Test in Ohio: How to repair derailed trust

Three weeks after tank cars carrying hazardous chemicals tragically derailed in this small Ohio town, a core challenge for the official response is bridging a yawning gap in trust with a wary public.

Federal and state officials appear to be trying. Pressed by a local resident, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday that he’ll stay overnight in East Palestine Ohio to partake of what citizens there are experiencing. To some experts, it’s an example of how building trust hinges not only on delivering help but also on forging personal bonds of confidence.

The trust gap has roots beyond the Feb. 3 derailment itself. Across America, public confidence in a host of institutions has been on the decline for years – a trend tied in part to forces like rising partisanship and social media’s ability to spread doubt alongside facts. But the challenge in this case is also hyperlocal: People could see and smell chemical-spill evidence that ran counter to what they were hearing from officials.

Even where officials and residents agree on the urgency of cleanup, it can’t happen soon enough for those who live on-scene, and no amount of promises will be persuasive without action to back it up.

Area residents like Daniel McRoberts still don’t know what to believe about the risks they face or the pledged cleanup. His mother and grandmother live only blocks from where the Norfolk Southern train derailed. Now Mr. McRoberts has questions about the well – the water source for many of the region’s households – for his own home 6 miles from where the hazardous chemicals initially spilled.

“Do I get it tested?” he asks others at an East Palestine pizza joint. Rail yard friends tell him it’s fine; others say he should leave town altogether. “There’s so many conflicting things. I’m not educated on that stuff. There are people that say they are,” like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state health and environmental safety officials, “but then everyone says, ‘Don’t trust them.’”

Remarkably, there were no immediate injuries or deaths after the train’s initial derailment. But in the days and weeks following, reports of illness among community members have coincided with officials giving all-clear signals on air quality. Similarly, local drinking-water supplies have passed post-accident safety tests, yet many residents worry that chemicals could leach into local water sources over time. 

“You’re not going to turn things around in a 24-hour news cycle,” says Stan Meiburg, executive director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability. “You have to commit yourself to a long-term engagement with the community of being available, being transparent, being patient, recognizing what you’re dealing with,” including post-traumatic stress.

Officials need to listen as much as speak, says Dr. Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator.

Building trust: It starts personal

In fact, ultimately restoring trust will be about building relationships.

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” Dr. Meiburg says of the work ahead for federal, state, and local officials. “The only way to build trust with institutions is to create relationships that are trustworthy, and then the institutions will be trusted because the relationships are trusted.”

Some of those steps may have begun. 

Governor DeWine has visited East Palestine several times, and on Wednesday he bluntly acknowledged the trust gap.

“Sometimes we don’t know all the information,” he said in a CNN-hosted town hall meeting with residents. “Sometimes we get facts that maybe are wrong, but there’s no way in the world I’m going to convey to you or to any other citizen a fact that I think is wrong.”

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw, also at the town hall, said the company felt it had an “environmentally sound plan based on engineering principles” to deal with the tainted soil, but community pushback prompted a shift. The company has decided to rip up and replace the tracks to completely remove the soil underneath them.

Skepticism among residents still runs high. But Mr. Shaw’s presence stood in contrast to the firm’s no-show at a similar meeting a week prior.

“We’re going to get the cleanup right, we’re going to reimburse the citizens, we’re going to invest in the long-term health of this community,” he said. “We’re going to work with these community leaders to help you thrive.”

Federal transportation officials are also trying to bring clarity to the accident’s cause. The National Transportation Safety Board provided details Thursday on how an alarm triggered by an overheated axle arrived too late for the train crew to prevent a derailment. The NTSB says its investigation will continue.

Questions about the derailment have also bubbled into national politics, with Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, who visited the town this week, accusing Biden administration officials of being slow to visit the accident site. Federal agencies, in turn, say their emergency responders were quickly on the scene, at a time when cameos by top officials would have hindered action.

In the days immediately following the derailment, state and federal responders managed a controlled burn of vinyl chloride that remained in several tank cars and posed an explosion risk – prompting a temporary evacuation of nearby residents.

