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Headaches, coughs, and questions linger.
This time last year, the 151 cars of Norfolk Southern train 32N were still rolling along somewhere between Madison, Illinois, and Ohio’s eastern border. The train had suffered a brief breakdown on its northeast journey to Toledo, where a new crew came on before the double locomotives turned southeast, following the shore of Lake Erie into Cleveland, a metropolitan area of 2.18 million residents. It’d have been an irritating train to encounter at a railroad crossing: It stretched almost two miles long.
32N also weighed 18,000 tons, and in its 20 hazardous material tank cars, it carried some 700,000 pounds of vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, which had originated in a chemical plant outside of Houston — a crucial hub in the American plastics machine, booming thanks to cheap shale gas. Some rail workers reportedly referred to the train as “32 Nasty,” due to its reputation for being difficult to handle.
On February 3, 2023, around 8:12 p.m., 32N passed a metal processing plant in Salem, Ohio, where surveillance footage showed flames and sparks coming from the wheels of one of the cars. About half an hour later, 38 of its cars derailed due to an overheated wheel bearing that engineers detected only after it was too late to stop the rupture. Eleven of the derailed cars carried hazardous materials, which immediately began leaking into the soil, nearby water, and air. The train came to rest a little less than 200 miles away from its final destination, abruptly terminating in a burst of flames in East Palestine, Ohio, population 4,700.
A year on, what we still don’t know about the Norfolk Southern derailment is almost as shocking as what we do. For all the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency, which was on site almost immediately after the accident, there are glaring pieces of information missing: the concentration of the chemicals locals were exposed to; how much of the surrounding environment is still polluted; and what health issues could still arise. Even “the plan for documenting and responding to long-term health effects experienced by residents is still being ironed out,” Bloomberg reports, 364 days later.
Days after the initial derailment and the town’s first round of evacuation orders, emergency responders and Norfolk Southern made the decision to vent and then ignite the train’s remaining vinyl chloride days later, reportedly to prevent an explosion. This sent an alarming black plume into the sky over the town. Locals subsequently reported headaches, nausea, rashes, and coughs, among other ailments; some said they saw animals get sick or die. “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” one hazardous materials expert told The Associated Press in the aftermath.
Former President Donald Trump visited three weeks after the derailment to hand out Trump-branded water bottles and tell the residents, “You are not forgotten.” Marianne Williamson, who is mounting a longshot challenge to President Joe Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary, recalled to Heatmap last summer that on her own visit after the disaster, “I saw the frustration, the bitterness, the despair, and in some cases, the hopelessness of people who had been not only neglected, abandoned, abused, and traumatized by Norfolk Southern, but had been re-traumatized by the neglect of their state and federal government.” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited the day after Trump; Biden is expected to make his first visit to the disaster zone this month.
Despite bipartisan hand-wringing, little has been done to prevent another disaster. A rail safety bill that would enhance safety protocols for trains carrying hazardous materials sponsored by Ohio’s Senators, Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown and its Republican JD Vance, has yet to go to the floor. Experts don’t believe it will get the nine necessary Republican votes to advance, partly because Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell opposes it.
Yet Toxic-Free Future reports that some 3 million people live along vinyl chloride transportation routes between the plants in Texas and the plastic factories in New Jersey, and train derailments have been on the rise.
Politicians and pundits will mark Saturday’s derailment with their cases and appeals for this and that. But locals are uncomfortably aware that it will be years more before they know what their lingering coughs and headaches mean — for them, for their children, and everything else attempting to live in their town. Whatever eventually becomes clear may be a help to others down the line, but will likely come too late for East Palestine.
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“We had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them.”
A member of the House Freedom Caucus said Wednesday that he voted to advance President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” after receiving assurances that Trump would “deal” with the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits – raising the specter that Trump could try to go further than the megabill to stop usage of the credits.
Representative Ralph Norman, a Republican of North Carolina, said that while IRA tax credits were once a sticking point for him, after meeting with Trump “we had enough assurance that the president was going to deal with them in his own way,” he told Eric Garcia, the Washington bureau chief of The Independent. Norman specifically cited tax credits for wind and solar energy projects, which the Senate version would phase out more slowly than House Republicans had wanted.
