EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — One day in mid-October of last year, Lonnie Miller sat at a small table in her kitchen and thought about the issues that had come to dominate her life: the nightmares about fires and rats, the unusual health problems, the meetings with counselors and physicians, the hateful comments she’d read on social media.

She’d lost her business and was in the process of saying goodbye to her house of nearly 30 years. So much of what Lonnie cherished had been shattered. The village she loved no longer felt like home. At least her small family remained intact and, she hoped, healthy. 

The blare of a train horn interrupted her thoughts.

Norfolk Southern tracks run 200 feet from Lonnie’s house on East Clark Street. In her neighborhood, the cadence of life conforms to rail traffic. Passing trains stop conversations as well as traffic. Families watching movies on TV hit the pause button until the rumbling and blaring stops. As a toddler, Lonnie’s son, Austin, pressed his face against a front window to catch glimpses of the passing cars, and they called to him. Gondolas, hoppers, tankers — he learned all the names. Thomas the Tank Engine smiled at him from the pages of children’s books. It was a way of embracing the seemingly benign, inescapable and even friendly presence of trains.

No longer. Lonnie now shivers at the shrieking of rail horns.

“I hate being here and hearing the trains,” she said. “I hate it. For eight months of my life, nothing has been normal.”

Change — fiery, loud and abrupt — arrived on a frigid Friday evening one year ago. In the following days, people who’d never heard of East Palestine viewed their first images of the village. Here’s what they saw: colossal towers of smoke, roiling flames and blackened rail cars — the things that came to symbolize a place once known for its production of rubber and pottery and where Bob Hope earned his first paycheck as an entertainer. 

The world fixated on the unfolding environmental disaster for a few days, then moved on. East Palestine’s 4,700 residents were left to figure out how to live in a transformed village. Some residents yearned for normalcy and returned to daily routines. Some decided the health risks were too great and moved out. A few feared their homes were contaminated and wanted to leave but couldn’t afford to do so.

Their stories of fear, frustration, resolve, determination and anger unite them with a growing list of communities whose names are now synonymous with contamination — Flint, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, Times Beach. What separates the East Palestine stories is the way they begin: with a singular, terrifying event.

Calm, then chaos

By 8 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, Lonnie Miller had covered herself in a blanket and settled into a living room chair. Her husband, Dave, leaned back in a recliner beside her. The glow of a TV filled the room. Son Austin, 21, listened to music in his bedroom downstairs.

For Lonnie, 47, this was an ideal way to end the week — curling up at home with those she loved nearby, watching something on Netflix and sending occasional texts. She likes to stay in touch. On this night, she texted two people — her sister, Connie, and a friend. The three discussed a village proposal to change food truck licensing fees while Dave, 53, nodded off. He had risen before 3 a.m. to begin his day as a crew leader at a metal stamping company in Columbiana. By now he was running out of gas. 

Twenty-six miles west of the Miller home, an eastbound Norfolk Southern train designated as 32N barreled through the Ohio town of Salem. Security cameras focused on frigid parking lots captured images of the train as it passed in the distant darkness. Video showed the orange glow of a fire under the wheels of the 23rd car in the train.

A massive collection of 150 rail cars and three locomotives, train 32N extended 9,300 feet and weighed 18,000 tons. Twenty of its tank cars contained hazardous materials — flammable and combustible liquids and gasses. 

The train began its journey two days earlier in Madison, Illinois, just outside of St. Louis. Its path arched into northern Indiana and Ohio before veering southeast toward the Pennsylvania border. Twice the train developed mechanical issues, once at Bement, Illinois, and again near Williamsport, Indiana. In both instances, crews made repairs, and the train was cleared to continue on its route.

Approximately 20 minutes after leaving Salem, train 32N entered Columbiana. One witness heard the train emit a “loud metal screeching sound.” In New Waterford, 6 miles from East Palestine, sparks flew from the burning wheel of the 23rd car. Investigators would later issue a preliminary report revealing that the fire was the result of an overheated wheel bearing.

Traveling at 47 mph, train 32N screeched through East Palestine with the 23rd car trailing flames and sparks that extended the length of the car. At the Market Street intersection, the burning car passed within feet of a Marathon gas station.

Train 32N’s journey came to its disastrous end at 8:54 p.m. on the east side of town, just past the North Pleasant Drive intersection and 1,800 feet from the Miller home. Thirty-eight of the train’s cars toppled off the track and piled into an accordion-shaped tangle of dented and twisted steel. Some of those cars burst into flames.

The thundering sound of metal thumping against metal jolted Lonnie from her Friday night serenity. Lonnie was accustomed to train noises. This one was different. Unusually loud, it rattled windows and hinted at something calamitous. Alarmed, she turned to Dave. “I think a train derailed,” she said.

Half asleep, Dave shrugged it off. It’s just slack in the train, he said. They heard it all the time.

Lonnie didn’t think so. She texted Connie: Had she heard the noise? Yes, Connie replied. She lived farther north on North Pleasant Drive, more than a mile from the tracks. 

Lonnie nudged Dave. Something big has happened, she insisted. Dave rose from his chair, put on his shoes and walked outside to see for himself. The night was exceptionally cold, about 10 degrees, but otherwise quiet and normal. Then Dave looked east and saw an orange glow on the horizon. Smoke rose into the sky.

While Dave was outside, Lonnie rushed downstairs to alert Austin. At first, he thought his mother was joking, but he followed her upstairs. Dave came in from the cold and told Lonnie she was probably right, a train had derailed. He told them about the flames. They could see for themselves from the front porch.

Dave wanted to get closer to see what was happening. Lonnie didn’t think that was a good idea. 

“We know people who live in that area,” Dave said. Maybe they’d need help. Dave backed his pickup truck out of the driveway and headed east, down nearby Martin Street.

Nathan Velez learned about the crash from his brother-in-law, Steven, who had called and left several messages. Nathan, 32, had returned home after working all day in his small engine repair shop on East Taggart Street and was busy fixing dinner for his family. He wasn’t paying attention to his phone. When he finally returned the call, Steven was excited. “Dude, somebody got hit on the tracks,” he said.

Steven lives on East Taggart Street, near the crash site. The impact had shaken him out of bed. He originally thought a train had collided with a vehicle at an intersection. “I can’t believe you didn’t hear it,” he said to Nathan. With two kids and two dogs, the Velez household could be a noisy place. Outside sounds often go unnoticed. Besides, the Velez house was located more than four blocks from the railroad tracks.

Nathan hung up the phone, turned to his son, Troy, 9, and said, “Hey, bud, hop in the truck. Let’s go.” The two headed east, to the end of East Clark Street. There, Nathan could see a jumble of burning and overturned cars that extended at least a few hundred feet. The scope of the fire stunned him. A number of tanker cars were fully engulfed, and the flames were spreading. He could see them jumping from car to car along connecting hydraulic lines. 

Nathan pulled out his phone and took a picture, then sent it to a Youngstown TV station with a simple note: “Train derailment in East Palestine.”

Nathan lowered a window. He and Troy could feel the heat of the fire. A moment later, something exploded with enough force to shake Nathan’s truck. He put the vehicle in gear and drove quickly back to his home. He had no idea what was in those tanker cars, but he knew the danger of applying extreme heat to pressurized containers. An acetylene tank had once ignited in his shop — It shot upward with enough force to put a hole in the roof. And as a kid, he’d throw empty spray paint cans in campfires and wait for the “boom,” a game country boys played. Nathan looked at those rail cars and saw potential bombs.

‘I think we should leave’

Bob Figley was relaxing in the basement of his home on South Pleasant Drive when one of his employees called to tell him something big had happened in front of Figley’s store, Brushville Supply on East Taggart Street.

Figley and his wife, Marilyn, live on 30 acres of property about a half-mile from the Norfolk Southern railroad tracks. He got dressed, then drove north. At East Taggart Street, he saw before him a wall of flames rising at least 100 feet into the air. It looked like something out of a dream — or a nightmare.

He turned right onto East Taggart and pulled into the parking lot of his hardware store, which sits on a hill and offered a view of the disaster unfolding below. For a while, he and a few others — neighbors and an employee — watched in awe as firefighters poured water on the derailed cars. One person mentioned some of the cars contained chlorine or maybe chloride. It was just a rumor (several cars, in fact, contained vinyl chloride), but the possibility that the cars held dangerous chemicals alarmed Figley.

“I think we should leave,” he said.

From the Millers’ home, the fire looked menacing — a looming mass of raging flames and smoke just beyond homes down the street. But that perspective of the blaze, from its western end, proved deceiving. It was in truth much larger. Dave, like Nathan, had driven to Martin Street and seen the fire’s terrible breadth. When he returned home, he told Lonnie, “It’s big.”

By now, sirens screamed all over town. About 300 firefighters from 50 different departments would eventually respond to the disaster. Lonnie grew concerned about her neighbor, an elderly woman who lived alone. So she stepped outside, crossed the lawn and walked up a series of steps to the neighbor’s door.

Eastbound emergency vehicles roared and honked down nearby streets. The sky directly above was clear — Lonnie could see the moon and stars. However, the eastern sky was completely obscured by a rising column of smoke that reflected the growing fire. This is crazy, she thought.

Lonnie pounded on her neighbor’s front door. After several minutes the neighbor answered, stunned and confused. She’d slept through the event. What’s going on? she asked. 

While the two women talked, a man approached from the sidewalk and said everyone had to leave the area. Local police had begun evacuating nearby residents.

“Where do I go?” the neighbor asked. “I don’t have any place to go.”

The man offered no advice. “You just need to leave,” he said.

“Just get in your car and go,” Lonnie said. The neighbor indicated she’d head to a relative’s house in nearby Salem.

Back at her home a few minutes later, Lonnie told Dave they needed to go someplace safer, but Dave demurred. If everyone left, he wondered, who would protect the neighborhood? What if looters came?

Standing in the living room, Lonnie and Dave’s conversation was interrupted by the wail of a train horn and the screeching sound of train brakes. Lonnie froze.

“Oh, my God!” she said. “There’s a second train!” She braced herself for the impact of a locomotive crashing into the derailed cars. It didn’t happen; the train stopped in time. But the incident added to the stress. Everything seemed to be spinning out of control. 

The family made a quick decision: Lonnie and Austin would go to Connie’s house on North Pleasant Drive. It’s certainly safer there. Dave would stay on East Clark Street with the family’s two English shepherds, Chevy and Lincoln.

Austin was the first to leave, heading out in his Honda Civic. Lonnie stuffed a few items into a bag, gave Dave a hug and said, “I love you.” She then climbed into her small SUV and began the journey to Connie’s place.                                        

She immediately ran into a problem: Traffic clogged all routes to North Pleasant. It seemed everyone was trying to flee town or get into town to see what was happening. Plus, there were all those emergency vehicles.

