Two years ago, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Norfolk Southern reported the incident to the National Response Center two hours after the crash, initiating response and clean up by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who arrived about five hours after the incident. Some of the cars immediately exploded and caught fire, and some leaked their hazardous contents into nearby waterways. Thousands of area residents were evacuated and told to drink bottled water. Three days after the derailment, local officials implemented a controlled burn of five rail cars containing vinyl chloride. What happened since is worth examining in detail—because a change to how we think about environmental problems could lead to better responses to chemical disasters.
In the aftermath
On the day after the derailment, EPA began to work with state agencies to conduct air and water sampling, and a week after, they began soil sampling throughout the community. And as my colleague Darya Minovi lays out, several whistleblower reports indicated that environmental monitoring may not have captured the full impact of the derailment. There were reports of falsified records, possible interference on the part of Norfolk Southern, indications that the controlled burn (which released hazardous volatile organic chemicals and products of combustion into the air) was unnecessary, and evidence that environmental contamination lingered beyond when and what EPA measured and communicated. Many of these problems could be considered violations of scientific integrity, as my colleague Lisa van Theemsche described. Over the weeks and years since the derailment, community members have reported health effects that hadn’t been present prior to the derailment, including headaches, respiratory and gastrointestinal issues, stress, and skin irritation. Eventually, Norfolk Southern agreed to a $310 million settlement with the federal government, and there are several other settlements pending legal actions brought forward by impacted residents.
There’s a better way—but we’re moving in the opposite direction
This derailment is a tragic example of the need for tighter rules for rail safety and chemical disaster prevention and planning. Unfortunately, the first Trump administration rolled back rail safety rules and under the second Trump administration there are threats to roll back chemical accident regulations. This administration is also gutting the EPA workforce and consolidating long-held regulatory authorities of independent agencies, like the EPA, into the White House. None of these actions enable better protection of human health or the environment, and they will make it harder to respond to the needs of communities like East Palestine.
A cumulative impacts approach
Protecting our environmental health means reducing and eliminating pollution and hazardous chemicals—and understanding the real-world effects of these hazards. People are not exposed to one pollutant at a time. Sources of environmental pollution are not evenly distributed, and they do not operate in isolation—some chemicals can cause more harm in combination with each other, or weaken defenses against other chemicals. Our environmental regulatory system should reflect these realities. This is where the concept of cumulative impacts comes in. An environmental regulatory decision that considers cumulative impacts includes consideration of multiple chemicals, multiple sources of pollution, multiple pathways of exposure (i.e. ingestion, inhalation, skin contact), exposure to other stressors, or sensitivity and susceptibility to environmental harm from systemic factors that negatively impact community health.
How should EPA evaluate cumulative impacts?
In November 2024, the EPA laid out their thoughts and plans on cumulative impacts science and implementation into a framework document. The framework is not a regulation or policy that can be enforced, but it helps explain the concept of cumulative impacts and how it may be applied and operationalized throughout the agency. The EPA Interim Framework for Advancing Consideration of Cumulative Impacts (the framework) provides definitions, implementation activities and a path forward. The EPA also included a set of principles of cumulative impacts.
Let’s investigate how these principles could be integrated into response and clean up considerations in chemical disasters like the East Palestine train derailment.
· Center cumulative impacts work on improving human health, quality of life, and the environment in all communities.
The EPA’s mission is to protect human health and the environment. To accomplish this effectively, the concept of cumulative impacts should be guided by “the timely pursuit of improved environmental conditions in the places people live, play, work, learn, grow, gather (e.g., places of worship), and engage in cultural and subsistence practices.” This is plain and simple: EPA’s work should be about improving human health, not allowing polluters to insert themselves into community information and engagement efforts. As we’ve written, the Scientific Integrity Act is one way to counter this type of interference.
· Focus on the disproportionate and adverse burden of cumulative impacts.
Focusing on where people and communities are most impacted is good governance and facilitates the goal of protecting all human health. Cumulative impacts work should be aimed at identifying the biggest impacts, preventing exacerbation of these impacts, and reducing disproportionate and adverse burdens. This means reducing pollution where it is already high and decreasing the pollution-burden gap that poses more harm to low-income communities and communities of color than their counterparts.
According to what was formerly EPA’s EJScreen, a screening mapping tool that provides information on potential disproportionate or unequal data, the communities around East Palestine, OH fall in the 73rd to 83rd percentile for low income—in other words, that 73 to 83 percent of the country has higher levels of income than the communities around East Palestine, based on US Census data. Material hardship is associated with higher impacts from air pollution, and some scientists are working on models to reflect this association in hazardous chemical protections. If we’re going to actually improve environmental health, we have to take factors like multiple pollution sources and economic stressors into account.
