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

Zsuzsa Gyenes:

When the derailment happened, my son and I were very sick the night that it had happened, and we were forced to leave our home very shortly afterwards, and we had been displaced continuously for over a year and a half. We still don’t have any help. We know that people are still sick. We’ve known people are sick. There’s still people in town wanting to get out.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So I’m back here in East Palestine, Ohio where the Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster happened in early February, 2023. The media since then has moved on. Politicians have moved on, and just recently, Norfolk Southern itself said that the site restoration cleanup is done. There’s still people getting sick. There are people whose lives have been destroyed, people who have had to leave this town to save their health and the health of their children, their families. This town will never be what it was before February 3rd, 2023. But we haven’t forgotten them, and I’m back here to talk to folks about how they’re doing and what they still need.

Zsuzsa Gyenes:

I am Zsuzsa Gyenes. I’m a resident of Hopewell, Pennsylvania. I am a former resident of East Palestine, Ohio. When the derailment happened, my son and I were very sick the night that it had happened, and we were forced to leave our home very shortly afterwards, after I was displaced with my family in a hotel for nearly a year and a half. I’m unfortunately back at a hotel after being illegally evicted from my home, being in a rental property, signed on to by Norfolk Southern. After the derailment, they agreed to sign this lease and pay a portion of the rent with this leasing agency. But I’ve not had great luck with this leasing agency. They’ve neglected the maintenance issues. There’s issues with the 80-year-old house that floods. There’s foundational issues. There’s been a lot of neglected things. I went without a fridge for a month. There was issues with the water and mold and my son’s chronic health conditions that were already made worsened by the chemicals are now being impacted by this leasing agency that neglects their tenants, leaving it into Norfolk Southern’s hands to get a good place for us to call home.

When they were saying they were going to make it right and having us believe one thing one day and then something different the next day. I didn’t really have a lot of faith in their ability to provide us with a stable home at that point. But like I said, we take what we can get. It was way overpriced, but I really wanted to get out of a hotel. I wanted to have a home again. I wanted normality again. We were still very much struggling to find that normality and the housing situation wasn’t ideal. I didn’t actually want to leave East Palestine. So to process a new home, a new school after everything, not having answers from a day-to-day basis, there’s only so much a human body can take. As a single mom, that was really hard to navigate, especially with my health challenges and my son’s health challenges that we’ve had before the drum that were complicated by our chemical exposure.

We still don’t have a solution for those. We still don’t have any medical care for those or answers emotionally, psychologically, it’s been very hard to process this while trying to build up my entire home because we did lose everything after the derailment due to the chemicals. So one of the people who worked for the leasing agency actually lives in or around East Palestine, and she was quite offended when she found out Norfolk Southern helped sign the lease and pay some of the rental portions. She wasn’t offered that, and no one else she knew at that time was offered that. I wasn’t given an explanation of why my family was offered that after a year and a half some days, they would tell us they were not going to help us move forward out of a hotel. And then I would have somebody from the news outlet or media station or somebody reach out.

And then the next day they were telling me, you know what? We will get you a lease. We will do this. We’re going to help you out. And then they sign me up with a slumlord who has just complicated our trauma and not allowed us to have much of a healing period after all this. So it’s just an avalanche of issues that have never fully been able to be resolved. Unfortunately, it’s come to me being in a hotel again with my family and having issues that have stemmed directly from our displacement from Thera and the consequences of Norfolk Southern’s actions in regarding finding a home for us. After everything was destroyed, everything was taken from us. My day-to-day basis is not knowing how the next day is going to end or how it’s going to begin. We just want to keep a roof over our heads for now, which is very much re-traumatizing.

I feel like I’m back right after the derailment and it’s happening all over again. And it doesn’t feel safe. It doesn’t feel secure. Food is always an issue living in a hotel. You don’t have a kitchen. You don’t have your cooking supplies. You don’t have a large fridge with a child that obviously you need more room and space for that takeout’s expensive. I would like to be able to find a new house as fast as this emergency will allow me moving in is going to have significant costs, especially if I need to expediate the process, moving costs of the truck to get our things back, starting a new lease, security deposits, all those things. I would love to keep being involved in community efforts to make things better. But it’s still hard too, to be traumatized and continuously being beat down to get up from the same accident that you didn’t cause.

And it’s not easy to bounce back, especially in this society right now, in this economy right now, surviving on a daily basis is hard for most Americans, much less alone. When you lose your entire house and are chemically bombed by an agency that literally does not care if you live or die, people have died and not only because of the chemicals and the sickness, but they’ve committed suicide over this, and it’s hard emotionally to wake up and process every day. But I have a hard time dealing with that as an empathetic person. And I don’t want anyone to think that this is some isolated just me event because it’s not, and I’m not the only one. This kind of things, these kind of things are happening to right now. Millions of people, if you want to talk on a bigger scale, are experiencing neglect from these corporations or the agencies that the government’s involved in.

People aren’t getting the help they need because of the callousness of corporations and profit. These corporations, they don’t care about our lives. They don’t care about how traumatized we are. They don’t care about that. We lost everything that we have owned our entire lives. They don’t care about. This is what happened to my son at nine years old, through 11 years old and going onwards. This is his adolescence on a daily basis. As a human being, you have to wake up and decide what you’re going to live for, who you’re going to live for, and how you’re going to do it. But it’s hard to do that when agencies with such power make the decisions without us being involved, without our voices, without the care of what happens to us afterwards. And it’s wrong and we need to stand up more and say something about it because it’s not just going to be me, and it’s never been just me, and it won’t just continue to just be me because I know lots of people personally that are still experiencing things from East Palestine, but throughout East Palestine, I’ve learned that other people are experiencing things all over the country from the same exact people, the same people that are pulling the strings.

If we don’t say something and if we don’t agree, we’re all the same kind of human beings who believe in the same kind of things, then I don’t know how else we can move forward. So I just hope people understand that this could be them and this is their neighbors, and we have to collectively decide on these things and take tangible actions. We need to bring the communities together for what they believe in and protect our families and protect the futures and not just given to corporate greed and the agencies, the governments or whoever who just turn their blind eye to these things. The people need to be the ones saying, Hey, there’s a problem here. Fix it. And not letting them continue it, because that’s the only way moving forward, we’re going to be able to make things change.