The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Jim Stewart (CNN Town Hall):

I’m angry. I’m angry about this. I lived in East Palestine for 65 years now that’s my home. My grandmother came from Germany. She lived in Palestine. My dad grew up there. My family’s grown up there. Now I live in a house that’s probably the closest of any of these, and it’s a shame I don’t feel safe in this town. Now you took it away from me. You took this away from this. You seem like a sincere man. I’m not calling you names, I’m not. Your company stinks because they’re not watching what’s going on. You’ve got to do something about this. I lost a lot. I lost the value of my home. I’m only one block. I can throw a stone to that burner. And what do we do now? I’m 65 years old, a diabetic. AFib hearts heart disease, everything. Now, did you shorten my life? Now? Did you shorten my life? Now I want to retire and enjoy it. How are we going to enjoy it? You burned me. We were going to sell our house. Our value went. Do I mow the grass? Can I plant tomatoes next summer? What can I do? I’m afraid to.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. The show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and if I sound a little tired, a little weary, it’s because I just got back to Baltimore late last night after once again making the long drive to East Palestine, Ohio and back. Listen, I know that there’s just so much going on in the country and in the world right now, but this Tuesday was the three year anniversary of the industrial catastrophe that forever upended the small town lives of people living in and around East Palestine.

And I just had to be there. It wasn’t an option not being there with the residents on that day. It’s been three years since a Norfolk southern bomb train that was carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine. On the cold night of February 3rd, 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 so-called controlled burn of vinyl chloride released a massive black chemical plume into the air and exposed residents in East Palestine and the surrounding area for miles and miles around to deadly toxins in one of the worst industrial disasters in United States history. And three years later, residents in East Palestine and the surrounding area are still suffering the toxic fallout. I wish I could tell you guys otherwise, but the fact is they’re still getting sick.

Folks are even dying off. Many are still financially ruined and buried in debts from costs related to the derailment. They’ve been screwed over by Norfolk Southern, by their own government, by Biden, Trump, Democrats, Republicans, I mean even their own damn class action attorneys. I mean, they have been exploited by everyone and helped by hardly anyone. I’m not going to say no one, but hardly anyone has really helped them. And so I am once again begging you guys, please don’t forget about the people affected by this disaster. Listen to their testimonies, share their stories everywhere you can. That’s what they keep asking is just share our stories. Talk to other people about us. Don’t let them forget us. And I mean for the love of God, for the love of yourself and the love of others, like please don’t let this national tragedy just go into the memory hole.

Don’t let your fellow workers and neighbors be forgotten and don’t let the countless injustices that they have suffered simply go unaddressed. And that’s where we are right now. And do not let their corporate poisoners or anyone involved in the coverup about the truth of what they were and are actually exposed to. Don’t let them go unpunished. Because what happened to the people in and around East Palestine is a national tragedy and a humanitarian outrage. And for that reason alone, we should keep fighting for justice. But we should also fight because these 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 we should fight and care because I mean what to them could frankly happen to any of us as corporations in the government continue to turn more and more of the United States into one giant sacrifice zone. And if we don’t do something to stop this now, I promise you, as someone who goes around interviewing people in sacrifice zones around this country, our toxic future will look a lot like East Palestine, Ohio looks today

Jami Wallace:

I am Jami Wallace from East Palestine, Ohio. It was three years ago today on February 3rd, 2023 that a Norfolk Southern train derailed in my community carrying hazardous chemicals. It’s now been three years. We are still here. We still need help. Our health is failing. I have been diagnosed with multiple different long-term illnesses that all can be related to the chemicals. There are a couple ways that you can help East Palestine. We are still being researched and need to research not only for ourself but for other communities that are impacted by chemicals. So you can give money to the University of California San Diego Glom Research Group or you can give money to the Chemically Impacted Communities Coalition where we’re joining together all the communities across the United States that have been impacted by chemicals to fight together as one big community.

Evelyn:

My name is Evelyn Albright. I am 10 years old and I live in East Palestine, Ohio where the trained derailment happened. The train derailment affected me. It gave me rashes and a really, really bad rash. And I’m a hockey player and I play at Brady’s Run Ice Rink and they have an angel fund. And even my parents said that they would hate telling me that I couldn’t play hockey because of the derailment and how much it was costing. But thank God my ice rink provided that organization and we lived in a hotel for four whole months. It was a lot. Honestly. I had to do mostly online work and we had three people in there, two dogs, and our cat had to go live down at our aunt’s house and it was just torture. I had my sister help me with my schoolwork because I didn’t understand most of it because of not being in school and all that stuff. My dad got severe heart failure and he had to be in the hospital for Christmas. And I know a lot of people in my town have gotten a lot of other very bad things happening to them during the train derailment.

