East Palestine, Ohio: February 2023
by Ashley Anderson
Was it Sunday morning, or was it Monday?
It had to have been Sunday morning. If I first saw the story Monday morning, then the timeline of events wouldn’t make sense.
The mention of East Palestine, Ohio, on CNN that morning startled me out of the early stages of a head cold-induced haze. I sat on my couch in my apartment almost 700 miles from where I grew up, the rural farmlands of Northeast Ohio. My empty breakfast plate sat on the coffee table. On TV, images of a broken cargo train burn burn burned as a small town thirty-nine miles from my hometown was thrusted into the national spotlight.
Despite having lived in a large mid-Missouri college town for the last five and a half years, I am an Ohio girl through and through. I lived in Ohio for the first thirty years of my life. I scoff at videos and articles that talk about Ohio as a place where nothing happens. I have a shadow box with a layered cutout of Ohio I made with my Cricut on the wall in my kitchen. I compare all other apples to the giant fruits of Ohio orchards.
It feels like home because it is.
What I am not used to is my home’s tiny corner of the universe being on the national news. As a child, I remember the excitement of seeing the names of small towns I knew on the weather map during the evening news out of Cleveland’s television stations. East Palestine was one of those small towns. A village of just under 5,000 residents, East Palestine is nestled along the Ohio River where three states converge: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Like many small Northeast Ohio towns, East Palestine pops up out of seemingly nowhere as a person drives along some state route with three numbers as a name that turns into Main Street. Like many small Northeast Ohio towns, Norfolk Southern’s rail lines traverse the land and, for some of these small town, the railroad is the reason why those towns exist. The movement of goods and people through the places we call home is a source of livelihood that keeps roofs over heads and meals on kitchen tables.
When I was in junior high and high school, my alma mater’s cross country and track teams regularly competed at East Palestine. Their track invitational, the East Palestine Relays, was one of the highlights of our spring season; everything, including the field events involving throwing and jumping, was a relay race. As adults, one of my younger sisters and I drove through East Palestine on our way to the Fiestaware foundry in West Virginia to shop for the iconic colorful dishes and cookware. The route through East Palestine took more time, but it meant not crossing the scary toll bridge at Newell. On our trips, we usually ate at a Mexican restaurant in sight of the Dunkin’ Donuts in East Palestine. They served tacos and enchiladas on the same brand of plates we just shopped for.
I want to feel something as I watch train cars filled with dangerous chemicals burn, flames and smoke glowing against the dark night and early morning sky. Officials evacuated everyone living within a one-mile radius of the derailment. Anyone with children who refused to leave could be arrested. The haze that my head cold left me in made my thoughts move slowly, like pancake syrup that had been in the refrigerator too long. Just as my thoughts moved past the shock of name recognition, the Sunday morning anchors moved on. The State of the Union address was two days away, and a mysterious white balloon captured attentions and imaginations as it floated through U.S. airspace. I went about my Sunday, blowing my nose so often that it burned red.
I listened as the news anchors outlined updates on this disaster Monday morning. Whatever ailed me has my body absolutely spent. As I leaned over my toilet with a bloody nose I couldn’t control, I caught glimpses of what continued to happen. Controlled release. Toxic materials. Vinyl chloride. Tests of air and water quality. Norfolk Southern.
The news continued to roll as my nose stopped bleeding long enough for me to post an announcement canceling my first-year writing classes that day. Summoning the strength to get dressed for work felt impossible. At a time when I should have been leaving for campus, ready to walk tow of my four classes I taught through the basics of rhetorical analysis, I took yet another dose of medicine and sunk into my couch. CNN’s coverage of the derailment carried me off to sleep.
When I woke up, East Palestine was already old news. Toxic chemicals burning in a small Ohio town was displaced by the State of the Union address, a Chinese spy balloon, and a 7.8 magnitude earthquake on the border of Turkey and Syria. By Tuesday, East Palestine escaped my mind, too. I went back to work. My formal teaching observation was later that week, and I had to somehow figure out ways to get my week back on track. My body was still struggling to fight off whatever made me feel so awful.
The week went by. People returned to their homes. My body began to heal. I forgot anything happened in East Palestine.