Alone in her car and stuck in traffic, with sirens blaring all around her and a fire blazing out of control less than a half-mile away, Lonnie began to panic. She worried about Austin — certainly he was caught up in this mess of traffic. She called Connie, who said Austin had not yet arrived. “He should have been there by now,” Lonnie thought. Where was he?

Nathan Velez returned to his East North Street home and told his wife, Nicole, what he’d seen. “Babe, we’ve got to get out,” he said. Nicole held the couple’s 1-year-old daughter, Cambria. It was nearing the child’s bedtime.

“What are you talking about?” Nicole said. “It’s nine at night.”

“It’s not good,” Nathan said. “Everyone is going to have to leave.”

Nathan’s serious tone alarmed Nicole. She began gathering supplies she’d need to care for the baby — diapers, clothes, food. It was now past 10 p.m. TV news played in the background while family members packed. A news anchor mentioned the train derailment, and a photograph of the fire flashed across the screen. “Hey, Dad,” Troy called out. “That’s your picture.”

Nathan grew concerned about his mother-in-law, who lived on East Clark Street. So he drove to her home and brought her back to his family’s East North Street house. Steven, his wife, Haley, and their dog joined the Velez family, and they all secured rooms at a Beaver Falls hotel.

Nathan, Nicole and the children piled into Nicole’s Toyota SUV and headed to a downtown gas station to fill the tank. Market Street was packed with emergency vehicles. The entire town, it seemed, was alight with flashing red and blue lights. The situation was even more dire than Nathan thought.

He told Nicole they needed to return home to get a small safe and the guns the couple owned. Once there, Nathan checked to make certain he’d locked his pickup truck. He noticed a thin layer of what he thought was snow on the vehicle. He rubbed his finger across the metal and discovered the snow was actually ash.

This can’t be healthy

Feeling trapped on East North Street, Lonnie made an abrupt U-turn — later, she was certain she’d driven into a resident’s yard — then took a long, looping route to Connie’s house. As she descended a hill overlooking town, Lonnie was stunned by what she saw. A massive conflagration now dominated what was normally a bucolic view. She stopped, rolled down her window and took a single photograph.

A few minutes later, Lonnie was relieved to see her son, Austin, sitting in Connie’s living room. She plopped down on a couch, then she and Connie called their mother, Dorothy Davis, who lived a few miles away in Pennsylvania.

The sisters spent the next several hours texting friends and checking Facebook for updates. Residents all over East Palestine were posting reports on what they’d seen and heard. People speculated about what was in those burning tanker cars. At one point, someone suggested it was malt liquor. It was difficult to determine what was truthful.

Meantime, back on East Clark Street, Dave remained in the house until around 11:30, when he detected a strong chemical odor. It smelled like burning plastic or paint. This can’t be healthy, he thought, so he loaded the dogs, Chevy and Lincoln, into the cab of his pickup truck and drove off. He headed west to the Market Street business district, where he noticed something odd: Although Market was farther from the derailment, the odor there was more pungent than on East Clark.

For a while, Dave cruised around town, stopping on occasion to take a few pictures. Exhausted, he pulled into the parking lot of a Dollar General Store on state Route 14 so he could get some sleep. The two dogs curled up in the back seat of his extended cab while Dave reclined in the driver’s seat. Dave closed his eyes. More than 2 miles from the derailment, he could still smell a chemical odor.

Nathan and Nicole and their two children checked into a hotel room around 1 a.m. Saturday morning. Cambria and Troy were by now terrified but soon settled down and fell asleep. Nathan and Nicole, shocked by what had occurred in the past few hours, spent the next several hours checking social media and news reports for updates on the derailment. They soon determined they needed to stay out of town, at least for a while.

Nicole found an Airbnb in Canfield, Ohio, about 20 miles north of East Palestine. “How long should we book it?” Nicole asked. “Book it for two weeks,” Nathan said. The couple weren’t rich — they live on income from Nathan’s small engine repair shop and Nicole’s salary as a nurse — but they saw no alternative to spending the money. Nathan had seen the fire double in size in an hour. He knew the explosive potential of those tanker cars. At 6 a.m. Saturday, after spending five hours at the Beaver Falls hotel, the family departed for Canfield.

Having been up all night texting friends and checking for updates, Lonnie returned to her home around noon Saturday, hoping to persuade her husband to leave. She found him folding laundry in the dining room. Daylight streamed in through a window, illuminating a very fine glitter suspended in the air. It looked metallic. Officials had yet to release information about the materials burning in those derailed cars, but Lonnie suspected the glitter wasn’t good. She pinched the air with her fingers. “Can’t you see what’s in the air?” she asked Dave. “Why are you here? We need to get out of here!”

Dave didn’t see the urgency. After a tumultuous Friday night, Saturday seemed normal. He could still smell chemicals, but the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency issued a statement saying the air was safe. Dave had seen men in hardhats walking along the railroad tracks across the street. They weren’t wearing gas masks, so how bad could it be?

Lonnie wanted to leave but wouldn’t do so without her husband. The couple remained at East Clark Street as the derailed cars continued to smolder and burn throughout the day. Austin returned home that evening. Meanwhile, friends who’d decided to leave East Palestine and stay in hotels texted Lonnie, urging her to get out.

‘Risk of catastrophic failure’

On Sunday morning, a deputy from the Columbiana County sheriff’s department arrived on East Clark Street and asked Dave how many people were in the house. Officials were getting a head count, the deputy explained. Lonnie asked the man about chemicals on the train, and he suggested she go to the community center at a local park. She could get answers there.

By then, officials had announced that some of the burning cars contained vinyl chloride, a combustible material known to cause cancer. Lonnie drove to the information center but got few answers there. People wearing Norfolk Southern shirts seemed more interested in collecting residents’ information — phone contacts and Social Security numbers, for example — than in helping people and answering questions about chemical exposure, she said later. Lonnie left angry and appalled at the lack of urgency.

At home, Dave kept thinking about the odd smells. It didn’t make sense. Why were the chemical odors more pronounced downtown, farther from the derailment? At one point on Sunday afternoon, Lonnie showed Dave social media posts of dead fish in Sulfur Run, a creek that runs past the derailment site and through the village’s downtown.

It was then that the danger became real for Dave. He threw his hands in the air. “Oh, my God, it’s already in the water,” he said. “That’s why there’s dead fish. That’s why it smells so bad downtown.” He figured chemicals leaking from the derailed cars had contaminated the area’s creeks and waterways.

Still, Lonnie and Dave decided they could stay in East Palestine for at least a while. That changed Sunday evening, as the couple watched a news conference held by local officials and carried live on Facebook. After a delay of several minutes, East Palestine fire Chief Keith Drabick sat down at a microphone to announce a “drastic change” in the vinyl chloride in one of the derailed cars.

“We are at risk now of a catastrophic failure of that container,” he said. “Measures are being taken to try to control that and prevent that from happening,” but he offered no details about those measures.

Everyone within a 1-mile radius of the derailment must evacuate immediately, he said. Those who defied the order and stayed in their homes could be arrested. The catastrophic failure, if it occurred, would produce hydrogen chloride and phosgene gas, Drabick said.

And then, less than 90 seconds after Drabick had begun talking, the news conference ended. Officials announced they would take no questions.

Moments later, each of the Millers’ cellphones emitted the high-pitched beep of an emergency alert. For Lonnie, the moment seemed filled with dread. How long did they have before the “catastrophic failure”? Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine issued a statement that went further, saying that the tanker could explode “with the potential of deadly shrapnel traveling more than a mile.” The Miller home was less than half that distance from the smoldering pile of cars. Could the explosion wreck the entire neighborhood? What about those chemicals? What would happen to them if the rail cars blew up?

Lonnie rushed through the house, grabbing family photos and stuffing clothes into duffel bags. Dave began filling zip-close bags with dog food. Lonnie screamed at him, “Just take the whole container! Put the whole container in your truck right now!”

The plan was to meet other family members at the Pennsylvania home of Lonnie’s mother, Dorothy Davis, and figure out what to do. Lonnie’s sister, Connie, and her husband, John, would be there, too.

Lonnie, Dave and Austin each drove separate vehicles. The family’s two dogs climbed into Dave’s truck. In the rush to leave, Lonnie backed her vehicle into Austin’s Civic. She simply misjudged where her son’s car was positioned. This evening, like Friday, was devolving into chaos, Lonnie thought. The derailment menaced everything she cared about — her family, her home, her neighborhood. As she drove out of East Palestine, Lonnie wept and prayed.

Once everyone had arrived at Dorothy’s house, Austin confronted his mother about the crash on East Clark Street. “What the hell, Mom?” he screamed at her. Then he saw the look on her face, realized how upset she was, and the two embraced. “I’m sorry,” Austin said.

Dave called hotels, searching for a place that would accept dogs because they could not stay at Dorothy’s small mobile home. Dave found an available room in Beaver Falls, but Dorothy wanted Austin to stay with her. Lonnie relented. She and Dave and the dogs headed to Beaver Falls. At least for now, it seemed, everyone was safe.

At the hotel later that night, Lonnie had trouble calming her dog Chevy. Voices in the hallway and the sound of other people with animals moving into rooms added to Chevy’s anxiety. The dog shook uncontrollably. Around 1 a.m., Lonnie decided to take her for a walk. 

Passing through the hotel lobby, Lonnie saw a group of workers waiting for room assignments. The workers were covered in black dust, like coal miners. She figured these were men who’d been trying to put out the fire in East Palestine, so she walked up to one of the older workers and thanked him for helping the town. “Ma’am,” the man said in a thick Southern accent, “this is what we do. We go from town to town and clean things up like this. After this, there will probably be another one.”

His words shocked Lonnie. Another one? How often does this happen? 

The past few days had been emotionally overwhelming. The derailment destroyed normal life on Friday night. Then, on Saturday, things seemed to settle down. Now Lonnie wasn’t sure she’d ever see her home again. Stressed and physically exhausted, Lonnie returned Chevy to the hotel room, then walked into the bathroom, shut the door, sat on the floor and cried.

A black cloud

Five of the tanker cars containing vinyl chloride remained intact after the derailment, but Norfolk Southern officials and their contractors felt at least one of them was unsafe because a relief valve had malfunctioned. The car’s contents were heating up, officials said.

To prevent an explosion, they proposed using small charges to create holes in the five cars, allowing the hazardous material to flow into a trench where it would be ignited by flares. They called this process “vent and burn.”

