It’s been three years since a Norfolk Southern “bomb train” carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the small town of East Palestine, OH, on the night of Feb. 3, 2023. Three days later, Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and completely unnecessary decision to empty five giant carloads of vinyl chloride into a ditch and set the contents on fire. The “controlled burn” of vinyl chloride released a massive black chemical plume into the air and exposed residents in East Palestine and the surrounding areas to deadly toxins in one of the worst industrial disasters in US history. Three years later, residents in East Palestine and the surrounding area are still suffering the toxic fallout. 

While Norfolk Southern, opportunistic politicians, sensationalist media outlets, and most of the public have moved on and forgotten about the mass poisoning of these residents, we at TRNN have not forgotten them, and we won’t give up on them. I’ve been interviewing and filming reports with residents in and around East Palestine for the past three years, including for our Izzy-Award-winning documentary Trainwreck in ‘Trump Country’: Partisan politics hasn’t helped East Palestine, OH. To commemorate the three-year anniversary, I have compiled here all of my original reporting for TRNN on the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine. 

Please I beg you, don’t forget about the people affected by this disaster. Listen to their testimonies, share their stories everywhere you can, keep fighting to hold their poisoners accountable. Because what happened to them is a national tragedy and a humanitarian outrage. Because they are working people just like you and me, they are our neighbors, and they did nothing to cause this disaster, even though they are the ones paying the ultimate price for the corporate greed and government negligence that did. And because what happened to them could happen to any of us as corporations and the government continue to turn more of the US into a “sacrifice zone.”

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Maximillian Alvarez is an Izzy-Award-winning journalist and the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Executive Director of The Real News Network. He is the founder and host of Working People, "a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today," which he started after his family lost their home and life savings during the Financial Crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession. Alvarez is the author of The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke, a collection of interviews with US workers recorded during Year One of of the Covid-19 pandemic. His forthcoming book—tentatively titled “American Sacrifice: Working People Fight for The Lives (and Our Future) in America’s ‘Sacrifice Zones’”—is under contract with Haymarket Books. From April 2022 to March 2024, Alvarez hosted and produced The Art of Class War series on Breaking Points. From September 2016 to January 2019, he was a regular contributor and then a columnist for The Baffler magazine. Prior to joining TRNN, Alvarez was an Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Prior to that, he was a graduate student-worker and rank-and-file member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization (AFT Local 3550) at the University of Michigan, where he earned a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature, taught undergraduates, and published academic articles in Media Theory and La Deleuziana: An Online Journal of Philosophy. Prior to that, he worked a litany of low-wage jobs in different restaurants, warehouses, factories, retail stores, etc. Alvarez’s writing has been featured in outlets like The Nation, Poynter, In These Times, Boston Review, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Dissent, Protean Magazine, The New Republic, Truthout, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. As an analyst and commentator, he has appeared on programs like PBS NewsHour, Breaking Points, Democracy Now!, The Laura Flanders Show, NPR’s 1A, The Hill’s Rising, This Is Hell!, Krystal Kyle & Friends, The Michael Brooks Show, The Jacobin Show, CounterPunch Radio, Citations Needed, Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray, Know Your Enemy, Srsly Wrong, Left Anchor, Revolutionary Left Radio, The End of Sport Podcast, Pod Damn America, The David Pakman Show, The Megyn Kelly Show, The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent, The Zero Hour with RJ Eskow, The David Feldman Show, and The Marianne Williamson Podcast.