East Palestine Abandoned: Mainstream Media Has Already Moved On, Leaving Residents a "Forgotten Memory"
Jordan Chariton on corporate media's predictable, yet scandalous, erasure of sick East Palestine residents and the surrounding areas: "Once they leave, you're a forgotten memory," Lenny Kiehl told us
Five years ago, I stood on the front porch of a Flint family as a one-year old baby—her skin ravaged with white blisters and rashes from Flint’s water—sat innocently on her distraught mother’s lap.
Jasmine Lee cried. She lifted and unfolded her baby’s ear lobes to show me the sores inside and out. Politicians, and the media, didn’t care about her family, or her city’s, continued suffering, she said.
“I don’t know what to do, I’m devastated,” Lee said. “I cry everyday because my baby’s skin breaks out and I feel like it’s just not right. They shouldn’t have to go through this. These babies don’t deserve this. And then you all stopped the water [free water]. Why?”
It was July of 2018. Weeks earlier, in May, Jasmine, her boyfriend, and their two children moved into their home on Wolcott Street in Flint. At the time, her one-year-old’s skin was smooth and spotless. But after bathing her in a bathtub filled with Flint water a few times, the rashes broke out.
Alarmingly, right before they moved in, then-Michigan Governor Rick Snyder declared Flint’s water “restored.” He did this by waving around water testing data Status Coup’s reporting showed was cooked—manipulated by his environmental department by cheating on water testing across the city to produce misleadingly lower lead readings.
By that point in 2018, the national media had LONG abandoned covering or investigating the Flint water crisis. Or the cover-up. At the time, yours truly was the only national reporter still frequently reporting in Flint, interviewing residents, and digging on the criminal investigation and cover-up. As a result of the media abdicating its responsibility to the people of Flint, and to the basic tenants of staying on one of the biggest environmental disasters—and government coverups—in American history, people like Jasmine were left helpless and desperate.
A city of 100,000 poisoned by its own government. Yet, just two a few years after the initial media coverage: No national media attention. Little state media attention. Little local media attention. The residents of Flint thrown to the wolves.
Fast forward five years and 330 miles east of Flint to East Palestine Ohio, where residents have been poisoned after a Norfolk Southern train bomb detonated over their small village of nearly 5,000 people.
Two weeks after the incident, the national media descended on East Palestine. At the time, we decided to wait a little, fully expecting the national reporters and networks to hang around for about a week before they deduced they had checked the box and left (and never looked back). In mid-February, we sent our reporter Louis DeAngelis to East Palestine, where he was one of many reporters there speaking with residents. At the time I told him to just wait as the rest of the riff raff would be gone before he knew it, unfortunately leaving us an empty lane to continue leading coverage of the petrochemical mushroom cloud that had sickened the majority of the village.
In Louis’ first reporting trip in mid-to-late February, he spoke to many residents experiencing nausea, dizziness, nosebleeds, vomiting, sore throats, fatigue, burning eyes, and other health problems. As we’ve reported extensively, residents across the village are experiencing rashes—really chemical burns—on their skin. For many, the burns are at their worst when they shower.
One resident, 37-year-old Kristin Battaglia, told Status Coup her face was burning but “it didn’t freak me out until I looked in the mirror.”
On top of her rashes, crippling fatigue, ear infection, sore throat, cough, chest pain, burning eyes, constant running nose, headaches, migraines, anxiety, insomnia, and bone pain—she had to rush her nine-year-old son to the emergency room in early March. Like much of the village, blood was gushing from his nose in the weeks following Norfolk Southern’s uncontrolled burn.
Other residents, whose homes lay literally in front, or behind, the rail tracks where the train derailed, and later exploded, are experiencing PTSD and trauma from what they saw.
“No one is helping us, people are sick, today I feel like my throat is tightening up; I am suffering forms of PTSD, I began counseling…we are in a living hell and no one is helping us,” East Palestine resident and small business owner Lonnie Miller told Status Coup.
