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

Jami Wallace:

It’s not fair. We’re people, our lives matter. My daughter’s life matters, and that’s what everybody is telling me is that you guys are just accosted doing business. We can kill a whole community and who cares? It didn’t hit the bottom line, so we’ll do it again.

[TEXT ON-SCREEN]:

On Feb. 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern ‘bomb train’ carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. Three days later, Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to dump and burn five tanker cars full of chemicals, blasting a mushroom cloud of toxic phosgene and hydrogen chloride into the air. Nearly 3 years later, residents in East Palestine and the surrounding area are still suffering the toxic fallout.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What do you want folks out there to know about how people here are doing? Two and a half years after this disaster,

Jami Wallace:

We’re not okay. We went from seeing symptoms in residents to long-term illness. Sometimes you do question if you’re crazy because they’re constantly telling you that there’s no reason that you would be sick, so it’s almost like reverse ma psychosis. You try to tell yourself, oh, well the 23-year-old couple houses down would’ve had thyroid cancer even if the derailment wouldn’t have happened. But then when you hear of 50 different people in this small town that have been diagnosed with thyroid disease, nodules or cancer, there’s no denying it. I got diagnosed with hypothyroidism that I never had. My name is Jamie Wallace. I lived in East Palestine pretty much my whole life. I have 46 immediate family members that live within the one mile zone. Right now we’re at my mom’s house. My stepdad grew up in this house. It was his grandparents’ house where he was raised, so he worked hard his whole life. He was a union bricklayer and he bought his dream house, which was his house, his grandparents’ house, and now there’s a for sale sign in the front yard.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Norfolk Southern just came out and said, as far as cleanup is concerned, we’re done. The air particulate monitoring is concluded. Do you think it’s done?

Jami Wallace:

Lies? Lies and more lies? It is not done. I was just down at the creeks with a creek ranger, Christina Selo on the 23rd of June. The EPA constantly says they can’t find chemicals, and it took me less than three minutes to find chemicals that I have pictures of that are clear. You can see plain as day the chemicals and those are just the chemicals we can see. Every time it rains and it stirs up that settlement and it stirs up all those chemicals that have leached into the sidewalls of the creek. You’ll see people on Facebook, boy, it’s really bad today and I really can’t breathe, and my kid had a nose bleed. It’s hit us fast and we appreciate the research. I’ve been working with Dr. Golum from the University of California, San Diego. She studied our Gulf War vets and she was able to show that there was a certain, the chemicals caused a certain symptom profile, so now she’s surveying residents here and comparing our symptom profiles to those of the Gulf War veterans that we’re exposed to chemicals.

It’s probably going to help other communities more than us. I say, people are like, well, I don’t want to be a Guinea pig, and they forced us to be Guinea pigs. They did, and there’s nothing we can do about that except for learn for the next community that this happens to. We still need the basics. We still need water. Everyone knows what the price of groceries are doing. We’re one of the poorest counties in the state of Ohio. People are struggling just to buy water and that’s the bare minimum. We still need relocated at the very, very least are homes tested. A lot of people don’t want to leave. This is generational land. It’s memories, it’s family. They don’t want to leave. They want to know if it’s safe to stay, so we need true testing. We need health insurance. I have health insurance and with my periodontal disease, with my teeth falling out cyst on my right ovary, I have the hypothyroidism, I have asthma, which I’m going to get tested for COPD now even with my health insurance, the copays and the co-insurance, my bills are stacking up.

You poisoned us and you can’t even give us health insurance. I want accountability more than anything because they will do this to another community. There should be criminal prosecution. They lied to at least two state governors and said they had to explode that train when they didn’t need to. What if I did that? Where do you think I’d be sitting right now? Not on the beach sipping my ties with these corrupt class action attorneys and government officials. Yeah. I’m sitting here in my mom’s backyard where we would sit 90% of the summer right now. There’d be the nine granddaughters running around, probably me and my sisters sitting here having a drink, listening to music. This was my peace. This is your home. It’s your safety. The one place that you should always feel safe is your home. I don’t have that peace and serenity anymore.

My mom living around the block. I’d come home from working a full day of work and have a three course meal sitting on my table. She’d be like, oh, we had leftovers, so I sent ’em over. How do you give that back to someone? You don’t. This could happen to anyone in any community. We sit back and I was guilty of the same thing. I’d hear about Flint, Michigan and think, well, it can’t be that bad. The EPA is there. I argued with my own husband that the EPA was right, and that’s not what I’ve experienced and people need to pay attention and they need to listen. The betrayal, my blind trust in my government as an average everyday citizen, how close are you to railroad tracks, to chemical facilities that are manufacturing or storing harmful chemicals? Pay attention because when it does happen, you’re going to wish you would have.

If everybody watching this could just share this story with one other person. Let people know what’s going on. I know that our world has come to a place where some people have lost faith in humanity, but I can’t make myself believe that If people knew that we had little kids here with blood coming out of their ears, nose and asses, let’s be honest, that they wouldn’t care, that they couldn’t understand that this could be their child. If people don’t stand up for us, I mean I already kind of feel like we’ve been left for dead. Just imagine it being your children. Just if you just spread the word to one person, I think that we might get the help that we need.