in Pennsylvania, but the impact was much greater than expected. High chloride concentrations reached as far as Virginia, South Carolina and Wisconsin. The highest concentrations were measured near the Canada-New York border, which is downwind of East Palestine.

Within two to three weeks after the accident, the pollutants disappeared.

The data also showed researchers another unusual trend. Gay explained that rain without pollutants is usually somewhat acidic, so it contains a good amount of hydrogen ions. However, the samples collected showed fewer hydrogen ions than usual, making the rain more basic than expected. Gay suspects that the metals released by the fire, such as calcium, sodium, potassium and magnesium, helped soak up much of the hydrogen ions normally present in our atmosphere.

“This study is unique and elegant because it clearly documents the effects of such accidents,” said Juliane Beier, a leading expert on the effects of vinyl chloride who was not involved in the study.

However, she said this is not the first time researchers have observed distal effects of local environmental events, and it is unclear what Long-term impacts that such environmental pressures could have on the community.

“I think we should be concerned,” Beier said.