It’s not entirely clear what the president could do to unilaterally “deal with” tax credits already codified into law. Norman declined to answer direct questions from reporters about whether GOP holdouts like himself were seeking an executive order on the matter. But another Republican holdout on the bill, Representative Chip Roy of Texas, told reporters Wednesday that his vote was also conditional on blocking IRA “subsidies.”
“If the subsidies will flow, we’re not gonna be able to get there. If the subsidies are not gonna flow, then there might be a path," he said, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News.
As of publication, Roy has still not voted on the rule that would allow the bill to proceed to the floor — one of only eight Republicans yet to formally weigh in. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he’ll, “keep the vote open for as long as it takes,” as President Trump aims to sign the giant tax package by the July 4th holiday. Norman voted to let the bill proceed to debate, and will reportedly now vote yes on it too.
Earlier Wednesday, Norman said he was “getting a handle on” whether his various misgivings could be handled by Trump via executive orders or through promises of future legislation. According to CNN, the congressman later said, “We got clarification on what’s going to be enforced. We got clarification on how the IRAs were going to be dealt with. We got clarification on the tax cuts — and still we’ll be meeting tomorrow on the specifics of it.”
Neither Norman nor Roy’s press offices responded to a request for comment.
The state’s senior senator, Thom Tillis, has been vocal about the need to maintain clean energy tax credits.
The majority of voters in North Carolina want Congress to leave the Inflation Reduction Act well enough alone, a new poll from Data for Progress finds.
The survey, which asked North Carolina voters specifically about the clean energy and climate provisions in the bill, presented respondents with a choice between two statements: “The IRA should be repealed by Congress” and “The IRA should be kept in place by Congress.” (“Don’t know” was also an option.)
The responses from voters broke down predictably along party lines, with 71% of Democrats preferring to keep the IRA in place compared to just 31% of Republicans, with half of independent voters in favor of keeping the climate law. Overall, half of North Carolina voters surveyed wanted the IRA to stick around, compared to 37% who’d rather see it go — a significant spread for a state that, prior to the passage of the climate law, was home to little in the way of clean energy development.
But North Carolina now has a lot to lose with the potential repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act, as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has pointed out. The IRA brought more than 17,000 jobs to the state, per Climate Power, along with $20 billion in investment spread out over 34 clean energy projects. Electric vehicle and charging manufacturers in particular have flocked to the state, with Toyota investing $13.9 billion in its Liberty EV battery manufacturing facility, which opened this past April.
North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis was one of the four co-authors of a letter sent to Majority Leader John Thune in April advocating for the preservation of the law. Together, they wrote that gutting the IRA’s tax credits “would create uncertainty, jeopardizing capital allocation, long-term project planning, and job creation in the energy sector and across our broader economy.” It seems that the majority of North Carolina voters are aligned with their senator — which is lucky for him, as he’s up for reelection in 2026.
SpaceX has also now been dragged into the fight.
The value of Tesla shares went into freefall Thursday as its chief executive Elon Musk traded insults with President Donald Trump. The war of tweets (and Truths) began with Musk’s criticism of the budget reconciliation bill passed by the House of Representatives and has escalated to Musk accusing Trump of being “in the Epstein files,” a reference to the well-connected financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in federal detention in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
The conflict had been escalating steadily in the week since Musk formally departed the Trump administration with what was essentially a goodbye party in the Oval Office, during which Musk was given a “key” to the White House.
Musk has since criticized the reconciliation bill for not cutting spending enough, and for slashing credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while not touching subsidies for oil and gas. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” Musk wrote on X Thursday afternoon. He later posted a poll asking “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?”
Tesla shares were down around 5% early in the day but recovered somewhat by noon, only to nosedive again when Trump criticized Musk during a media availability. The shares had fallen a total of 14% from the previous day’s close by the end of trading on Thursday, evaporating some $150 billion worth of Tesla’s market capitalization.
As Musk has criticized Trump’s bill, Trump and his allies have accused him of being sore over the removal of tax credits for the purchase of electric vehicles. On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson described Musk’s criticism of the bill as “very disappointing,” and said the electric vehicle policies were “very important to him.”
“I know that has an effect on his business, and I lament that,” Johnson said.
Trump echoed that criticism Thursday afternoon on Truth Social, writing, “Elon was ‘wearing thin,’ I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!” He added, “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn’t do it!”
“In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” Musk replied, referring to the vehicles NASA uses to ferry personnel and supplies to and from the International Space Station.