Fire Chief Drabick, acting as “incident commander,” said Norfolk Southern officials and their contractors told him the situation was urgent and gave him just 13 minutes to make a decision whether to approve the vent and burn process. Drabick heard no objections from the first responders, railroad officials and hazardous materials experts that made up the “unified command.” So around noon on Monday he gave the OK.

Lonnie researched the dangers of vinyl chloride and phosgene gas, which, she learned, was used as a chemical weapon in World War I. She felt guilty about leaving her mother, Dorothy, and son Austin in an area she felt was unsafe. 

On Monday morning, she called her mother and sister, and everyone agreed they needed to leave the area immediately. A hotel room wasn’t the answer. Family members decided to drive separately and meet at a shopping center parking lot near the town of East Liverpool, Ohio, about 20 miles north. There, Dave sat in his truck and again used his phone to search for an available house or an Airbnb. Lonnie posted a plea on Facebook. Hours passed, with no luck. Everything was booked as people from East Palestine scrambled to leave town. For 4½ hours family members sat in their separate vehicles in the cold. Dave grew increasingly frustrated. At one point Lonnie, sitting in her small SUV, looked over and saw him weeping in his truck.

Finally, Dave secured rental rooms at an East Liverpool house that could accommodate everyone except Lonnie’s sister, Connie, and her husband, John, who found a separate place to stay. 

Hours passed on Monday afternoon while East Palestine residents, many now scattered about the region in hotels and Airbnbs and at the homes of friends and relatives, waited to see what would happen when officials ignited the vinyl chloride.

Nathan Velez and his family, including his mother-in-law and brother-in-law, gathered in a room at the Canfield Airbnb they’d rented. The TV was tuned to a local news station covering the story live. An iPad and cellphones streamed live feeds. Everyone was talking. When Nathan noticed the burn-off was beginning, he hollered out, “Everyone shut up. You all need to watch this. All of us in the room might lose everything right now.”

The room grew quiet. On the TV, a small fireball rising from the derailment site morphed into a massive roiling black plume. Weather conditions at the time were less than ideal. Over East Palestine, a layer of warm air lay atop colder air hovering near the earth’s surface, creating a temperature inversion. The problem with inversions is that the warm air acts like a hard ceiling, trapping smoke and pollutants.

As a result, that thick plume of smoke from the “controlled burn” rose to a height of about 3,000 feet, then spread in an ever-widening circle that soon filled the sky and darkened East Palestine. 

Nicole was the first to respond to live video of the burn. “Are you kidding me?” she said.

Nathan looked closely at drone shots and could see the family’s East North Street house below the plume. What was in that black cloud? Whatever it was, it couldn’t be safe — and it was coming down in his village. Nathan and Nicole decided to extend the Airbnb lease as long as possible. They knew they could never again live in East Palestine.

The Millers watched the same images in their East Liverpool rental. The black cloud appalled Lonnie. She imagined East Palestine as ground zero in Manhattan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with everything and everyone covered in a choking dust.

Bob Figley, the hardware store owner, looked at the black cloud and wondered, “Who thought it was a good idea to blow up a toxic bomb?”

He and his wife, Marilyn, had stayed with relatives on the west side of town in the days immediately following the derailment but made brief visits to their home and business over the next few days. They wanted to move several pregnant goats they were raising to a safer location and feed their chickens. Police called and told Bob they wanted him to shut down his business temporarily. He wondered about the future. Would he be able to reopen? Would customers return to a store so close to an environmental disaster?

The rising plume reminded Deane Cope of mushroom clouds rising over American deserts during atomic bomb tests in the years after World War II. As a child, Deane had seen films of those tests. “My God, this is really something,” he thought as the cloud rose over East Palestine.

Deane, 79, watched the burn-off from the yard of a friend’s house in Unity Township, where he and his wife, Debbie, 67, had been staying since the night of the derailment. Debbie saw the cloud from inside the house. She and Deane were anxious to return to their normal lives and thought the burn-off would be a step in that direction.

The Copes live on East Clark Street, across from the Miller house. Norfolk Southern’s tracks run just beyond the couple’s backyard. Deane grew up on East Clark. Trains had always been a comfort to him. He remembered his grandmother feeding hobos who rode the rails decades ago.

Debbie felt differently. Those rumbling trains, passing so close to her house and rattling the walls, could be a hassle. On occasion, the couple had to straighten pictures knocked askew. In warm weather, Debbie liked to sit on the back porch and enjoy moments of peace and quiet, but she found it hard to do when trains rolled through every 30 minutes or so.

After the burn-off, Deane thought he and Debbie would soon be able to return home. But his wife wasn’t so certain. She’d struggled with blood cancer for more than a decade. All those chemicals worried her. “Is everything contaminated?” she wondered. “What’s inside the house? What are we going to be breathing?”

‘We have to figure things out’

Lonnie, Dave and Austin remained in East Liverpool until Tuesday, Feb. 21. Lonnie wanted to stay longer. The family paid for lodging with a credit card, and she was willing to do so for another few months if needed. She felt the environmental damage caused by the derailment had rendered East Palestine unsafe. But Dave insisted. 

“We have to try to figure things out,” he said. Besides, Dave added, Lonnie needed to prepare her testimony for a Feb. 23 hearing into the derailment. The hearing had been scheduled in Beaver County by Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano. Lonnie had reached out to his office because Mastriano chaired a committee responsible for overseeing fire and emergency management, and as a result she was one of several people invited to testify. It felt good to be heard by someone with authority, she said.

Once back on East Clark Street, however, the house did not feel the same. Odors lingered, and there were health concerns. Some of Lonnie’s friends had reported rashes, chemical bronchitis, swollen faces and a burning sensation around the mouth. Lonnie herself had experienced nosebleeds and crushing headaches. “Much worse than a migraine,” she said. 

She tried to blame these on other factors — lack of sleep, stress. But she remembered the Flint, Michigan, water crisis, so mishandled at the local, state and federal level that several officials resigned and a number of others were criminally charged. (A state court found even the prosecution was mishandled, and the charges were either dismissed or dropped.) She thought of the 9/11 emergency responders in New York who experienced an increased risk of cancer due to their exposure to toxic dust, and the water contamination issue at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. She begged Dave to put their belongings in a rental truck and just leave.

“We can’t just walk away from everything,” Dave said. He got so upset at one point that he stormed out of the house, got in his pickup truck and drove away. Distressed, Lonnie turned to Austin and said, “I don’t know what Dad’s going to do.”

Her husband was “so angry and upset that he couldn’t save us, and he wanted to. He came back home within five minutes. He was just devastated.”

The couple spent that night lying in bed and listening to the trains running along tracks 200 feet away. Norfolk Southern had reopened the track a few days after the burn-off; now the rail traffic seemed never-ending. “They just kept going like we didn’t exist,” Lonnie said.

Soon, Lonnie began experiencing nightmares. In one, a house across the street became engulfed in flames, and Lonnie could do nothing to save her neighbor. In another, she and Austin sat in an automobile while a train derailed in front of them. Lonnie would wake up screaming, with Dave trying to console her. Another time, she dreamed of rats attacking in the bedroom. Lonnie’s dogs tried to fight off the rodents but were overwhelmed. A friend later told Lonnie that, in dreams, rats signify contamination.

Lonnie began sleeping in a living room chair, with a duffel bag of clothes beside her, in case another train derailed and she needed to leave quickly. Eventually, Dave, too, slept in the living room so he could be near his wife.

One night in March, Lonnie awoke long before sunup. She saw Dave awake in the recliner beside her. He’d been thinking about chemical contamination. In those days after the derailment, he wondered, what did they breathe into their lungs? He regretted driving around town and taking pictures in the hours after the railroad cars had run off the tracks. He was concerned the chemicals could already be wreaking havoc inside his body. Would he become ill with cancer or some other disease in one year? Five years? Ten years? Dave feared he wouldn’t be around when Lonnie and Austin needed him.

Lonnie and Dave wept, then embraced and prayed that God would heal and protect them. “You have to stay strong,” Lonnie said. After a while, both Lonnie and Dave calmed themselves. Lonnie then walked into the kitchen and vomited in the sink.

“We both knew there was nothing about our home and our town that would ever be the same again,” she said. They had to get out.

Nathan Velez and his brother-in-law, Steven, returned to East Palestine on Feb. 8. The chemical smell hit Nathan “like a fist,” burning his eyes and, within seconds, giving him a headache. He visited his shop on East Taggart Street, closer to the derailment. It was even worse there — “like stepping inside a can of paint thinner,” he said.

He visited a Norfolk Southern assistance center and got into an argument with a company representative who Nathan felt was demeaning and insulting. Security escorted Nathan out of the building. Nathan was stressed and exhausted. He and Nicole were spending thousands of dollars each month, bouncing from one Airbnb to another. From the night of the derailment until June, they spent more than $12,000 in lodging; Norfolk Southern eventually reimbursed them $8,500.

Nathan was outspoken and a good storyteller, so reporters sought him out. He was interviewed a number of times on local and national news programs. For a while, he kept track of the interviews but stopped counting after a few dozen.

One day, he finished an interview with Fox News then headed to an Airbnb that was then serving as a home. He was scheduled to do another interview that evening on CNN. During the trip home, Nathan’s heart began racing. Sweat poured down his face. His hands wouldn’t work.

“Holy shit, I’m having a heart attack,” he thought. He pulled into the Airbnb driveway and called Nicole. “I think I’m dying,” he said.

Nicole rushed outside, and her training as a nurse kicked in. “Babe, you’re having a panic attack,” she said. She calmed him down. He texted CNN staffers and let them know what was happening. “I’m running on fumes,” he wrote. He ended up doing the interview, believing the world needed to see what people in East Palestine were dealing with.

The most terrifying event to strike the Velez family occurred one day in March. Nathan was at the shop doing yet another interview when son Troy called. “Cam ate something,” he said. Nathan could hear Nicole screaming in the background. “You need to get here now!” she said.

It took Nathan 20 minutes to drive to the family’s Airbnb in Poland, on the outskirts of Youngstown. He ran inside. Nicole held Cambria, who was beet red and convulsing. Cam had ingested medicine not intended for children. It all happened so quickly. Nathan called 911, and within minutes an ambulance arrived and took Cam to a local hospital. Doctors tried to calm her heart rate with medication, but it didn’t work. So she was transferred to Akron Children’s Hospital.

Nathan and Nicole spent that night in a hospital waiting room while doctors stabilized their daughter. Cambria remained in the hospital for a week.

“This almost completely wrecked us,” Nathan later said. ​​The stress and chaos of moving from one rental place to another was becoming too much. All the packing and unpacking. At their East Palestine home, everything had its place. Now, nothing had a place. “This only happened because we weren’t in our own home,” Nathan said.