Chris Albright:

So my name is Chris Albright. I am a resident of East Palestinian, Ohio. I live half a mile from where the train derailed. Today is the three year anniversary of the derailment. Some of the things I want to talk about right now is I’m very angry. Am I allowed to swear?

I’m pissed. I’m pissed right now at the response from the country. I’m pissed right now at how many people have forgotten about what happened here. I’m pissed at the fact that everybody thinks we’re doing fine, that everybody thinks everything in East Palisade in Ohio is good. It’s not. We are still fighting the same battle we were fighting three years ago. It’s ridiculous. We have been through democratic presidents, we’ve been through Republican presidents right now, and nobody is stepping up to help us. Nobody gives a shit about what happened to us in East Palestine. I’m pissed. We’ve been fighting this battle now for three years. Three years we’ve been going on about this and nothing is being done right now. And anybody who is watching this step up, talk about it, keep it relevant, bring it up to your state representatives, your congressmen, your anybody, anybody who is going to listen, bring it up. Let them know that we are still not right. We’re still not whole. We’re still not healthy in East Palestine.

Help us. Please help us. I’m so sick of the fight we’ve been battling. I had to step away for months just for my own mental stability before I got back into the fight again. It is exhausting on us. It is very tiring. It’s very hurtful. So please, please, please step up, help us, keep us in your thoughts. Keep pushing for us. Keep doing anything you can to help us, anything. I don’t care what it is. Send a text out that says, Hey, east Palestine is still screwed up. Do that to your friends. Anything helps us. Please help us. Please for the love of God, help us. We need it. And there’s so many different communities around this country right now that I know need to help. I understand everything that’s going on right now, but please step up. Please give us a hand. We need it. We really need it. Thank you.

Ashley McCollum :

My name is Ashley McCollum. I was a former resident of East Palestinian, Ohio. I’m currently in Beaver County right now. Since three years ago, a lot of things have been consistently the same. We’re still all struggling. We still all have needs that are unmet. It’s really hard getting back into normal life with the traumas that you guys have probably seen on the documentaries on here. We have so many people that are experiencing these issues and need help in their communities. Beaver County, Pennsylvania is one you guys have to get together and really start talking because that’s a big thing that I’m hearing today, that we need that communication there. If anyone can help us with venues, getting people together, getting people talking, these are our communities, these are our futures. We need to really start getting things together with each other and seeing what our neighbors need. I work with a charity called O-V-D-M-A. It’s Ohio Valley Derailment Mutual Aid. They’ve helped people in town, they’ve helped them with rent, with medical bills, anything you can think of that struggling families in a disaster need help with. There’s other charities that are out there that you can really get involved with. And even in your area, there could be disasters that need your help too.

Hopefully next year we won’t be in the seat and we’ll be able to say we’re somewhere further than what we were because the past three years we’re no further than what we were the first day it happened.

Sharon:

Hi, my name’s Sharon. I live on the Pennsylvania side of the East Palestine train Arment Disaster. And I have been a little bit involved with some different things also in the O-V-D-M-A, the Ohio Valley derailment mutual aid group where we’re trying to help people that have just everyday needs because I think everyone might be misunderstanding that people have already gotten aid. There are several lawsuits going on, but I imagine those are going to go on for decades. One of the lawyers told me. So yeah, people might be under the impression that we’ve already gotten help. We’ve already been gotten our lawsuit money, which most people haven’t yet. It’s been a lot of delays. So as far as helping people, we are just trying to keep ’em in their homes, keep ’em going until they can maybe get a little bit of a settlement. The politicians, the government, they’ve all let us down as far as they say they’re going to help.

I mean we have to beg them, don’t get me wrong. We have to push and push and beg and beg for help. They’re not offering it easily. But then when they finally do say they’re going to help, it’s another health study, which we already have six health studies going on. We didn’t need another one. We don’t want to be studied like Guinea pigs. We want to be helped. How about they put those millions of dollars if they’re admitting that they’re, I mean they’re saying they’re helping, but it’s not helping, but them giving the money for studies is admitting we need help. Why can’t they put all those millions into some kind of a healthcare fund that when these cancers come up that the CDC told us they knew how to treat, they didn’t know how to get the chemicals out of our bodies, but they knew how to treat the liver cancers that these chemicals caused.

Why isn’t there some kind of health fund set up in the background where people can access that help, the real help that the people need. And I’m also with the O-V-D-M-A, the Ohio Valley derailment Mutual aid. That includes the whole Ohio Valley because this plume went over the whole entire Ohio Valley, not just East Palestinian, Ohio. It went as far as I could tell all the way to Pittsburgh. So it went right over me. It went over a lot of us while we were asleep. And so I’m trying to help out as much as I can. And here we are.

