WASHINGTON — The Biden administration admitted possible cancer-causing toxins were spread in East Palestine, Ohio, following the Norfolk Southern train derailment in 2023, explosive new emails show, despite the White House insisting residents were safe.
“The occurrence of a cancer-cluster in EP [East Palestine] is not zero,” FEMA recovery leader James McPherson wrote in a March 29, 2024, email to other public health officials — a little more than a year after the crash.
“As you all are aware, the first 48 hours of the fire created a really toxic plume,” he said in the chain of communications, which were first reported by News Nation.
Just two months earlier, President Biden had excoriated “multimillion-dollar railroad companies transporting toxic chemicals” for the fiasco — but praised his administration’s “herculean efforts” to resolve the “vast majority” of East Palestine’s problems.
The crash spewed harmful chemicals into the air and resulted in 115,000 gallons’ worth of carcinogenic vinyl chloride undergoing an open burn — displacing residents and leading to reports of strange illnesses as well as the death of livestock in the weeks following the Feb. 3, 2023, disaster.
Michael Regan, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, showed up on Feb. 22 with TV cameras in tow to capture himself drinking from the local water supply, and months later claimed unequivocally that people in East Palestine were “not in danger.”
“Since the disaster, EPA has collected more than 100 million air monitoring data points and more than 25 thousand samples in and around the community,” Regan said in an Oct. 17, 2023, statement.
“This data collection continues, and ongoing science-based reviews show that residents of East Palestine are not in danger from contaminated drinking water, soil, or air from the derailment.”
But a watchdog group that has been investigating the toxic fallout from the train derailment said the Biden administration’s approach was “flawed” from the start — and has now released emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests to prove it.
“They didn’t always test for the right chemicals; they didn’t test in the right locations; they didn’t have the right detection limits,” Government Accountability Project investigator Lesley Pacey told The Post, saying the Biden admin wasn’t “worrying about public health” but, rather “public reassurances.”
“They delayed testing for dioxin, and then when they did the testing for dioxin — and also did the testing in people’s homes for other chemicals — they used Norfolk Southern contractors, and those contractors used equipment that wasn’t correct,” said Pacey, who’s been investigating the incident.
“They completely botched this event from the very beginning.”
So-called “ASPECT” planes that monitor air quality weren’t deployed due to apparent bad weather until four days after the derailment, she added, when they should have been flown within eight hours of the incident.
The federal response also lacked robust monitoring of the water supply and ignored agency policies in order to burn the harmful chemicals, according to Pacey, allowing East Palestine natives to get “very, very ill.”
The new emails — including batches from FEMA, the EPA, the White House, the National Security Council and the Justice Department, which later settled with Norfolk Southern for $310 million to redress harms to the Ohio community — also show that one year after the chaos admin officials were still discussing the need to develop a “tripwire to identify cancer clusters.”
Biden, who was diagnosed earlier this month with an “aggressive” form of prostate cancer that has already spread to his bones, often claimed that his late son Beau died from a brain cancer possibly caused by exposure to toxic fumes while serving in Iraq.
He also claimed in a 2022 speech that he had cancer due to growing up near oil refineries in Claymont, Delaware, though the White House maintained he was referencing “non-melanoma skin cancers” that had previously been removed.
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