Losing more than a home

The Millers’ home on East Clark is a narrow two-story wood structure with an American flag flying from a pole on the front porch. East Clark is lined with similar homes, modest aging structures that have been carefully maintained.

Inside, the house is cozy, the rooms decorated with antiques and collectibles: old muffin trays and rolling pins in the kitchen, vintage tins for baking soda and other cooking staples, Coca-Cola crates, classic print ads for Lionel model trains. The Millers raised their son, Austin, here and had planned on passing the house to him when they retired and possibly moved south, perhaps to the Carolinas or Florida. That won’t happen.

In the months after the derailment, Lonnie and Dave put the house on the market. They’d taken out another mortgage to purchase a house in Leetonia, a small Ohio town about 15 miles west. 

Losing the house broke Lonnie’s heart. After nearly 30 years, the place was filled with memories and markers of life, such as the pencil lines on a wall that tracked Austin’s growth. He was 5 months old when Dave built a garage — Austin’s footprints are imprinted in the concrete floor.

But Lonnie and Dave felt they had no choice. They could no longer trust East Clark Street to be safe.

For Lonnie the decision was especially difficult because the house represented a special connection to her father, Larry Davis.

On Sunday afternoon, Oct. 8, 2006, Lonnie’s parents were traveling along Route 551 in Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, east of New Castle, when their pickup was struck by a vehicle that had run a stop sign. Three teenagers in the vehicle died, and Lonnie’s father received serious injuries. A medical helicopter transported him to a hospital in Youngstown, where he spent much of the next several weeks in a coma.

Larry Davis regained consciousness a few times and always asked about his grandson Austin, then 4. “They were best of friends,” Lonnie said. “I made my dad a promise in the hospital to do everything I can to make his grandson safe.”

Larry Davis died of his injuries in late January 2007. As a result of a settlement, Lonnie and Dave were able to pay off their home. Lonnie felt that was her father’s final gift to her. A home was something he was never able to provide for his wife. Larry Davis worked as head of maintenance at a local factory. He could fix anything, and he was a hard worker. Lonnie has pictures of him, exhausted after his shift and asleep on a couch. But he never made much money.

“I watched Dad struggle for years and years, trying to provide for my mom and my sister and I,” Lonnie said. “We lived in a trailer, a mobile home, and he regretted that. He wished he could have built my mom a beautiful house.”

In death, he was able to provide a house for his daughter. Now, Lonnie had to part with that gift. “I feel like I’m losing my dad all over again,” she said.

‘We couldn’t make it’

The Millers’ new place in Leetonia needed a lot of work. Interior walls were punctured by holes; junk filled the rooms. Lonnie knows antiques and collectibles, and the only thing of value she found was a lamp worth about $50. Mice infested the place. Racoon droppings littered the floor.

Outside, the yard was littered with trash — everything from toothpaste tubes to pantyhose. While cleaning up the property, the Millers filled two dumpsters with debris. The house needed a roof and electrical work. But at least it was safe, and it was nowhere near a railroad track.

By October, the family had moved out of the East Clark Street home and were staying at the Leetonia house. Lonnie enjoyed watching Dave and Austin work together to fix it up. Lonnie emptied out her Market Street antiques store, Mama’s Attic. She’d decided long before to close the business, although owning the shop had been a dream of hers. So much had changed in the town. It wasn’t just the chemicals. The derailment had created divisions in the community, in many cases turning friends and neighbors against each other. To Lonnie, it was unbearable.

Lonnie cleaned up the East Palestine house and put it on the market, something that would have been inconceivable a year ago. All of those things that made the house special had been poisoned. “If I had the money, I would tear it down myself,” Lonnie said. “I wouldn’t even ask for a permit.”

Deane and Debbie Cope moved back into their East Clark Street house after staying 11 days with their friend in Unity Township. Debbie still worried that air inside the house could be hazardous, so the couple requested testing. A few men stopped by and used hand-held devices to sample the air in several places. Results revealed no hazards. Months later, though, the Copes saw news reports that indicated the testing devices were faulty. Now they don’t know what to believe.

The house has been a thread connecting Deane to his family’s past. His great-aunt lived there decades ago. As a child, Deane cut the grass in the summer and in the winter shoveled snow off the sidewalk. In 1984, he and Debbie were married in the living room. It’s the only place the couple ever owned.

“We’re not living like kings, but our needs are met here,” Deane said. He would like to stay in the house, but he’s concerned for Debbie’s health. She’d like to leave, but the couple can’t afford to move. They live on Social Security benefits and Deane’s small pension. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out their 401(k). 

“If we had to go someplace and pay rent or a house payment, we couldn’t make it,” Deane said. The couple found a place in nearby New Waterford that would suit their needs — it was a ranch home with a garage. The price: approximately $170,000, much more than the Copes can afford.

“We’ll never get that out of this place,” Deane said while sitting in his living room in January. Who wants to buy a house a hundred feet from a railroad track, especially one in a town now known for a toxic derailment? “We’re stuck.”

Frustrations and feathers

In the weeks after the derailment, Bob Figley grew increasingly frustrated with the response by government agencies and by Norfolk Southern.

After the burn-off, some residents grew concerned about dioxin, a highly toxic pollutant created by burning vinyl chloride. Dioxin is known to cause cancer. But the EPA didn’t test East Palestine soil for dioxin until weeks after the burn-off. Those tests found the levels to be normal, or what would be expected in any community, but independent tests discovered much higher levels. Who was right? 

Bob wondered whose side the EPA was on. “Are they the Environmental Protection Agency or the Empire Protection Agency?” he asked. It bothered him that after the derailment Norfolk Southern “took over” a portion of the town without consulting the business owners whose property was directly affected by the disaster. It felt like big businesses and institutions were pushing people around.

What’s the future for him and Marilyn, and for his business? Bob grew up in East Palestine; he’s not going anywhere. His store, Brushville Supply, has been at its current location on East Taggart for 20 years.

“Where am I going to go?” Bob asked. “Everything’s here. We’ve got 30 acres, a house, barns, maple trees. That’s our retirement home. Do I want to start my life over somewhere? If there was something here that was going to kill us in a year, then, yeah, I’d leave. But we just don’t know.”

In the months after the derailment, he and Marilyn lived in a number of rental places. They were concerned about toxins in their home. “We lived out of suitcases for five months,” Bob said. Eventually, the railroad paid to have their home cleaned and the interior rooms painted, something the couple felt they needed to do in order to make the place safe.

Bob was told by the EPA his business needed to be cleaned, a monumental task in a place packed with thousands of tools, fittings, hoses, connectors and other items. He spent a lot of time getting estimates, coming up with a plan. Then he was told the cleaning was voluntary and would have to be done by a separate company. Such interactions leave people confused — is there a hazard that needs to be removed or not?

Bob wants the railroad company as well as government agencies to “come in and be straightforward and tell us the truth. Come in here and be responsible and take care of the mess you made.”

Like the Miller family, Nathan and Nicole Velez decided to look for a new place to live. By April, their home on East North Street had been vacant for nearly three months after being exposed to whatever chemicals had been released into the air during and after the derailment. 

Nathan spent months traveling to the East Palestine house, packing the family’s belongings into plastic bins and then renovating the place — finishing a bathroom project he’d started before the derailment, repairing floors, replacing a ceiling, painting the interior walls. He and Nicole found a house they liked in New Waterford, and their offer was accepted. All of this proved costly. Nathan sold his beloved El Camino and drained money from his business, which remained closed to regular business until summer.

By November, Nathan and Nicole had sold their place at 327 East North St. One of the last items remaining in the house was a calendar that had hung for years in the family’s kitchen. It was Nicole’s habit to draw a line through the current day before she went to bed at night. The first and second days of February 2023 are marked off — those turned out to be the last days the family would spend in the house.

“So long, 327,” Nathan wrote in a Facebook post. “You were a great first house.”

Once his family’s move from East Palestine was complete, Nathan contemplated the future of his shop, located in a one-story shed packed with tools, engines, motorcycles and ATVs. Should the business remain on East Taggart Street? The chemical odors had dissipated, but what about other forms of contamination? Sulfur Run, which some residents feared was still polluted, flowed past the back door. Nathan had much to figure out.

After the derailment, as he and his family navigated various crises, Nathan began writing about his experiences. His entries were at times achingly personal and often reflective. In the fall of 2023, he wrote about the lessons he’d learned since returning Steven’s phone call on the frigid Friday evening of Feb. 3. 

“No one is coming to save you,” he wrote. “The government, the railroad, the lawyers, no one. Whatever it is you wish would happen probably won’t. Not unless you shut up and do it yourself.”

In the early spring, Lonnie found feathers on the ground while taking her dogs for walks around her East Palestine neighborhood. She’s a spiritual person and considered these signs from angels telling her she and her family would be safe. Then a friend in nearby West Virginia told her she’d found dead birds in her yard after the burn-off. Now Lonnie thinks those feathers may have been from birds who’d flown through airborne chemicals.

Other things Lonnie once considered real turned out to be illusions. Friendships she thought were resilient fell apart over disagreements about the derailment and its aftermath. She looked at the home that once protected her and wondered if it harbored invisible hazards. Even the signs posted around the village — “EP Strong” — seemed to tell a lie. Neighbors and friends had turned on each other.

Eleven months after the derailment, Lonnie’s nightmares remained, but she no longer woke up screaming. Counseling proved a big help. The East Clark Street house had been on the market for weeks, but no potential buyers had emerged. Still, Lonnie and Dave were relieved to be in Leetonia. “We’re getting away from the threat, and this is the best we can do,” Lonnie said.

The place came with more than 2 acres, so the dogs had room to run. And perhaps its most important amenity: no nearby railroad traffic to rattle the house or nerves. Quiet dominates the landscape. Still, if Lonnie walks to the edge of the property and listens carefully, she can hear it in the distance, perhaps carried by the wind: the sound of a train, blaring its warning.

This story is part of collaborative coverage of East Palestine between the Pittsburgh Union Progress and the New Castle News, funded in part by a grant from the Pittsburgh Media Partnership.

The post On a frigid and fiery night one year ago, a train upended lives in East Palestine appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

The City of Pittsburgh’s incorporation of climate-change projections into its stormwater-control regulations have been highlighted by the latest National Climate Assessment as an example of how a city can prepare itself for the bigger, more frequent rain storms produced by the changing climate.

The federal document cited the former steel capital for its work requiring developers of new properties covering about a quarter of an acre of land, or with impervious surfaces of about an eighth of an acre, to install various kinds of green infrastructure so that their projects don’t worsen runoff.

