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March 22, 2023

Is the Biden administration deliberately ignoring a chemical disaster in East Palestine?

By Wolf Howling

Third-party testing has found that highly toxic dioxin, a result of burning vinyl chloride, is present throughout East Palestine. The residents, including children, are showing scary symptoms that make sense only if they’ve been exposed to dioxin. The federal government has been working hard…to pretend this hasn’t happened.

On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train pulling 150 cars derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Twenty of those cars were carrying hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride. On February 6, decision-makers at Norfolk Southern opted to detonate the derailed train cars that carried the chemicals, releasing a host of toxins, including dioxin, into the environment.

When you burn vinyl chloride, you create dioxin, exposure to which, even in minute amounts, can cause “cancer, reproductive damage, developmental problems, type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease, infertility in adults, impairment of the immune system and skin lesions.” Why Norfolk Southern decided to burn the vinyl chloride and why Ohio’s government approved that burn has never been adequately explained, at least not to my satisfaction. Regardless, it was a decision that has had dire consequences, though one would not know that from the EPA or FEMA.

After the detonation, several agencies selectively tested the air and drinking water at “strategic” points throughout East Palestine—without explaining where those points were located or why they were strategic. In less than a week, the EPA announced that it was safe for the residents to return to East Palestine. This announcement came even as fish and wildlife were dying en masse in and near the town. The announcement came even as evidence of contamination was easily visible in nearby waters.

The Biden administration initially refused to declare an emergency for this little piece of MAGA country, an act fully in keeping with how progressives politicize every aspect of government. The Secretary of Transportation, the utterly incompetent and repulsive Pete Buttigieg, who on the day of the derailment was showing his concern about overly-white construction companies, refused even to visit East Palestine until he was shamed into it weeks after the incident. Buttigieg has been virtually silent on East Palestine since the visit, as have most of the MSM. And of course, Biden refuses to go to East Palestine.

Finally, around March 8, after removing soil from next to the railroad derailment site and testing it, the EPA said that there was no danger from dioxin. Okay, but as a matter of logic, that would seem to be the least likely area to find dioxins after the liquid vinyl chloride was burned and aerosolized, creating the dioxin that went airborne in a massive toxic plume of smoke. The dioxins in that plume would fall to earth at some distance from the detonation. And yet, reading between the lines of the press release, the EPA did not mandate testing in any other East Palestine location, whether soil or waterway, to look for dioxin downwind from the derailment site.

This is a scandal with many facets that is far from over, even if the MSM and the Biden administration are seemingly ignoring it. Evidence of that peeked out in this Fox News report about children coughing up blood, along with information about what dioxin does to the human body:

This is horrifying. Congress must reopen hearings on all aspects of the East Palestine train derailment and subsequent detonation of hazardous chemicals. These hearings should explore the decision to detonate the chemicals and whether that decision was made with any thought given to East Palestine’s residents.

The hearings must also explore whether the Biden administration’s response to the detonation has been incomplete and, if so, whether that was intentional. The hearings should also address facts showing newly appearing diseases and illnesses around East Palestine that are explainable only if the residents were exposed to dioxin. Frankly, if a child is spitting up blood because of exposure to a chemical that the EPA should have found immediately through competent testing, there are likely a lot of people who are criminally negligent in this case.

Image: East Palestine smoke plume. YouTube screen grab.

Wolf Howling is a pseudonym. He blogs at Bookworm Room.

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