EXCLUSIVE: EPA Official Admits There's No Evidence to Support Norfolk Southern's Detonation of Five Vinyl Chloride Cars in East Palestine, Railroad Performed Prohibited Open Burn
"Four of [the cars] were not showing signs of stress yet,” EPA official says in video obtained by SC. Admission shows "they did this to get the [train] lines open," hazardous waste expert tells SC.
Status Coup has obtained video in which an EPA official, unaware he was being recorded, acknowledged to several East Palestine residents that officials with the federal agency who were on-the-ground in East Palestine after the Norfolk Southern derailment in February saw no evidence to support the railroad company’s decision to detonate five cars carrying toxic vinyl chloride.
The EPA official also revealed the process that resulted in a chemical explosion over the small village was a prohibited open burn detonation—contradicting both the EPA and Norfolk Southern’s claims, made since the derailment and detonation, that the procedure was a “controlled burn.” EPA regulations prohibited the open burning and detonation of hazardous waste in 1980 due to potential risks to human health and the environment.
“My question has always been why five [cars of vinyl chloride],” Mark Durno, an EPA on-scene coordinator, told several East Palestine residents on June 6th following a public information session featuring CDC and EPA officials.
He also revealed that EPA officials saw no indications that, as Norfolk Southern claimed, five cars of toxic vinyl chloride were at risk of an imminent uncontrolled explosion.
“The way I understand it from our guys that were on site, is that four of them were not showing signs of stress yet,” Durno told residents (clip below). “One was and one was getting close. So why, why, why? And then we had two burn pits, so that tells me that, let’s say one could influence one or two others, then what about the other two?”
Durno’s reference to there being two burn pits, and doubting whether one or two vinyl chloride cars vulnerable to an uncontrolled explosion could threaten the other vinyl chloride cars, is particularly noteworthy considering, according to Norfolk Southern’s manifest, four of the vinyl chloride cars were grouped together (cars 26-29) with a fifth vinyl chloride car 24 cars behind them (car #53).
Exposure to vinyl chloride is linked to increased risks of a rare form of liver cancer along with primary liver cancer, brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Sil Caggiano, a hazardous waste specialist who spent 39 years in the Youngstown Ohio fire department, said Durno’s private admission reinforces his belief that there was no emergency situation that required any of the five vinyl chloride cars to be detonated over East Palestine.
“I seriously question if ANY were under serious stress given the fact that they were ALL blown up,” Caggiano, who retired in 2021 as a battalion chief, told Status Coup.
Caggiano emphasized that if the five vinyl chloride cars where heating up to the point they were all at risk of an uncontrolled explosion, it would not be possible for first responders and emergency crews to safely work anywhere near them.
"How do you work on a fire impinged tanker that’s hot enough for a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion [BLEVE]? It was not too hot [for emergency crews] to get near the container and place the explosive on it without incident? So exactly how hot was it? A thermal image camera should have been used to document the temperatures. Was it? Where’s the documentation? Most thermal image camera have internal recording or telemetry. This speaks directly to my belief that they did this to get the [train] lines open. I still believe this was about getting rid of product and not about dangers.”
Jack Vankirk, who spent 14 years as a firefighter with the Chippewa Pennsylvania fire department, echoed Caggiano’s suspicion.
“The only reason I can come up with [to detonate five vinyl chloride cars] would be for them to speed up the clean up around the tracks, because obviously if you burn off the chemicals then there’s less to clean up on the ground. Sounds to me like there were higher powers involved calling the shots that the EPA won’t admit too.”
Durno also acknowledged Norfolk Southern’s detonation was, contrary to the company and EPA’s claims, a prohibited open burn.
“What I said was, yes, you could consider that an open burn,” Durno said to residents. “In an emergency situation it is what it is” (clip below).
Durno’s admissions made in the video obtained by Status Coup comes a day before the National Transportation Safety Board [NTSB] begins a two-day investigative hearing on the Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine.
EPA regulations dating back four decades prohibited open burning and detonation of hazardous waste decades ago due to risks it posed to the environment and nearby people. The agency carved out one exception: where other safe modes of treatment are not possible. To arrive at that determination, however, agencies or companies overseeing an emergency response must evaluate, and then re-evaluate, whether “safe alternative technologies are available to treat their waste explosives.”
There is no evidence Norfolk Southern took these steps (the company did not respond to Status Coup’s request for comment or questions related to this story).
A former EPA official, who requested anonymity since their current job engages with the agency, told Status Coup that Durno’s admission is important because it marks the first time the EPA has been honest about what happened in East Palestine after “misleading and lying to the public for the past five months.”
“These different descriptors of the burn have very important legal distinctions,” the ex-EPA official said, stressing that the open burning of chemicals is a “very dangerous practice.” Durno, a veteran EPA official who was involved in the agency’s flawed Flint water crisis response, might have grown tired of being the face of EPA’s “false cover story,” the former EPA official speculated.
Stephen Lester, a toxicologist whose insistence that the EPA test for dioxins following the derailment helped force the agency’s hand to do so, responded to Durno’s admission with condemnation of the EPA’s response to the East Palestine disaster.
“It is outrageous that EPA took so little control over the decision to deliberately burn vinyl chloride and other toxic chemicals in the derailed tanker cars in East Palestine,” Lester, the Science Director at Center for Health, Environment & Justice, told Status Coup.