The city is an early adopter of stormwater rules based on the expectation of increased future rainfall, which threatens worsening floods unless new development enhances the ability of land to absorb and store water rather than just deflecting it as runoff.

The rules “require new developments to plan for projected increases in heavy rainfall under climate change rather than building to historical rainfall amounts,” according to the assessment, published on Nov. 14. It also noted that Pittsburgh committed in 2021 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

While bigger cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia are making “extensive” climate preparations, Pittsburgh is an example of an “innovative” approach to climate planning taken by a geographically, economically and politically diverse sampling of mid-sized cities, the climate assessment said.

“Their efforts generally receive less visibility, but the need among similarly sized cities in the [Northeast] region — to learn about best practices and lessons learned in developing and implementing climate action plans to inform their own efforts — can be significant,” the assessment said.

Pittsburgh’s existing stormwater rule was updated in April 2022 to include rainfall projections calculated two years earlier by Carnegie Mellon University and the Rand Corporation. Although the forecasts for more-likely but less-damaging storms were similar to projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the CMU/Rand forecast predicted even greater increases in rainfall than NOAA. 

For example, a so-called 100-year storm — that which is expected to occur only 1% of the time — is expected to dump 6.4 inches of rain on Pittsburgh in a 24-hour period, or about a sixth of what the city typically gets in a whole year, according to the CMU/Rand forecasts. That’s about two inches more than projected by NOAA, according to Kyla Prendergast, a senior environmental planner with the city.

By contrast, a more-likely “one-year storm” would mean 2.1 inches of rain fell on the city in 24 hours, similar to the federal projections.

“The rainfall depths are a bit higher than the NOAA ones, and that helps us to ensure that we’re holding developments to a higher standard, and whatever we’re building now is actually going to be able to manage the rainfall that we know we are going to be seeing in the next 10, 20, 50 years,” Prendergast said.

Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania director for the nonprofit Clean Water Action, welcomed the city’s inclusion of climate projections into its stormwater rules as a change that is much more likely to protect the city from flooding than an earlier version of the rule.

“What Pittsburgh is doing is making sure their regulations will actually work so that they reflect the reality of the climate crisis we’re in,” Arnowitt said. “If you’re writing stormwater rules, and you’re using rainfall amounts based on what happened in 1900 to 1950 before climate change really took off, you’re going to be controlling much less water than if you base it on what we expect rainfall to be like in the next 10, 20, 50 years. It makes a lot of sense.”

NOAA’s National Weather Service is working on an update of a regional estimate of precipitation frequency. The new report, called NOAA Atlas 15, will use climate-change information to “derive precipitation frequency estimates” when it is published in 2026, said NWS spokesman Michael Musher. 

NOAA said the new estimates will provide “critical information to support the design of state and local infrastructure nationwide under a changing climate.”

Climate scientists predict an increasingly warm, wet future and widespread disruption of historic weather patterns worldwide as a result of trapped greenhouse gases. The latest National Climate Assessment, the fifth in a series of the Congressionally mandated reports, said the United States has cut carbon emissions from their peak in 2007, and has done more to adapt to the effects of climate change in the last five years, but it urged much stronger action to lessen severe effects including flooding, wildfires, heat waves and sea-level rise.

In Pittsburgh, the latest rule blames more runoff for a range of ills including erosion and sedimentation, exceeding the carrying capacity of streams and sewers, increasing public costs to control stormwater, and threatening public health with the backup of raw sewage in basements.

“A comprehensive program of stormwater management, including regulation of development and activities causing accelerated runoff, is fundamental to the public health, safety and welfare,” the rule says.

To ensure that new developments lessen or at least do not increase runoff, developers can incorporate a variety of techniques such as rain gardens, green roofs and “construction wetlands” — areas that restore a landscape’s capacity to absorb rainfall, she said.

Projects that disturb at least 10,000 square feet of land or create 5,000 square feet or more of impervious surface are now required to submit their plans to the city’s stormwater permitting process, and to show that the project would not increase the amount of runoff during a rainstorm.

So far, the city has approved about 50 projects that include the new rainfall forecasts although none are yet under construction, so there’s limited evidence so far on the effectiveness of the new standard, Prendergast said.

But she argued that incorporation of the new climate projections into the development plans, and the city’s approval of them, already show that the standard is working.

The new rules will inevitably increase costs for developers, Prendergast said, but that would be less than the cost of reacting to future flooding based on outdated precipitation forecasts. There has been some pushback from developers since the rules were introduced but the pace of development hasn’t slowed, she said. The city has produced a “design manual” for developers, explaining the rule and the reasons for it.

Pittsburgh, located at the confluence of three rivers, and with many populated hillsides, is especially vulnerable to flooding, and has suffered loss of life during the worst storms. In 2011, a downpour left waters that overtopped cars and left drivers standing on their roofs or wading through chest-deep waters, Prendergast said. Four people died in that storm.

“We do have a lot of water in the city,” Prendergast said. “Historically, Pittsburgh has tried to fight against the water; we have a lot of streams that have been paved over, and turned into pipes. It worked for what we’ve seen in the past but as we move forward, we see that it’s not the most resilient approach to managing water. We’re hoping that with this code and other policies, we are going to be able to work with the water rather than against it.”

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.

The post Pittsburgh is a poster child for climate-conscious planning appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

When Zakary Littlefield bought a home on a small dead-end street overlooking Pittsburgh’s South Side, he didn’t suspect that he’d be forced to sell it just three and a half years later. 

He noticed the cracked pavement when he purchased the property. The road had cratered and the asphalt was, inch-by-inch, crumbling down the hillside. 

Unable to navigate the shrinking, craggy edge, standard city garbage trucks soon stopped picking up his trash, later replaced by smaller refuse vehicles. Drivers no longer delivered to his doorstep. In the back of his mind a thought persisted: “My road may be gone tomorrow.”

Littlefield’s home, recently renovated and nestled along Newton Street in the South Side Slopes, is one of 11 properties on that street that the City of Pittsburgh intends to buy and then retire in an effort to mitigate the risk of landslides. 

In Pittsburgh and throughout northern Appalachia, the combination of a soft, clay-laden geology and a precarious, tilted topography raise the likelihood of landslides. With more frequent and intense rainfall expected in a warming world, the probability of damage to property and people is likewise expected to swell.

The home buyouts, funded with $1.2 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA], are one way that local governments can counter potential catastrophes. In other parts of South Pittsburgh, nearly $10 million in additional FEMA funds, plus millions more from the city, will be spent this winter to reinforce slopes deemed worth saving.

Maintaining Mount Washington

The slopes of Mount Washington have for years attracted concern from city officials.

In February of 2018, setting off what would become one of the wettest years in recent record, a landslide destroyed a home on Greenleaf Street in Duquesne Heights, spilling debris onto Route 51 and closing the thoroughfare. To the east, Mount Washington’s William Street has been closed and crumbling since 2018 and now resembles a narrow walking trail rather than the two-lane roadway it once was. At the bottom of Reese Street, the hillside is slowly sliding down a steep incline above a walking trail in Emerald View Park and Norfolk Southern’s railroad tracks. 

“There’s a lot of transportation infrastructure that has been impacted or could potentially be impacted by some of these landslides,” said Eric Setzler, the chief engineer at Pittsburgh’s Department of Mobility and Infrastructure. 

Some of the existing  landslides on Greenleaf, William and Reese streets have been temporarily stabilized and the supports have been holding, Setzler said. But by the end of the spring, these three failing slopes will be permanently buttressed by the FEMA investment. 

The point of the stabilization projects, Setzler said, is to secure the hillside to protect residents, their homes and transportation infrastructure that could be damaged should a catastrophic event occur, ideally, “ensuring stability for decades to come.”

The city, which is contributing $3 million to the $13 million total project cost, anticipates work will begin this winter after the construction contracts are settled. The work is expected to finish by April 2025, and Setzler said the most noticeable disruption will be the closure of Greenleaf Street for much of the duration.

More rain, more slides, more costs

“Ten years ago, this wasn’t really even an issue that was on the city’s radar,” said Jake Pawlak, deputy mayor of Pittsburgh. That’s not because city administrators weren’t attentive, he said, but “because we weren’t having nearly so many landslides, which have really emerged as a major infrastructure challenge and safety challenge in the past decade.”

Now the number of potentially unstable slopes far outweighs the city’s capacity to fix them.  

“It’s a real challenge,” Pawlak said. “It’s a risk to people. It’s a risk to our economy. It’s a risk for infrastructure.”

In 2018, when historic rains drenched Southwestern Pennsylvania, the city spent more than $12 million on cleanup from landslides. “We want to be more proactive,” said Setzler. 

He’s targeting imminent or ongoing slides in Elliott, Riverview Park, Morningside, Perry North and South and the Hill District. If heavy rains persist, more could follow. 

The city has begun to allocate more money to fixing and preventing landslides. The 2024 budget calls for $4.6 million for slope failure remediation and $8 million next year. After that, the budgeted numbers taper to $2.3 million and $2.5 million and $2.7 million from 2026 and 2028. The decrease in 2026 does not represent a de-emphasis on landslides, but rather a normal ebb and flow of project funding cycles, Pawlak said. He expects more funding to be allocated to the budget in the years to come.

Even as more money flows to landslide prevention, the investments that these projects require, Pawlak said, could not be met without state and federal partnerships. 

The Mount Washington-area projects and partnership with FEMA, which pays 75% of the bill, he said, is a “great first step in what we hope to be an ongoing relationship in addressing these issues.”

Building buyout

When Littlefield met with city officials about his home on Newton Street, they told him the risk was higher than they’d like for people to be living there, and the cost of repair too high to justify.

“The outcome of that meeting was effectively that it would be cheaper to buy the houses there from residents that were on the road than to fix the road,” he said. 

The city offered fair value, Littlefield said, about the same amount that he paid for it, and he took the offer. “It would be impossible for me to sell the house to anyone else, so I kind of felt like it was the only reasonable option,” he explained. 

The city applied for another grant from FEMA to acquire the houses, through a program designed to eliminate high-risk properties, but the agency hasn’t yet confirmed the funds. With options limited for protecting private property, the buyouts allow city government to mitigate private risk through acquisitions and demolitions. 

“It’s an opportunity for people whose homes are at risk or severely damaged to start fresh and also for the government to reduce the risk by eliminating that property,” said MaryAnn Tierney, the regional administrator for FEMA.

When the federal funding was announced in December, Tierney toured the city’s at-risk hillsides.

“As we think about climate change and we think about areas that are at risk for climate change, it’s not just coastal communities,” Tierney said. “It is communities like Pittsburgh, where you see the effects of concentrated rain on these very significant and steep slopes.” 