· Apply a fit-for-purpose approach to assessing and addressing cumulative impacts.
The framework describes the importance of assessments that are ‘fit-for-purpose.’ This means that cumulative impacts assessments align with the specific requirements of the decision or action. After the East Palestine derailment, there were many decisions made—immediately after the derailment and for the next few years—including who to evacuate and when, what information to disperse, when to recommend bottled water, what and how much to remediate, and whether to use controlled burns to deal with rail cars filled with vinyl chloride. Specifically, the decision about igniting rail cars to avoid chemical reactions that produce larger spontaneous explosions was found later to have been unnecessary. The information available now indicates that people who knew about the chemicals being transported were not able to relay this information to the response team.
In my view, the concept of cumulative impacts requires connections between different data types and useful coordination between the people and programs involved. It is also crucial to avoid cross media impacts—such as when water pollution is remediated by pumping chemicals into the air without pollution control to prevent nearby exposures. And if EPA had integrated the concepts in the framework into the derailment response, they may have made better decisions, like earlier and more comprehensive air measurements to capture both airborne pollutants and those deposited onto surface water and land.
· Engage communities and incorporate their lived experience.
Meaningfully engaging people in government decisions that impact them is crucial—and it can’t just be checking a box. It means communicating openly, honestly, and early to communities. It is also important to have procedures and agency culture that consider and act upon the lived experience of communities, rather than belittling or ignoring their own expertise about their lives and communities. State and federal officials communicated with the community early and throughout the East Palestine response, with some ability for questions and answers. But it is important for both responders and communities to be able to share information quickly and without barriers. Some experts point to technology with mapping functionality as a way to support quick and efficient communication to the community as well as for community members to communicate potential impacts to responders. Early engagement and transparent communication of harms, plans, and data with communities is paramount and needs to happen fast and without barriers.
· Use available data and information to make decisions and take action.
The ability to make smart, evidence-based decisions requires having the data in the first place. The closest EPA fine particulate air pollution monitors to East Palestine are about 20 miles away, and the closest air toxics monitors are about 40 miles away. In lieu of ongoing monitoring in East Palestine itself, regulators turn to computer modeling results that estimate existing levels of air pollution and risks. Some air pollutants that were emitted from the controlled burns of the vinyl chloride in the train cars (such as benzene, 1,3 butadiene, formaldehyde, naphthalene, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons) were already elevated in East Palestine compared to other areas of the country. But with a cumulative impacts approach, the decision of how much of an individual air pollutant can be emitted has to incorporate the pre-existing levels of other pollutants with similar properties or potential health impacts. We can look at chemicals not in isolation, but by class. Of course, immediate safety would be the first decision-making factor in this type of chemical disaster, but implementing the framework would include considering what air pollutants already exist, what health conditions are elevated, and what the existing risks are to the health of people in that community.
There have been a lot of questions raised about the environmental testing and clean-up that followed the derailment, offering another opportunity to use a cumulative impacts approach. For example, the EPA has developed guidance that suggests remediating to achieve lower levels of lead in the soil when there is evidence of other sources of lead (e.g. lead pipes or older housing stock).
· Operationalize and integrate ways to consider and address cumulative impacts.
By including the words ‘operationalize and integrate’ in the framework, the EPA is committing to conduct cumulative impact assessments and make decisions based on them. To this end, EPA’s framework suggests a “whole-of-government” approach. This is when multiple government agencies act in a coordinated effort, bringing together their missions and regulatory authority to decrease and eliminate harmful impacts. In this type of approach, there isn’t duplication of effort, and the people with the knowledge to help address a situation—community leaders, local government officials, and state government officials—are kept in the loop.
Operationalizing also means developing default processes that allow decisions to be made quickly, which is particularly crucial during a chemical disaster. The framework suggests that EPA make decisions using a precautionary approach. Making quick default decisions is not incompatible with making decisions that are precautionary. This approach would mean that rather than spending time and resources determining which individual pollutants should be measured, EPA would include all measurable chemicals within a class.
What we can do
Obviously, barriers to smart and effective public-health policy have grown even higher as the new administration takes over EPA, targeting programs, staff, and rules for elimination under the false pretense of reducing “waste.” We need to tell the administration and Congress that protecting our health and safety isn’t a waste, it’s a necessity.
While the new administration is unlikely to make positive moves toward a cumulative impacts approach, it’s important to keep pushing for it—including at the state level. State and local bodies can make real progress by bringing the lessons of the EPA’s cumulative impact framework into their own environmental protection efforts.
The East Palestine train derailment, sadly, illustrates that the best way to protect the environment is by preventing accidents in the first place. Despite bipartisan support, movement of the Rail Safety Act has stalled in Congress. Call your elected officials and let them know that this is important to you.