The Environmental Protection Agency's inspector general has opened an investigation into how the agency responded to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. The review follows requests from residents of the small town near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and from Vice President JD Vance.
The inspector general announced the probe on Tuesday. It will assess the EPA's handling of what was the worst U.S. rail disaster in more than a decade, along with the health and environmental worries that have emerged since. Those concerns persist even though the EPA assured the public that no toxic levels of chemicals remained in the community in the weeks and months afterward.
The disaster began late on a Friday night in February 2023, when a failed bearing sent a Norfolk Southern train off the tracks. A mix of chemicals spilled and caught fire. Residents evacuated, and three days later officials chose to blow open five rail cars and burn the vinyl chloride inside them.
The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that this "vent and burn" operation, which sent a huge plume of black smoke and drifting chemicals across several states, was unnecessary. At the time, however, officials leading the emergency response feared the tank cars could explode and cause even greater harm.
The inspector general's office said it will determine whether the EPA met its responsibilities and whether it had "sufficient data to support the agency's public communications" telling residents it was safe to return home and live in the town. Testing experts have questioned whether the data the EPA shared obscured the risks, and whether the agency could judge how dangerous exposure to such a mixture of chemicals really is. Health standards are generally built around exposure to a single chemical.
Resident Jami Wallace, who has pushed for the investigation, said she told herself "I'm going to cry" upon hearing the news. Wallace has tracked more than 80 people in the area who have developed cancer since the derailment, though linking each illness directly to the accident is difficult. She and others had earlier pressed the EPA to test for cancer-causing dioxins. "It's like we've had to push them along the way for every single thing they did, and then they didn't even do it right," she said.
Wallace said she is unsure how much the probe will achieve, but she values the renewed attention. "If nothing else, at least we're getting attention again," she said. "And people know that we're here and that we are not OK." The recent request from Vance and the head of the EPA helped launch the review, though residents and whistleblowers have also filed multiple complaints over the years.
Legal and financial questions remain unresolved. Norfolk Southern agreed to a $600 million class action settlement with residents, but the money has been largely held up in court amid questions about the initial settlement administrator's handling of the funds. A group of residents has also sued, arguing the class action attorneys misled and pressured them into signing.
A separate federal settlement, which includes a $15 million fine for the railroad and $55 million for decades of medical exams and groundwater testing, has been under review for more than two years without a judge's approval. Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern is seeking an $85 billion merger with Union Pacific to form the first transcontinental railroad, a deal that still faces extensive review by the Surface Transportation Board.