The chemical spill’s severity was highlighted yesterday, when Ohio officials released a new estimate that about 43,700 small fish and other creatures in a 5-mile radius died from the pollutants in the days immediately following the spill. 

Late last week, public officials began attempts to sway opinion through social media clips of them consuming local tap water. Through cheers and shared smiles, lawmakers and top health officials downed their own glasses. 

“Devastating for our little town”

Despite the performance, Kathleen Unkefer continued drinking bottled water at her workplace, a floral design store in downtown East Palestine. She came into 2023 with a lot to look forward to, including her 50-year reunion at the local high school later this year. It’s an achievement one earns, she laughs, after a lifetime in a small place like this community of about 5,000 along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.

“Everybody knows everybody,” she says of the village’s character.

That goes for the community’s problems, too. 

Ms. Unkefer mentions a local friend whose wine and honey business has stopped receiving orders since the incident. Folks stopped buying another friend’s chickens. Another, a resident of 78 years, came into the flower shop earlier that morning crying.

“It’s just devastating for our little town,” Ms. Unkefer says as she wraps a customer’s flowers. “We’ve been through so much. We’re just trying to survive, and we will. But you just worry.”

“I’m not worried about me,” she adds. “I’m worried about the young people. Will they stay?”

A new health clinic opens

Seth Randolph has served as a volunteer fire department and emergency services personnel member for 13 years. He grew up not far from East Palestine, just miles away in New Waterford.

As an intermediary between aid workers and locals, he’s felt tensions rise in the community.

He understands the frustrations, and that residents want answers.

If “they don’t get answers, their first scapegoat, so to speak, is your public safety entities,” Mr. Randolph says, as he walks to a cash register to purchase flowers recently wrapped by Ms. Unkefer. “Residents look to the people they pay to make decisions to keep them safe.”

On Tuesday, the EPA announced it would assume control of the site’s cleanup by enforcing Norfolk Southern’s complete remediation of it, from soil removal to a full reimbursement of costs to the agency.

“Let me be clear,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Norfolk Southern will pay for cleaning up the mess they created and for the trauma they’ve inflicted on this community.”  

That same day, the state opened a health clinic for residents experiencing symptoms potentially linked to the chemical spill and the controlled burn that followed. Ohio officials have also recently requested additional aid and medical assistance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and personnel from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

For now, state officials are advising people reliant on wells to continue consuming bottled drinking water. Governor DeWine on Wednesday stood by the latest tests finding that local tap water and air remain clean.

“Never too late to do the right thing”

Norfolk Southern has also pledged at least $6 million in local assistance.

“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” says Andrew Whelton, an environmental engineering and health researcher at Purdue University.

Dr. Whelton has witnessed similar environmental fallouts. The drinking water for more than 300,000 people was contaminated after more than 10,000 gallons of coal cleaning liquid was spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River in January 2014. Roughly 300 people sought medical treatment during a 50-day emergency in the state.

Dr. Whelton was among those asked to advise the state government on a way forward.

“Once you lose that trust, you can’t really get it back” without a third party, such as science or health experts from outside federal or state government, he says.

“This is a time for extreme transparency” from officials, he adds. As in West Virginia, in East Palestine residents “want to know the safety of their water, their soil, their homes. They want to know if it’s safe or not, are their kids going back to school, are their kids exposed to chemicals that weren’t cleaned up.”

For Mr. McRoberts, it’s a sense of community that’s brought him to the local pizza house on this recent day. In his hand are dozens of signs he made in support of East Palestine. His small company designs logos for products; it’s his way of giving back to the community that raised him.

For the week after the derailment, his relatives from near the site stayed at his home. Now, their household and his family lack the means necessary to leave town and start over someplace new. As for himself, he’s not sure if he would want to, or if it will be necessary someday.

It’s become a matter of “just living with it,” Mr. McRoberts says.

More so, he adds, his family hopes that “everything [officials] say is fine, is actually fine.”