Christa Graves:

I’m Christa Graves. I’m a lifelong resident of the East Palestine area. My home is a little just outside the one mile zone. This time, three years ago, we didn’t know if we were supposed to evacuate. We weren’t super concerned. And here we find ourselves three years later stuck in the same place, minus one family member with another one pretty sick who can’t take the medicines for the breathing condition that this caused without side effects that impair their life in another way. We see so many, many community members who are sick and more who want to pretend that it’s all over.

And for the most part, the world’s moved on and we’re stuck in a vacuum of time. We’re stuck in the mud. We don’t know where to go next. We don’t know what proactive step can we take that we haven’t already done. I think right now we really need some people with holistic healthcare to volunteer or donate to the charity to help with those who are developing sensitivities to medications, which I’ve been told from other disasters happens and I’m living it with my mother. Tonight was a night I wasn’t sure I should leave and come here.

And she assured me to come. And I got to see some of the ladies and men that we’ve walked through this sometimes in different lines but always in the same direction. We’re so lucky to have so many people that we’ve met along this route from community members that maybe we didn’t know or we had drifted away from to meeting Max and Marilyn Lyner and Mike Stout and Mindy B, and so many other people from outside of our community who got involved and they’re doing what they can to help. And hopefully when we get on the other side of this, we can try to prevent future rail disasters and prevent future chemical disasters. And we have worked with some rail activists, former railroaders who see the problems with the rail industry and they’ve seen this coming and they’ve tried to stop it. So that’s been really eyeopening as well. I wish this would never have happened to our community, to our families.

I wish I never had to learn all the things that we’ve had to learn. I wish I could still live in a world where this didn’t happen, but I’m so thankful for the wonderful people that we’ve met on this journey in the amazing lessons that we have learned. I hope there’s a fourth anniversary with the same people that we have right now or that more have joined up, but I hope we’re not down anymore. And more and more it’s not looking that way. And as I sit here, I think, oh yeah, people locally are going to see this and they’re not going to believe that they’re going to roll their eyes. The ones who aren’t affected, the ones who don’t believe they’re going to be affected in the next 10 or 15 years, and I so hope they’re not. I hope that we are overreacting, but nothing that I have read or experienced or spoke to anybody about or researched suggests that this is an overreaction and that the uptick in serious health issues is just coincidental to a chemical bomb being blown up over top of our community.

So if there’s anybody who’s into a holistic, a functional medicine, anything like that that wants to donate their knowledge, we could really use some more help because all our doctors were told not to acknowledge anything related to chemical, not to test for anything related to chemical. And I’m taking my mother to pulmonology appointments where they will not look me in the eyes and they will not address the fact that she was exposed to chemicals. They won’t test for chemicals. And we’ve been waiting for two weeks for a replacement inhaler for the one that was causing drastic side effects to her life. So now she can’t breathe. Well, we need more options. We need more guidance.

And also we need to remember how honored and blessed we are to know each other for all the community members who joined hands and got to know each other and marched through this, but also for all the people outside the community who have joined the fight and brought their skill, their talent, their time, their heart into this situation and three years and one day ago, we could never have imagined that we would need to know all of this, that we would need to meet all these wonderful people. And it all changed very quickly and we watched it slowly unfold the same way that we were told from Left Canal and Times Beach and Hinkley and so many piketon and so many other disasters that it’s just happening. And we’re watching everybody be subjected to this and we’re thankful for all of those who have joined step with us and bring their skills and their talents to help us in whatever way they can. One is the Ohio Valley derailment mutual aid that all the money is given to residents who fill out a need survey. There’s no income guidelines, there’s no red tape. You fill out the need survey and if there is funds available, and we desperately need funds to help people cover medical bills or maintenance on their cars because they’re running to so many appointments or copays or repairs on things that they would’ve had the money if they weren’t paying it all on medical bills, bottled water, so many things. There’s still so many needs that aren’t met.

And we have to be thankful for what we can, which is each other and all of the wonderful people that have joined us. And I hope and pray that this doesn’t happen to your community because we never dreamed it could have happened to ours. And then when it did, we were sure the right things would be done. We were sure that as we found that we were sick, that the EPA would protect us, that FEMA would do their job, that the railroad would be held accountable. And we have found none of that to be true. We have found no accountability. The truth that we have found has come from government accountability, from our attorneys, from our own research, from hours of scouring FOIA documents. And because we’re doing it, so many don’t believe it. And I’m so worried that they won’t be looking for the future health impacts because they don’t want to believe there’s anything wrong with their beautiful small town life. And it really was. And some are proceeding like it still is. I just hope it doesn’t catch up with them in the way that I’ve been shown it will by the past, by the science. And I thank you for taking the time to watch this and sticking with our story and I can’t wait until I can get my head out for air and watch more of your stories and see more of what’s happening in the rest of the world and hopefully try to make an impact to repay for what everybody has done trying to help us.