After the majority of news crews left, the physical and mental health problems for residents have only intensified as the CEO of the railroad company, Norfolk Southern, continues to appear for hearings in front of Congress and state politicians vowing to “do the right thing.”
The only problem: Norfolk Southern is doing the exact opposite.
Knowing that the national media would abandon the story, Status Coup decided to go back for a second reporting trip in the middle of March. Sadly, reporter Louis DeAngelis found himself as the only national reporter still on-the-ground. In a City Council meeting, where local officials backtracked on their promise to allow residents to ask questions and voice grievances, Louis and Status Coup was the only news cameras in the room.
As a result, during his reporting trip, he was stopped on the street by residents several times thanking him, and us, for continuing to cover the story. Unsurprisingly, some of those same residents who had been abandoned by mainstream media reporters wanted to be interviewed.
“The whole process if fucked up,” Lenny Kiehl told Status Coup during Louis’ second reporting trip to East Palestine. Like many East Palestine families, Kiehl and his wife Candy have had to temporarily uproot from their East Palestine home to a hotel. Their home still reeks of chemicals and they don’t believe it is safe to be there.
But getting reimbursement from Norfolk Southern hasn’t been easy, he told Status Coup.
“They treat everybody [differently]” Kiehl said, noting that the company was reimbursing some effected families while rejecting others. The company’s basis for rejecting some is arbitrary and nonsensical. For example, Norfolk Southern offered to pay for temporary relocation to hotels, as they “clean up” the chemical remnants of the train bomb, for residents who live within the official city limits. Shamefully, this excludes residents who still technically live in East Palestine but beyond city limits.
Those residents’ homes’ smell of the same chemicals their neighbors’ homes down the road, technically within the city limits, smell of. Yet they’ve been left with an empty bag and temporarily shattered lives.
“This one gets all this and this one don’t get shit,” Lenny said. Norfolk Southern “should have to follow something, some type of pattern, some type of set standard, that includes everybody, every scenario, it’s all the same—you do not want to be in this position, you do not want to be where you’re at, you want to be at home, you don’t want to be worrying about stuff.”
Of course, the massive chemical plume did not stop within the city limits of East Palestine. Nor at the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. Ashley Bennett, a Pennsylvania mother whose family lives 5.3 miles away from the East Palestine derailment, told Status Coup Pennsylvania has been “left out” of the response.
“There's no wall between Ohio and Pennsylvania and so if it was another 650 feet it would have been in Pennsylvania,” she told Status Coup. “We got hammered with the smoke and everything that was in that smoke," she said, adding that the evacuation zone should have been as far as 10 miles.
Every day, residents Status Coup speaks to share details of their developing, and worsening illnesses—and the lack of help they are receiving from their local, state, and federal government. Adding insult to injury—like in the case of Flint seven years earlier—national media crews who had at one point swarmed the poisoned village have left town and are no longer reaching out to residents.
Lenny Kiehl shared with us his response when a neighbor expressed his excitement about the media leaving town.
“He said ‘I’m glad all the media is leaving,’” Lenny recounted. “I said you’re wrong. You want as many media people here as you can get and you can keep here because that is the only way you will get anything and any attention.”
Perhaps clairvoyant, he accurately concluded: “Once they leave, you're a forgotten memory."
Like in the case of Flint, which in a month marks nine years of its ongoing water crisis, the people of the small village of East Palestine have already been forgotten by the multi-billion dollar corporate media machine that, make no mistake about it, is fully capable of continuing to send reporters and producers to town for follow up reporting and investigation. If you’d like to make sure these people, and this important story, is not forgotten, become a paying monthly or annual member of Status Coup today to help us fund continued ON-THE-GROUND reporting in East Palestine. Together, we will force the mainstream media to stop normalizing Americans being poisoned by corporate America and their government—and then left to slowly die.
The craziest part of this, is the mother's watching their children suffer!!!! MAKE MOVES!
Excuse me for mentioning this, but compare this terrible situation (and all that should have but hasn't happened) with the millions instantly and soon after garnered by the illustrious parents of Newtown, Connecticut.