I felt guilty about forgetting, but I was also not surprised. Northeast Ohio is a place of forgotten tragedies that eventually feel like they become secrets. Those secrets become stories, like the tales I head as a child about the people in glowing suits who came and went at the county landfill at night. Or the same suspicious people who appeared at entrances to the Ravenna Arsenal, also known as Camp James A. Garfield, which was the most productive producer of weapons for the U.S. military from 1942 to 1945. The Ravenna Arsenal continued to produce and store ammunition, as well as fertilizer, until 1957 and then again during the Vietnam War.
For the longest time, I thought the stories of the glowing men were local folklore, stories passed on to get a rise out of young ones. The fact of the matter is that about 1,481 acres, or 6.9% of the land that comprises the arsenal, are considered environmentally contaminated. Something happened there that the general public will likely never know about, but they do remember the men in the glowing suits and wondering what they were doing by coming and going only at night. The Ravenna Arsenal is fourteen miles from the house where I grew up, 44 miles from East Palestine.
The litany of environmental disasters doesn’t end there, though. The Perry Nuclear Power Plant, first commissioned in November 1987, is located within forty miles of two fault lines. A 5.0 magnitude earthquake struck the area in 1986 before the plant was officially operational, and the risk of another quake isn’t an impossibility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports that the chances of a nuclear reactor in the United States being hit with an earthquake strong enough to damage the reactor’s core is one in 74, 176; the chances of a core-damaging earthquake striking the Perry plant are significantly higher: one in 47,619. In terms of this seismic risk, Perry’s plant ranks thirty-ninth among the 104 nuclear power plants in the United States, but the potential impact of damage to the Perry facility could be international in scope due to its close proximity to Lake Erie. To be prepared, local health departments stock potassium iodine for residents who live within a ten-mile radius of the plant. Potassium iodine prevents a person’s thyroids from processing radiation following toxic levels of exposure. New residents to the area receive pamphlets on what to do during a nuclear emergency and how to recognize the symptoms of radiation exposure. My best friend lives close enough to have received these pamphlets when she and her family moved into their house a couple of years ago. The Perry Nuclear Power Plant is sixty miles from my childhood home, 100.5 miles from East Palestine.
Perhaps the most famous environmental disaster in Northeast Ohio is the burning of the Cuyahoga River. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District reports that the Cuyahoga River has caught on fire at least thirteen times between 1868 and 1969. Cleveland’s mayor called the river an open sewer in 1881, and factories continued to dump industrial waste there despite wastewater treatment starting in 1908. The 1969 fire drew local and national attention despite an earlier fire in 1952 being the fire we often see in photographs, or the fire in 1912 that killed five men and caused almost a million dollars in damages.
The legacy of a river once considered dead has become a particular piece of Northeast Ohio’s identity, especially in the areas around Cleveland. The burning river has become the punchline of local jokes. Musicians of different genres and degrees of fame have made references to the Cuyahoga in their songs. Local businesses have immortalized the burning river in their names. Great Lakes Brewing Company, Cleveland’s oldest craft brewery, has a popular pale ale named Burning River. The brewery also sponsors the Burning River Fest, which supports clean water initiatives in Northeast Ohio. The Cuyahoga River has become an exception to the disasters that turn into what seem like secrets because, at least in a contemporary sense, it looks like we’ve learned our lesson. Outcry over the river’s repeated fires, especially the 1969 fire, prompted Congress to pass the Clean Water Act in 1972. The river is no longer considered dead. In this story, progress has been made and it’s the right kind of progress, one that thinks about our environment and the people who live there.
Not all the area’s environmental problems have names. Growing up, I remember the cautions and warnings about fish caught in Lake Erie because of the levels of mercury and lead. Children in Cuyahoga County, where the poverty rate is more than double the national average, experience lead poisoning at a rate that is four times higher than the national average. Those who attend underfunded schools in Northeast Ohio still learn in buildings containing asbestos because the buildings are old and districts often don’t have the money to replace them because of how school funding works in Ohio. Local funding comes from property taxes, a practice that was declared unconstitutional decades ago. If the value of the land goes down and property values drop, t