Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, U.S., February 6, 2023 in this screenshot obtained from a video released by the NTSB. (National Transportation Safety Board)
The decision to conduct a controlled burn of five derailed tank cars that unleashed a plume of toxic chemicals last year in East Palestine, Ohio, was based on flawed and incomplete information, National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday.
Homendy, facing questioning from Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), testified that contractors employed by the Norfolk Southern railway company “lacked the scientific background” to support the decision that a vent and burn was necessary to head off a chemical reaction that could cause the cars to spontaneously explode. She testified that a better option would have been to allow the tank cars time to continue to cool down.
The testimony follows the NTSB’s release of a trove of documents over the past year that have called into question the decision to conduct the vent and burn, which has spurred an extensive cleanup operation and health concerns among residents of the small Ohio town.
The NTSB has disclosed as part of its ongoing investigation into the incident that Gov. Mike DeWine (R), Fire Chief Keith Drabick and other officials were told they had just 13 minutes to decide whether to vent the vinyl chloride-carrying cars in February 2023 or wait and risk a likely uncontrolled and catastrophic explosion.
Drabick, the East Palestine incident commander who later testified he was “blindsided” by the rushed timeline, gave his go-ahead for the company to conduct the vent and burn.
“They were provided incomplete information to make a decision,” Homendy said Wednesday. “There was another option: Let it cool down.”
Homendy also said that experts from the OxyVinyls chemical shipping company informed Norfolk Southern’s contractors that they did not believe the chemical reaction was taking place or could take place, but they were not included in the meeting where the decision to do the vent and burn was made. “They were not given full information because no one was told OxyVinyls was on scene,” she said. “They were left out of the room.”
After the hearing, Vance said her testimony raised questions about whether the railway company or its contractors were recommending the vent and burn to “facilitate the rapid movement of freight,” given that trains were able to pass again soon after the controlled burn. He said his questioning was not intended as a critique of DeWine or Drabick but rather meant to reveal whether the decision-makers that day were not given complete information to make their decision.
DeWine dismissed that suggestion in an interview with The Washington Post before the hearing, however. He said he had no reason to believe there were other viable options available to head off an explosion, given that none of the officials were informed of that possibility at the time.
“You have to go with the facts you have at the time,” DeWine said. “I’m in no position to judge the merit of what these people are now saying, but what I can tell you is that they had plenty of opportunity to raise their hand and come up with a different scenario and different options, and nobody did.”
The decision to burn off the chemicals has faced scrutiny since just days after it happened. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) wrote to Norfolk Southern President Alan Shaw in February 2023 that the railway “failed to explore all potential courses of action, including some that may have kept the rail line closed longer but could have resulted in a safer overall approach for first responders, residents and the environment.”
Norfolk Southern and its contractors have denied the charge, saying that the only way to keep people safe was to do the vent and burn.
After the train derailed on Feb. 3, 2023, Norfolk Southern relied on two contractors on the scene who specialized in transferring hazardous chemicals and industrial firefighting: Specialized Professional Services Inc. (SPSI), and Specialized Response Solutions (SRS).
The SPSI contractors said they believed that the fires around the cars had likely triggered a chemical reaction, called polymerization, that could lead to a catastrophic explosion of the tank cars. SRS officials were also concerned that the reaction was occurring in one car. They recommended what they called a vent and burn to minimize risks to personnel on the scene should the car explode on its own.
The contractors ruled out other options to get rid of the materials — including transferring the product, drilling into the tanks to relieve the pressure, or re-railing the tank cars with the chemicals still on board. They said those measures posed too great a risk to first responders.
But the tank car displaying high temperatures had begun cooling down and stabilizing in temperature before the vent and burn occurred, which Hamendy said showed that the first responders could have waited and seen if the car continued to cool down and could then be disposed of in a less destructive manner. (One of the five tank cars had shown an elevated exterior temperature that climbed to a peak of around 140 degrees Fahrenheit before dropping to the mid 120s.) Vent and burn involves puncturing the tank car at two points and then burning off the materials as they leak out.
“Based on what we were seeing, excessive heat, high temperatures, unable to get good pressures on the cars, we had to make a judgment call that a reaction, a polymerization potential was extremely elevated,” said one SRS official, according to the NTSB report.
Officials with OxyVinyls, a company that was shipping the chemicals and is currently being sued by Norfolk Southern to help pay for the disaster, said they repeatedly expressed to Norfolk Southern’s contractors that they did not think polymerization was taking place. OxyVinyl’s technical manager told the SPSI president that OxyVinyls “did not see any obvious signs that polymerization was occurring within the tank cars,” given that the temperatures of the cars would be higher if that were the case.
“If the vent and burn option was pursued, the technical manager expressed concern to SPSI about the potential for a vapor cloud explosion, and the major combustion byproduct being toxic and corrosive hydrogen chloride,” the report said.
On Feb. 6, the contractors told a meeting at East Palestine High School involving DeWine, Shapiro via phone and many other local officials and first responders that a vent and burn would be the best option because of the high risk that the car could explode by itself. They also argued that all five cars must be vented and burned because only venting one or two cars could raise the risk that the other cars increase in pressure.
After that meeting, a smaller group including DeWine and the incident commander were asked to join Norfolk Southern in a separate room. The SPSI president and the SRS project manager there told DeWine he had only 13 minutes to decide if he would allow the vent and burn to proceed, because they needed to conduct the operation before sunset. The incident commander asked them to explain the vent and burn one more time, then gave his go-ahead to the team, believing it was the only way to avoid a catastrophic explosion, the NTSB report said. The incident commander said he had received no conflicting information that it was possible the tank cars were not going to explode.
Federal guidelines on vent and burns say they should be used only as a last resort, when all other methods of transferring the materials have been exhausted.
In the interview, DeWine said the discussion on the right course of action had gone on for hours before they were informed that sunset was nearing and the decision had to be made very quickly. He dismissed the 13-minute window as giving a misleading impression that they only discussed the scenario for a short time.
“If there were experts on the scene that day who knew all this information, they did not get that information to the people making the decisions,” DeWine said.
The hearing occurred as the Senate still awaits a vote on railway safety legislation championed by Vance and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).