She applauded Pittsburgh for its efforts, but recognized the remaining challenges.

“The city is doing all of the right things,” Tierney said. “They’ve prioritized this. They’re seeking grant dollars. They’re putting their own money behind it. They’ve had a massive engineering effort to think about this. … They should be commended for recognizing and trying to take proactive steps to address it.”

Photographs by Quinn Glabicki.

Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram and X @quinnglabicki.

This story was fact-checked by Sarah Liez.

The post Slip sliding away: Federal funds buy out Pittsburgh homes under threat from landslides appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

During this holiday season, around 900 people are known to be sleeping outside or in shelters in Allegheny County.

Housing and homelessness were ever-present concerns in the Pittsburgh region this year. But even as tents went up and shelters swung shut, new leadership came knocking on the doors of power with pledges of responsiveness and equity.

With COVID-driven funding expiring fast, though, the long-haul effects of the pandemic may be just beginning for the city, the Pittsburgh Public Schools and other local institutions.

In so many areas of life in our region — education, environment, equity, public health and safety — the gears of history continued to turn, and sometimes to grind, in 2023. PublicSource highlighted emerging trends and dug deep into the data, documentation and human-level impact.

Here are some of the stories we reported, many of which will echo into 2024 and beyond.

What happens after a camp is cleared?

The year 2022 closed with the City of Pittsburgh removing an encampment along Stockton Avenue on East Allegheny’s edge and sweeping aside with it a longstanding agreement.

The tents went down just as Allegheny County’s new Second Avenue Commons shelter prepared to accept displaced people while the Smithfield United Church of Christ’s basement doors creaked open.

If anybody thought those developments would noticeably blunt the effects of the housing crisis, they were quickly disabused of that notion.

The early days of Second Avenue Commons were marked by staffing problems and safety questions, while this autumn saw ramped-up evictions from its single room occupancy units. The Smithfield shelter, meanwhile, became a haven for hundreds but a bugaboo for Downtown businesses, until its June closure demonstrated just how tattered America’s safety net has become.

“I understand that it can’t exist indefinitely, but this haphazard closure is going to cause death and we need to hold people accountable for that.”

Aubrey Plesh, founder of Team PSBG, which operateD the shelter at the Smithfield United Church of Christ, Downtown

With cold weather’s return came a slow-motion rollout of the county’s and city’s plan for emergency shelter. The persistent presence of at least 200 people on the street, though, left leaders looking for… 

A path to long-term affordable housing

The affordable housing shortage has been well documented for at least a decade, though never so viscerally evident as it was in 2023. Yet one of the most versatile tools for addressing housing needs — the Housing Choice (Section 8) Voucher — had become rusty and blunt by the time PublicSource documented concerns of landlords, tenants and former Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh [HACP] insiders. That reporting spurred pledges of prompt improvements in customer service in the program, but the year ended with curbs on the portability of vouchers.

City development officials, meanwhile, scrambled to preserve affordable units that might otherwise fall into disrepair or convert to market-rate status. A $50 million federal grant raised hopes for more and better Hill District homes.

County-level interests sought to bring to the boroughs some of the models that have taken root in the city. And after nearly a decade of inactivity, the Pittsburgh Land Bank slowly began the process of reclaiming abandoned city property, sidestepping legal obstacles that held up progress. 

While fears of gentrification have been most pronounced in Pittsburgh, housing market forces don’t stop at the city line. That’s why Sara Innamorato was quizzed about the issue during her successful run for county executive, which has everybody asking …

Will a fresh approach on Grant Street really change things?

In what will be the last Allegheny County election season to feature direct six-figure contributions to candidates, Democrat Innamorato barely overcame Republican Joe Rockey’s large fundraising edge. (Conversely, District Attorney Stephen Zappala ran as a Republican, and bested billionaire-backed Democrat Matt Dugan.)

Innamorato’s pledge to focus on the “struggle of everyday people” has a different feel from outgoing County Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s recent emphases, which have tended toward consensus building with business, labor and multiple levels of government, plus stable property taxes.

Innamorato has said she’d like to address increasingly skewed assessments, but also wants to reduce a reassessment’s impact on those least able to afford tax hikes.

Innamorato also heard “alarm bells” in the county’s selection of nonprofit contractor Adelphoi to take over the Shuman Juvenile Detention Center. But she will become executive amid heightened attention to violent crime, which the county has sought to address with a $50 million effort to beef up prevention efforts.

That’s a lot on the plate of the likely most prominent member of what we’ll call … 

Southwestern Pennsylvania’s pandemic-forged leadership class

Innamorato follows political ally Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey to Grant Street, but also joins dozens of new leaders who replaced longtime executives in both the public and private realms.

Also reaching prominence this year were Pittsburgh Police Chief Larry Scirotto (who promptly disappointed some accountability advocates) and University of Pittsburgh Chancellor Joan Gabel (whose statements on Israel and Gaza left some dissatisfied).

The three years of turnover at the top that followed the Great Resignation may be remembered as a pivot point for the Pittsburgh region, but it won’t likely herald an extended and unanimous chorus of Kumbaya. Exhibit one: Gainey and UPMC (now led by Leslie Davis) show no signs of reaching an accord on any obligations the healthcare giant may have to the city’s coffers.

And the city’s bank balance? It’s likely to get leaner, as federal American Rescue Plan Act funds run dry. 

Gainey won’t be the only local leader scrambling for funds because … 

Schools will likely be scraping by

The Pittsburgh Public Schools are expecting similar headwinds as relief funding dries up and costs mount.

To get through the next budget year, PPS needs to draw nearly $30 million from its depleting rainy day fund. But even then, glaring inequalities persist, with students in some schools feeling they’re being taught in a “playground” instead of a rigorous educational setting.

The district also faces challenges over disparate student outcomes, variable teaching quality and uneven costs maintaining a patchwork of buildings that far exceed the needs of a shrinking student pool.

Graduates of high schools in Pittsburgh and suburban districts may be wise to review university balance sheets before filling out applications as … 

Higher ed weathers storms of its own

Higher education fairs little better in a city that’s hinged its revival on an “eds and meds” economy. 

Many newer workforce entrants are questioning the value of a degree altogether. The Community College of Allegheny County lost about half of its student body between 2010 and 2022 – and even a steep drop since the 2020 pandemic doesn’t account for the whole picture, one of steady decline.

Alarm bells rang out from Chatham University’s sedate Squirrel Hill campus in summer, when faculty learned the university faced a $12 million budget hole. To close the gap, President Rhonda Philips laid off department staff, trimmed administration salaries and slashed faculty pension contributions.

Chatham faculty answered with an early unionizing effort they hope will strengthen their position as the administration seeks to patch its deficit. That push can be viewed as one of many efforts aimed at …

Leveling society’s playing field

Campus concerns early in the year were focused primarily on safety for LGBTQ students, and when Pitt’s response wasn’t satisfying, an effort to bring the issue before the Board of Trustees resulted in criminal charges and student conduct hearings. At Duquesne University, a bid to rename Lambda to the Queer Student Union stagnated amid ongoing tension between the school’s Catholic orientation and the growing push for LGBTQ inclusion.

Nearly every university is grappling with diversity in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in admissions.

That ruling was also seen as a potential warning shot for other programs meant to undo effects of discrimination, and lent some urgency to the Gainey administration’s pledge to refresh the data behind race-conscious programs. Equitable law enforcement remained a work in progress, too, as a mayor elected in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police didn’t immediately dent the racial skew of his own department’s activities, or make “driving while Black” a thing of the past.

Equity efforts increasingly overlap with the ongoing environmental and climate catastrophe, and nowhere is that more newsworthy than in …

A region still fueled by fossils

Pollution from coal, manufacturing and other fossil fuels continues to plague a region still trying to shrug off the nickname “Smoky City.”

After Shell Chemical Appalachia opened its giant new petrochemical plant in Beaver County, a PublicSource investigation revealed a litany of malfunctions where, in many cases, the Department of Environmental Protection largely relied on Shell to assess its own missteps and the validity of public complaints.

In October, the Biden administration announced funding for two hydrogen hubs spanning stretches of Pennsylvania, although a proposal centered around Pittsburgh did not make the cut. Opinion is fiercely split on whether hydrogen has a role in the transition to clean energy or merely extends our fossil fuel dependence.

To some, natural gas extracted through fracking offers another pathway to weaning off coal and its carbon-heavy cousins. But families living less than 900 feet from a well pad in Washington County say their health and quality of life has suffered accordingly, while state legislation to keep drilling away from homes fell flat this summer.   

Climate change and air quality are daunting big-picture problems, and if you’re yearning to feel good about humanity, it might be advisable to look at …

Spirited neighborhoods rising to challenges

If the arc of history bends toward justice, the end of that rainbow can seem elusive — but perhaps it will end in the Hill District.

The neighborhood is still wary about developer promises after witnessing one of urban renewal’s most infamous injustices when the city razed the Lower Hill District and built the Civic Arena and parking lots. But leadership at the Bethel AME Church, victimized by the wrecking ball in 1957, believe they have a pact that will partly redress that tragedy with affordable housing.

Similarly, Wilkinsburg’s population losses created both a need for redevelopment and fear of gentrification. The apparent collapse of a push to merge the borough into Pittsburgh may invite civic leaders to build on the community’s strengths.

Pittsburgh’s growth depends on its embrace of diversity and its willingness to welcome newcomers, and nowhere was that more evident than in Beechview. The South Pittsburgh neighborhood hosts the biggest concentration of Latino residents in the region, and its business district — once crippled by disinvestment and fraud — features what may be the region’s most bilingual main street.

As PublicSource enters its 13th year of writing, photographing and otherwise pursuing stories for a better Pittsburgh, there’s plenty of room for improvement — in the region and the media. Also ample is the spirit of determination to solve problems, whether they’re as concrete as the shortage of affordable housing or as intangible as equity in education. We’ll continue to seek and share truth, whether it’s in the form of professionally reported investigations or community members’ essays. We hope you’ll continue with us on that journey, and thank you for your readership and support.

Rich Lord is the managing editor at PublicSource and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.

Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at PublicSourceand can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.

Fact-checked by the PublicSource staff.

The post In 2023, Pittsburgh and Allegheny county news overflowed — and the shelters did, too appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Colin Schreiber, 30, is raising a 1-year-old boy with his fiance on a partly vacant block in Coraopolis across the street from a noisy concrete plant. He recently gave up his job as a security guard at the airport because, he said, he would get home around 6 a.m. right as the machinery hummed to life, rattling his windows and denying him sleep.

Schreiber said the operators have no regard for nearby neighbors, which include the occupants of a low-income apartment complex and a senior high-rise. 

