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

Laurie Harmon:

Anybody who lives far away and you watch some of the major news stations and you read things on Facebook, everything’s fine here and everything is not fine. I’m telling you this from experience.

Speaker 2:

We are following breaking news as we come on the air. This morning. A trained derailment forces hundreds from their home in Ohio,

Speaker 3:

Date of emergency in Ohio, after a train derailment and massive fire, some of the cars were carrying hazardous chemicals.

Speaker 2:

A plume of smoke erupted into the skies surrounding East Palestinian, Ohio. Monday afternoon after authorities released toxic fumes from five derailed train cars.

Speaker 3:

It’s basically a mushroom cloud. I mean, there’s really no other way to describe it. I know it was alarming to see the big plume of smoke and the fire, but I want to reassure Pennsylvanians that the process is proceeding as planned.

Laurie Harmon:

The train crash that happened here in East Palestine should never have happened. It was negligence on their part. They did not maintain their property properly. I would never have thought that a train would derail and it would take years to clean up a spill, especially when the EPA and Norfolk Southern both were stating that everything was fine. My name is Lori Harmon. Lived in East Palade my whole entire life. I live approximately 0.2 miles away from the trained Arment site. It’s been a very long road. I will never be the same following this trained arment, but there are a lot of people that have been sick since the train derailed, and there are a lot of people who have been battling a lot health problems, a lot of health problems. I myself, I’ve spent my whole entire life savings on things that happened since the train derailment.

That’s something that you don’t ever want to feel knowing that you don’t have what you worked your whole entire life for anymore because of a chemical spill and controlled burn. They said it was safe. I came home. I came back on the 10th and within hours my skin was just burning. It was on fire. I started to get extremely horrible rashes. It was like the worst sunburn. They would blister peel repeats. I was eventually diagnosed with contact dermatitis due to chemical exposure. I was diagnosed with lesions in my spinal cord. I was diagnosed with severe kidney problems. I had surgery this past August to go in and to remove my body produces kidney stones at a very fast rate, and I passed them every six to eight weeks. I’ve been dealing with that since the middle of February of 2023. I had kidney stones one other time when I was real young, but never to this point. A lot of my lab work makes no sense. It makes no sense to any doctors that I’ve seen. So I quit going to the doctors. They were not helping me. They were blowing me off. They wouldn’t listen to what I had to say. When you’re not being treated properly for an ailment that you have, how do you get better? I ran out of money. I spent my whole entire life savings and this is the train.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, you can literally hear the train like a block away from where we’re doing this interview.

Laurie Harmon:

Where was I?

Maximillian Alvarez:

You were saying that you stopped going and you’d used up all your life savings going, so I dunno if you want to start that over again.

Laurie Harmon:

So I stopped going to the doctor’s for almost a year, and about over a year, Chuck’s carrying the contaminated vinyl chloride soil away, drove down my road for many, many months. I run industrial size air purifiers in three rooms, and I run five standard size air purifiers in the other rooms. This is my home. Never really wanted to admit that it’s contaminated or my home is making me sick, but my home is making me sick. I have more days behind me than I have in front of me. When you have lost everything that you worked for all these years to have a retirement and for that money to be gone in living paycheck to paycheck, wondering how the bills are going to get paid, and it could have all been avoided. I have lost foster children. I lost a relationship. I’ve lost my whole life savings.

I’ve lost friends. I’ve lost family members from moving away. You can never describe in words the feeling of what Norfolk Southern has taken away from not only me, but the residents and the community members that have been affected by this, trained around it. Anybody who lives far away and you watch some of the major news stations and you read things on Facebook, everything’s fine here and everything is not fine. I’m telling you this from experience. I’m a three time cancer survivor. I have had open heart surgery. I have a pacemaker. I have gone through trauma in my life that I didn’t think that I would make it, but I always overcame anything. Life threw at me, I pushed forward. I can’t get past. It’s like I just can’t get over this because it is taking so much from, again, not just me, so many other people.