Three days after a Norfolk Southern train loaded with toxic chemicals careened off the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio, town fire chief Keith Drabick gave the rail giant the green light to intentionally vent and burn five tanker cars full of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing chemical used to make plastic.
current EPA staffers and independent scientists to voice his concerns about the potential release of dioxins and other highly toxic chemicals, and to try to understand how EPA could have let the burn happen.This just seems like an incredibly stupid and reckless decision,” Garrahan wrote to his former colleague three weeks after the chemical burn, in an email exchange he shared with HuffPost. “Am I missing something?”Later that day, Garrahan received what he described as a “cryptic” response.
“In order for polymerization to occur, which was Norfolk Southern and their contractors’ justification for the vent and burn, you would have to have rapidly increasing temperatures and some sort of infusion of oxygen, neither of which occurred,” she said. Open burning “is generally the least environmentally preferred treatment technology and, consistent with existing requirements, should only be available where there are no safe modes of treatment,” the memo reads.
“They chose not to,” Lester said. “I’ve heard everything from, ‘Well, we were in the room but nobody asked our opinion,’ to ‘We were in the room but we just didn’t say anything.’ It’s like, you’re in the room. You have the authority, you have the right, you have the responsibility to say something.” However, a spokesperson told HuffPost that the agency was not the first to label the event a “controlled burn,” that the railroad and other members of the unified command team began using that language early on in the response, and that EPA’s role during the burn was to “A frame grab from drone video taken by the Columbiana County Commissioner’s Office shows towering flames and columns of smoke from the"controlled" burn in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 6, 2023.
Garrahan has mixed feelings about speaking out against his former agency. After a career in public service, he’s enjoying retirement and not looking to cause a stir.“I do believe that persons having to make difficult decisions with limited information generally deserve the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “However, if those decisions seem to violate EPA’s mission and sacred trust to protect human health and the environment, then I feel a moral obligation to speak out for environmental justice.