“I think they should have to pay the residents for the damage they’ve caused,” he said. 

Justin Bryan, 39, lives a few miles away in Moon. He’s a proud fifth-generation business operator who said he’s excited about investing in Coraopolis through the plant his family acquired there three years ago.

“We want to bring jobs back to the area and we really want to start reinvesting in the community,” he said.

“I’d love to be here as a good neighbor 70 years from now.”

The task of weighing these competing narratives may soon fall to a judge. In October Schreiber, with the help of Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, issued a 60-day notice of intent to sue Bryan’s company. He’s presenting nuisance claims, alleging multiple environmental violations, seeking damages from the company and urging stronger oversight from county and state regulators.

The pending class action suit also claims dust generated by the facility exposes residents to “known hazardous substances” that increase their risk of disease and health problems.

The plant, Riverside Builders Supply, makes concrete by mixing sand, cement, gravel and water, before transporting it to contractors for use on job sites. The Bryan Materials Group recently took over the aging facility, and according to Justin Bryan, plans a series of updates and improvements. He says in a good year the plant will distribute about 3,000 truck loads but in leaner times it could be as few as 1,800.

According to the filing, trucks rolling out of the site frequently stir up clouds of dust that settle over cars and windows in the surrounding blocks. Washing out the equipment results in polluted water discharges entering the stormwater system, it alleges.

The facility submits semiannual discharge reports to the state Department of Environmental Protection, and the Allegheny County Health Department [ACHD] monitors its emissions, according to Bryan, who said it has not been warned of noncompliance or red flags.

“They’ve made suggestions … and that’s again the best management practice,” he said of ACHD, noting the county last entered the site for a spot inspection in November. “They’re great to work with.” 

Amie Downs, spokesperson for the Health Department, acknowledged an uptick in resident complaints involving the facility and said the department has taken appropriate action.

The advocacy group Allegheny County Clean Air Now [ACCAN] has compiled a document logging 59 nuisance incidents, between March 2022 and November 2023, that it says were recorded by residents or members of its organization. 

Downs said the county has logged 18 official complaints in that time. Some of those may include more than one incident. “All [complaints] have been responded to in a timely manner,” Downs said in an email. 

Coated in dust

Bob Kricos lives two doors down from Schreiber on Pennsylvania Avenue. In the eight years he’s lived there, his two children have become prone to fits of coughing and sneezing that he attributes to dust from the plant.

At first, he said, the issues weren’t that bad. The former owners ran a diminishing operation, and the site was far less active until Bryan took it over and ramped up production.

Recently, he said, things have become intolerable and he’s often driven out of bed before 6 a.m. His biggest concern remains the dust, though. 

“The plant creates a very fine dust that coats and clogs up everything outside and inside my house,” he wrote in a statement delivered to ACHD officials during a recent Board of Health meeting. “The cars, roads and houses are all coated in cement dust. … We clean daily and it looks like you didn’t clean the next day. There is a perpetual layer of cement dust on everything.”

In hopes of improving their indoor air quality, Kricos has set up five filters in different areas of his home. He’s made some himself by taping furnace filters around a box fan to form a sealed cube trapping unwanted particles. He also owns professional grade air cleaners supplied through a partnership between ACCAN and the Pittsburgh-based group ROCIS, for Reducing Outdoor Contaminants in Indoor Spaces.

Angelo Taranto, ACCAN’s secretary, said he has been engaging the community around Riverside since residents, including Schreiber, began reaching out with concerns last spring. 

Taranto has canvassed homes along Pennsylvania Avenue, including the low-income housing at Coraopolis Gardens and, farther along on 1st Avenue, senior living high-rise Coraopolis Towers. Most were familiar with the facility’s disruptions, he said, but few accepted free filters.

Taranto said the cleaners offer immediate help, while efforts for firmer oversight and regulation could take years.

The cleaners work by filtering out particles of any variety or origin that could impact human health, said Linda Wigington, team leader at ROCIS.

“Particles from any number of sources can really aggravate acute conditions as well as chronic conditions,” Wigington added.

“The unique situation in Coraopolis with the concrete plant is that they’re just so close to it.”

Kricos said his children’s symptoms have eased since installing the equipment.

“It doesn’t solve the problem but it’s a lot better,” he said. “My kids were coughing and sneezing constantly before we got this.”

Tracking the trucks

Schreiber, Krikos and Taranto have submitted complaints to the Health Department, often including photographs showing swirling dust clouds or other alleged infractions. They say the department responded by installing 5 mph speed limit signs around the site and also requiring a fugitive emission management plan. But Taranto said Riverside’s six-page plan outline lacks the teeth of a federal Title V permit, which is required of high-pollution facilities.

Downs confirmed the fugitive emissions plan resulted from the Health Department’s recent engagement with the facility, adding that concrete batch plants are generally exempt from permitting requirements if they’re fitted with a particulate matter filter. She declined to confirm whether Riverside employs such a filter.

Bryan said he employs a sprinkler system and street cleaners across the yard to reduce dust and encourages his employees to consider the neighbors while going about the inevitably disruptive work of concrete production.

“That’s what I preach to my guys. … It’s just, ‘Let’s be, you know, generally respectful,’” he said.

ACCAN is gearing up to launch a web page dedicated to documenting the facility. Using technology developed by CMU’s CREATE Lab, the site will present air quality data along with camera footage using a monitor and camera installed on Kricos’ property. 

ACCAN also intends to publish copies of complaints submitted to ACHD – along with any responses – in a blog format. Since 2021, the group has maintained a similar page documenting alleged violations at a metal scrapping plant a few miles upstream on Neville Island. That plant, owned by Metalico, is the subject of an ongoing class action lawsuit alleging its emissions and noisy operations make it a public nuisance culpable of negligence. 

Planting a better future

Before he was hit with a notice to sue in early October, Bryan said, he had no direct contact with Schreiber or other angered residents. If they’d called or even sought him out on site, things may have turned out differently, he added.

“I wish they would have come talk to me,” Bryan said. “We want to integrate in the community.”

Randon Willard, executive director of the Coraopolis Community Development Corporation, said he couldn’t speak to the environmental concerns but noted that Riverside has given generous donations to the corporation’s food pantry and snack pack programs.

“They have been very invested,” Willard said of Riverside. “I know Justin personally and he wants to see the Coraopolis community thrive and grow.”

When the company took over Riverside in 2020, the aging plant had more or less run its course, Bryan said. They kept on the three employees that came with the sale and have since built the workforce back to a complement of 26. 

Bryan said he’s already working on a series of updates and modifications he expects will head off neighbor concerns, however the suit shakes out. 

Subject to borough approval, the rickety equipment will be outfitted with sleek and efficient retrofits. More importantly for the likes of Schreiber and Kricos, Bryan plans to enclose it within a building that would trap much of the dust and noise. And the narrow wedge of grass that separates the plant from the public street will be walled and landscaped.

“We want to be here,” Bryan said. “This is a good spot for us. We want to really spend some money and reconfigure a lot of that to modernize it.”

Bryan said he sympathizes with their concerns but notes the plant – founded in the 1960s – has been there far longer than most of the residents.

“If I had a home and somebody or the borough rezoned across the street and put up a concrete plant that would be difficult,” he said. “Except this has always been here.”

Schreiber and Kricos both said they’ve considered moving but are limited on options. Both say their children’s health and futures drive on their opposition to the plant.

“I just want to live peacefully and raise my kids in a safe environment,” Kricos told ACHD.

Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at PublicSource. He can be reached at jamie@publicsource.org.

This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.

The post Residents sue as Coraopolis concrete plant ‘coats and clogs up everything’ appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

For decades, the people of Yukon, a town of around 500 in Westmoreland County, have lived beneath a growing mountain of industrial waste.

Since 1964, when a landfill first began to take in the sludgy, heavy-metal-laden byproducts of a then-booming steel industry, locals have complained of health problems and suspected the facility of operating dangerously.

A March report from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] presents new evidence that landfill operator MAX Environmental failed to comply with federal clean water and hazardous waste laws, reinforcing long-held suspicions among the landfill’s neighbors. 

“These are things that the community has been saying for a long time,” said Stacey Magda, an organizer with Mountain Watershed Association, who pointed to a generalized failure to contain hazardous waste and unpermitted liquid storage tanks found on-site as “big red flags.”

“And now we actually have documentation,” she said.

In March, EPA investigators spent five days at the facility and found that MAX failed to properly treat and store hazardous waste. An EPA lab found one sample with more than 1,300 times the safe disposal limit of cancer-causing cadmium in a landfill not permitted for untreated hazardous waste disposal. Investigators found leaks, spills and dilapidated hazardous waste storage areas, and reported that MAX failed to properly inspect its leak detection system and hazardous waste containment areas.

The investigation also found that the company did not report some monitoring data to regulators as its permit requires, and that it did not use equipment intended to remove hazardous heavy metals from wastewater discharged into Sewickley Creek, a main tributary to the Youghiogheny River that flows into the Monongahela at McKeesport.

Mountain Watershed Association, a conservation and watchdog group that advocates for the safety of residents in Yukon and for the protection of the greater watershed, first obtained the EPA report in October through a public records review.

“This is the first time that we’ve really seen this really black-and-white proof of what’s really happening at MAX Environmental,” Magda said.

The EPA’s findings come as MAX seeks to add a seventh landfill permit to its operations in Yukon, and as the company petitions state regulators to reclassify the sludge it generates from waste treatment as nonhazardous. 

MAX Environmental General Manager Carl Spadaro said in an email response to PublicSource’s questions that the company has since revised waste sampling procedures and “implemented a modified procedure” for testing certain treated hazardous waste to make sure it meets standards. The company has also begun a “structural assessment” of the containment building floor, and stormwater management training. MAX recently hired an engineering consultant to evaluate possible improvements of a containment area, and a contractor to repair the exterior walls of containment buildings, Spadaro wrote.

‘Actively leaking’ hazardous waste

In March, investigators from the EPA’s National Enforcement Investigations Center [NEIC] spent five days at MAX’s facility in Yukon, which is permitted to treat and dispose of hazardous waste. MAX must treat hazardous waste to acceptable levels before burying it in their landfill, according to permits. 

EPA testing, however, found that samples of the waste treated and buried by MAX contained up to 21 times the standard for lead, and more than 1,300 times the standard for cadmium, which is considered a cancer-causing agent by the Centers for Disease Control. 

According to the report, MAX’s on-site laboratory tested and approved waste for disposal which remained hazardous after treatment. The report notes MAX’s hazardous waste treatment process is “ineffective” at meeting treatment standards. 

