Joseph Sabino Mistick: In East Palestine and beyond, a familiar story

To many residents, it looked like the end of the world when 50 cars from a 150-car Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, just over three weeks ago. Eleven of the derailed cars carried toxic chemicals and were scattered along the tracks smoking and burning.

Thousands of fish died in nearby creeks, and an oily gloss covered pools of water and streams around the site. And then it got worse. Norfolk Southern, fearing an explosion of the wrecked cars that were carrying toxic vinyl chloride and benzene, decided to drain them and set the chemicals ablaze.

A thick black plume so dark that it looked like it came straight from hell spread upward and scattered the poison into the wind. If you are from East Palestine, the burn-off increased your fears that this could be the end of your town and just the beginning of your family’s suffering.

As Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said, people “are asking themselves: ‘Is my headache just a headache? Or is it a result of the chemical spill? Are other medical symptoms caused by the spill?’ ”

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw has no answers. After taking hits for an unpublicized sneak-in and sneak-out visit to town, Shaw sat down with a small panel of residents in the controlled setting of a CNN town hall program and proceeded to dodge all their hard questions.

The people of East Palestine must face their fears, but the people who run Norfolk Southern do not choose to face theirs.

For 150 years, our region sacrificed the air and water and the incredible natural beauty of our hills and rivers for jobs and the industrial might of our nation. For much of that time, the hard choice was between progress and the environment. Now that we have the technology to protect both, some of our leaders appear to lack the will.

An Obama-era train safety rule would have required faster-­stopping brakes on “high-hazard” trains by 2023, but it was repealed by the Trump administration for not being economically justified. And here’s a gut-punch: It would not have applied here anyway, because this train was not listed as a “high-hazard” train.

If this train — with all the toxic cancer-causing vinyl chloride and benzene that it was carrying — was not high-hazard, you have to wonder what other horrors are passing through our towns every day.

A collection of public agencies, government officials, company spokesmen and environmental experts continue to reassure the residents that the air and water around East Palestine is safe. We have heard that story before.

On Sept. 13, 2001, when EPA head Christine Todd Whitman visited ground zero at the World Trade Center, she assured the rescue workers that the air was good to breathe.

Twenty years after the attacks, The New York Times reported that the human toll from the collapse — 2,753 lives lost — had “very likely been eclipsed by deaths from exposure to toxic pollutants in the air in the weeks and months after the collapse — and that number keeps growing.”

No more false reassurances. Modern methods can measure and remediate the damage caused by this explosion and fire. And no one should be satisfied until all the tests are analyzed and all the hazards are removed.