The agency should have taken control of the conversation with Norfolk Southern, and emergency responders, in the lead-up to the decision to burn the vinyl chloride cars, Lester argued. Ultimately, he said, the EPA should have stopped it before the cars were detonated.
“EPA’s decision to allow this deliberate burn is clearly irresponsible and a direct dereliction of duty,” he said, stressing that the decision to burn the vinyl chloride cars put the health of East Palestine residents, and their neighbors, at great risk.
In response to Durno’s admission that the EPA saw no indications that four additional vinyl chloride cars were at risk of an imminent uncontrolled explosion, toxicologist and NYU professor Judith Zelikoff stressed that the release of the chemicals from the additional four vinyl chloride cars resulted in a much graver threat to residents’ health.
“The dose makes the poison, if you had exploded five cars you would have had have five times the amount being released. And it’s not just the vinyl chloride, there are many many other volatile organic compounds [VOCs] in the area in the explosion emissions. Anything that you would have gotten from one, you would have gotten all those same byproducts, metabolic products once they get into the body, high, high, high risk, high, high, high concentration, possibility of further spread. Put yourself in a situation, would you rather have one day of the Canadian wildfire pollution or five? It’s the frequency, it’s the duration, it’s the concentration, so there’s no doubt in my mind that one [car] would release much less toxicants than if you blew up five.”
Despite the EPA regulations that prohibit open burn detonations, Durno told residents that, if the federal agency was in charge of the emergency response, it would be exempt from following its own open burn regulations.
“All the open burn regulations would apply but in an emergency situation, we’re [EPA] actually exempt,” Durno said (clip below). “If we were doing the work, we’re actually exempt from those types of regulations because it’s an emergency. Now the company’s not necessarily [exempt] so there could be significant fines and penalties levied based on their actions.”
Durno assured residents that the agency has an array of enforcement powers that will allow it to dole out civil penalties to Norfolk Southern.
“We have a lot of opportunities to use our enforcement authority based on their actions that were taken; for example, they didn’t call the National Response Center immediately like they’re required to. So from an enforcement standpoint, when we get into that phase, we can levy pretty significant fines and penalties against the railroad because of that” (clip below).
He cautioned that Norfolk Southern could fight the EPA over fines arguing that they were responding during an emergency.
Durno’s admission to residents aligns with doubts Pennsylvania officials expressed soon after the derailment.
On February 23rd, Randy Padfield, the director of Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency [PEMA], testified in front of a Pennsylvania Senate committee about what he perceived to be red flags when Norfolk Southern abruptly went from, on Sunday night, planning to burn one vinyl chloride car, to on Monday morning, pivoting to detonating an additional four vinyl chloride cars.
“We went from talking about venting and burning one car, that probably had about 50 percent contents in it, to venting and burning all five cars, within a very short period of time in a very time compressed, in a very, I should say, non-discretionary time environment where we were forced into that kind of tactic. And I’m not saying that is not the tactic of choice but they [Norfolk Southern] were not able to articulate any other courses of actions that were thought through at that point in time. And we were trying to understand, like, what changed overnight that was driving that tactic that morning when they were briefing Governor DeWine?”
At the same February hearing, Eric Brewer, the director of Emergency Management for Beaver County Pennsylvania, described the decision to increase the number of cars being detonated from one to five—in less than 24 hours—as “jaw dropping.”
The railroad company recently requested that a U.S. judge toss a proposed class-action lawsuit against it over East Palestine claiming it’s prohibited by federal law. Meanwhile, the company continues to pay for fairs and other events in East Palestine—while refusing to pay for permanent relocation of residents who want to move or their healthcare expenses related to illnesses born from the chemicals they’ve been exposed to.
As Status Coup has reported, East Palestine residents have experienced a disturbing amount of physical and cognitive health issues since the derailment and detonation:
Dizziness
Nausea
Bloody noses
Headaches
Sore throat
Chest pains
Burning eyes
Nose burning
Numb lips and tongue
Diarrhea
Fatigue
Rashes
Sinus infections
Numbness in back of neck
Chloracne
Chemical taste in mouth
Irregular menstrual cycles in women
Forgetfulness
Confusion
Increased anxiety
The EPA did not respond to Status Coup’s request for comment or questions before the publication of this story. In May, the EPA cited legal reasons for not answering Status Coup on whether the East Palestine detonation was, contrary to months of the agency’s “controlled burn” claims, in fact an open burn.
“We aren’t currently in the position to provide a legal conclusion responsive to your inquiry,” a spokesperson responded. At the time, a source familiar with the agency’s evasive answer told Status Coup “everybody is lawyering up.”
Since a significant volume of media coverage and reporting in February soon after the Norfolk Southern derailment and detonation, media and public attention to the public health and humanitarian disaster in East Palestine has subsided. Status Coup reporter Louis DeAngelis has reported on-the-ground in East Palestine three times since the derailment, with a fourth trip planned for July, but the majority of national news outlets have moved on from the story.
A month ago, East Palestine residents presented a list of their demands, including that Governor DeWine declare a state of emergency, relocation for residents who want it paid for by Norfolk Southern, continual independent testing for contaminants over the next 30 years, and continual medical testing and care.
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