Edward:

My name is Edward. I’m seven years old. I was exposed to the train to Roman badly and the second day I think I had puffy cheeks because I was sick and I couldn’t stop licking my lips for some reason. My mom used to take me to the creek when I was a kid, a little kid, and now they’re polluted and I know the words, kind of all the words. I know phy, vinyl chloride, and I forget chlorine to when I grow up, I’m going to try to be the president and I’m going to stop all of this. I’m going to make everything free in stores and I’m going to lower the prices and make everything free.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What are you going to do to companies like Norfolk Southern?

Edward:

Yeah, put them out of business. We went up the neighbor’s driveway and we saw the smoke. My mom took pictures of it and I was scared to sleep in my bed by myself that night when the train enrollment happened, and I was four years old when it happened and I was in my bed with my mom. She was putting me to sleep. She was looking at Facebook on her phone. It popped up on her phone saying on Facebook, please do not go to East Palestinian, Ohio. A trained enrollment has wrecked.

Christina Siceloff:

So my name is Christina Siceloff and I’m from Darlington, and now it’s been three years since the derailment happened and East Palestine. And I really think that a lot of us in PA have been left out talking with people recently we’ve been asked what is being done for us? And nothing is really being done for us except for what people in the media have done for us, getting our stories out and continuing to follow up on what’s still going on. There are still people from both Ohio and PA that are getting sicker. The doctors are still not sure on how to treat us. A lot of people don’t have a doctor to go to because they can’t afford to go to the doctors. The EPA is still not giving us answers. Norfolk Southern says that everything is cleaned up, but yet the EPA won’t say it is.

And if it is, then why are people still smelling things? Why even to this day, I was just talking to somebody who had said that they can still taste it being a resident. I don’t taste it or smell it anymore, but I live here. And one thing that I had wanted to talk about was how it doesn’t matter what side of the political spectrum you’re coming from, nobody cared about us. Joe Biden, he wouldn’t sign a disaster declaration for us. He gave us health studies when Trump’s administration took over. He gave us more health studies, but that’s it. JD Vance came here and said that in six months, if our needs still weren’t being met, that he would come back and make sure that they were being met. He talked and his office talked to many of us for weeks every week leading up to him going into DC.

And now we’ve not heard anything from him. RFK Jr, who’s now the health secretary. He sat at some of our kitchen tables, even a person who had has cancer now and is dying. And he made promises to them and he made promises to all of us. And they’ve not followed through on those promises. We don’t ever hear from them. Even now, it’s February 3rd, 2026 and we haven’t heard a word on the third year anniversary from them. The Attorney General of Ohio released a statement earlier that he hasn’t forgotten about us. But now we still question is it true that you didn’t forget because we’ve been so let down and our trust is so broken and for us, everything’s been taken from us. The day-to-day life for us, we can go and we can walk out our door and worry about the soil that our kids play in.

We can’t go fishing in the creek because what’s in the creek that can harm us? We can’t go forage for mushrooms out in the backyard anymore because we don’t know if they’re safe to eat. We don’t know if the air is safe for us to breathe. And we don’t know if any cough that we get is a natural cough that everybody gets sick from. Or if it’s a new symptom of the derailment and just a lot of our trust has been broken and we see all over the country now what’s going on? And the government keeps wanting us to trust them. But then whenever you have people that are just like us standing up and saying that there’s things wrong and you don’t listen to us, then you continue to do the same thing we’ve seen over and over again in three years. The same thing done here. We’ve seen it be done in Conyers, Georgia, and we’ve seen it done in Roseland, Louisiana and Moss Landing. And it’s the same thing over and over and over again. If you want our trust, then get us to trust you by helping us and not just giving us false hope. We need help from government. We need help from people too. So many people came to help us initially with water that we really needed and we appreciated it. Even Donald Trump brought us water, but that was before he was president.

Now we’ve got nothing and our homes are taken away. I’ve said over and over again to people my home that I grew up in for 37 years, it’s not my home anymore. It’s Norfolk Southern’s home and everybody that’s in the government needs to look at us as people and we are just like them. A lot of them have families too. And I know JD Vance, he’s got a new one on the way. And if this happened in his town, what would he want for those kids too?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank everyone in and around East Palestine for continuing to speak with me after these three horrendous years and for continuing to fight even when they have suffered and endured so, so much. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. Please share these stories with everyone that you can. And if the people don’t listen to podcasts, I mean we’ve also included more video interviews that I’ve done with residents in the show notes for this episode. So you can share those two. And we’ve included links to groups and mutual aid resources that were mentioned by residents in the testimonies that you just listened to. Please don’t forget about these people and don’t let them be forgotten by others. And we’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.

And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. You can sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you guys, it really makes a difference and it’s because of you and your support that I am able to get out to places like East Palestine in person. So thank you and please keep supporting us. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Don’t forget East Palestine solidarity forever.