MAX’s Spadaro wrote that the company disagrees with the observation that MAX does not properly treat hazardous waste. A Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection [DEP] accredited laboratory “analyzed the waste at issue and demonstrated that we meet the appropriate treatment standards,” he wrote. He added: “Any hazardous waste leaks or spills that NEIC might have observed were onto containment areas, which is what they were designed and constructed for.” 

EPA regulations stipulate that hazardous waste storage areas must be “completely enclosed,” but when investigators arrived at MAX’s Yukon facility they observed “significant damage and deterioration” to the walls of its hazardous waste storage buildings and “large holes” and damaged or missing exterior walls which exposed hazardous waste to the elements. Investigators observed rain falling directly on hazardous waste through holes in the roof of a storage building, and a building that stored hazardous waste that was missing a wall entirely on its eastern side. 

Investigators observed hazardous waste in open containers, “actively leaking” from a storage container and on the ground outside treatment pits. Vehicles that came into contact with waste tracked it across the facility, the EPA found.

Spadaro wrote that the landfill’s neighbors “should have no concerns about health and safety related to our operations because the wastes are kept on site in contained areas.” He added that facility employees have “periodic medical examinations to make sure that they are not exposed to elevated levels of hazardous materials.”

Defending the sludge

In a 2019 petition to the DEP, MAX wrote that its “sludge has not exhibited any hazardous characteristic, created any environmental impact, or been managed in a manner inconsistent with any environmental regulations,” with waste concentrations “well below” standards. It asked that the runoff from its landfill no longer be considered hazardous waste. The petition to delist the waste is pending regulatory approval.

In March, EPA investigators found that MAX’s equipment used to remove heavy metals from wastewater “is not properly operated and maintained and was out of service.” They wrote: “The facility is not getting complete treatment,” possibly resulting in excess metals in the wastewater. EPA records show that MAX violated its discharge permits in five straight quarters between January of 2022 and March of this year.

Stacey Magda (left), an organizer with Mountain Watershed Association, and Yukon resident Debbie Franzetta (right), who moved to Yukon with her husband in 1987, look out across Sewickley Creek near the outfall where MAX discharges on Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023. “Why now?” Franzetta asked of the EPA inspection. “They should have been here 40 years ago.” (Photos by Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource)

Roughly a week later, John Stolz, director of the Center for Environmental Research and Education at Duquesne University, sampled discharge from the facility’s outfall into Sewickley Creek. According to his preliminary testing “the discharge was incredibly high,” he said. “Everything was elevated.” 

“They’re saying they discharge 23 micrograms per liter on average with a maximum of 79 micrograms per liter on a maximum for arsenic,” said Stolz. “And I’m telling you, I’ve measured over 600 micrograms per liter in their discharge.” 

The amount of arsenic Stolz found at MAX’s outfall is nearly eight times higher than the maximum amount the company reported to regulators. For lead, Stolz’s testing showed levels 5.7 times higher than what MAX reported. For copper, his results came in more than 24 times the company’s reported levels.

“People are fishing in that stream,” Stolz said. The outfall is roughly 200 yards upstream from a marked roadside fishing location. “People are recreating in that stream.” He added that more testing is needed upstream and downstream to understand the impact on the watershed. 

“This shouldn’t be for me to do.” Stolz said. “This should be for the DEP to do.”

DEP spokesperson Lauren Camarda said that agency staff attended the March investigation with the EPA and is aware of the contents of the report. The agency is conducting a separate investigation into the facility, and does not comment on ongoing investigations, Camarda said.

What does the future hold?

Last year, MAX applied for a permit to build a seventh landfill in Yukon which would dispose of untreated hazardous waste. At a DEP hearing at the local fire hall last December, residents shared a range of illnesses that they blame on MAX and urged the agency to deny the expansion. 

Misty Springer, who lives below the landfill, told the DEP representatives that she’s experienced six miscarriages. “Not fun going through one, but six of them, it’s fucking hell,” she said. 

“How many people on your block have cancer?” she asked officials. “How many people in your town? Because I bet your town is bigger than mine, and I bet you my town has more people with cancer than yours.”

In February, after residents opposed the expansion and the DEP notified the company of deficiencies in its application, MAX pulled its submission, but vowed to refile. 

Now, in light of the current EPA investigation, MAX’s Spadaro said the company has suspended plans to pursue the permit “until we resolve all outstanding compliance concerns from EPA and DEP.”

“This is a crux moment,” Magda said. “Landfill six is very close to capacity. We now know that there is untreated hazardous waste in there. We don’t know where. We don’t know how deep.”

“The untreated hazardous waste is never going to leave Yukon.”

Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.

This story was fact-checked by Abigail Nemec-Merwede.

The post EPA investigation shows failures at Westmoreland hazardous waste treatment facility amid resident fears appeared first on PublicSource. PublicSource is a nonprofit news organization serving the Pittsburgh region. Visit www.publicsource.org to read more.

Update (11/9/23): Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor announced that his office will begin an audit of the county’s Clean Air Fund.

“Our aim with this audit is to ensure that uses of the Clean Air Fund are in compliance with the law and these funds are available for projects designed to improve air quality and public health,” O’Connor said in a press release. “We must ensure there is transparency and accountability for how our County distributes these funds.”

O’Connor’s office said the audit “will examine whether uses of the fund have complied with the purposes for which it was established, the process by which community organizations apply for and are awarded grants from the fund, the extent to which ACHD has obtained input from affected communities regarding use of the Fund’s resources,” among other inquiries.

Allegheny County Board of Health sends bid to tap Clean Air Fund to public comment phase

Update (3/22/23): The Allegheny County Board of Health voted to advance the proposal to tap the Clean Air Fund for more support for the Air Quality Program to an extended public comment phase. Public comment will be followed by another consideration by the Air Pollution Control Advisory Committee.

During the meeting, numerous environmental advocacy organizations, including the Breathe Project, the Group Against Smog and Pollution [GASP], Valley Clean Air Now, Clean Air Council and PennEnvironment spoke in opposition to the proposal. 

Reported 3/20/23: The Allegheny County Health Department’s Air Quality Program is seeking unprecedented access to the Clean Air Fund, a coffer of nearly $10 million earmarked largely for community-based projects that address Allegheny County’s chronic air quality issues.

During a special meeting of the Air Pollution Control Advisory Committee on March 13, County Manager Jennifer Liptak painted an urgent portrait of a department experiencing fiscal turbulence.

“If we continue down this road, we’re going to continue to have a deficit until we figure out how to make this program more efficient,” she said.

The meeting was the ninth in a lengthy and contentious debate over a proposal to increase the portion of the fund that the Air Quality Program may use for its operating expenses. The program, which oversees monitoring and enforcement of air pollution regulations, has been allowed to use up to 5% of the Clean Air Fund balance to pay for its operations. Now the department seeks a five-fold bump — up to 25% — of monies that could otherwise be used to fund community projects.

Over the past several months, the committee expressed doubts about the proposal, with many members questioning whether the move is an appropriate use of funds, and whether it is financially justified. 

“The substantial change should not be taken lightly,” said Mark Jeffrey, U.S. Steel’s representative on the committee, on March 13. “At the end of the day, we want the money to go back to communities. We want to improve air quality in Allegheny County. And this is going to take a dent out of it one way or the other.”

A motion to send the proposal to the Board of Health passed the committee by an 8-4 vote. The board on Wednesday will decide whether to send the proposal to the next stage: public comment. The board shot down a previous iteration of the proposal in January, which was brought to a vote without the committee’s blessing. 

The latest push adds to the debate over who should have access to the fund and for what purposes. The process also raises questions of how to appropriately support a county air program with dwindling revenue that is struggling to stay in the black.

After PublicSource inquiries, County Controller Corey O’Connor pledged to audit the Clean Air Fund this year, saying that had not been previously done.

Changing the Clean Air Fund? 

The Clean Air Fund contains nearly $10 million in fines and penalties paid by polluters in Allegheny County, and it continues to receive money each year as violations persist. 

Per county law, the fund is intended “solely to support activities related to the improvement of air quality within Allegheny County and to support activities which will increase or improve knowledge concerning air pollution, its causes, its effects, and the control thereof.” As is, the Air Quality Program may draw up to 5% of the fund balance each year for operating costs.

The Air Quality Program is made up of about 45 engineers, analysts and inspectors, and is responsible for monitoring air pollution in Allegheny County, permitting for major polluters and enforcing air quality regulations.

Under the new proposal, the Air Quality Program’s slice of pollution-penalty pie would grow five times to 25% of the Clean Air Fund’s balance, with an annual cap of $1.25 million and a clause that says the stopgap measure would sunset after four years. After that, the Air Quality Program would again be limited to drawing 5% of the Clean Air Fund. 

The Air Quality Program has drawn the full 5% from the fund to cover operating expenses per the regulation each year since at least 2016 — typically around $500,000 to $600,000.

Since 2019, the program received nearly $2.1 million from the Clean Air Fund for operating expenses, 44% of the total Clean Air Fund expenditures, according to data from the county controller’s office. 

The Health Department also used $70,065 in Clean Air Fund dollars to cover temporary staffing expenses, and $121,290 for air quality permitting and enforcement software, according to contracts. In 2017, $500,000 was transferred from the Clean Air Fund to pay for renovations for a Health Department building in Lawrenceville. 

A precarious Air Quality Program

Financials show 2023 as an inflection point: The Air Quality Program faces a projected $760,000 deficit this year. Liptak, along with acting Health Department Director Patrick Dowd and Deputy of Environmental Health Geoff Rabinowitz, said the proposal to draw more from the Clean Air Fund is a way to cover the difference, and would be a stopgap measure as the program seeks to hire a full staff and figure out how to right the ship.

“The program has to be functional,” Rabinowitz told the Air Pollution Control Advisory Committee at a meeting in January. “This is not a situation that is tenable in perpetuity.

“There is a sense of urgency here, and I hope you hear that in my voice.”

From the county’s perspective, the Clean Air Fund is a viable and available avenue to keep the Air Quality Program functional without dipping into the county’s general fund, which was used to cover a $481,000 deficit in 2022. “That’s not good,” said Liptak.

“The general fund is the property tax dollars for the citizens of Allegheny County,” she said. “That’s the last resort.”

The Air Quality Program does not usually rely on the county general fund to finance its staff like many other departments do. Instead, the program has historically relied on grant funding and a variety of fees collected from industrial emitters.

The closure of large industrial facilities like the Shenango Coke Works on Neville Island in 2016 and the Cheswick Generating Station in 2022 were by all accounts boosts to the county’s air quality, but the facilities were also longtime sources of revenue for the Air Quality Program. 

EPA grants have also been unreliable, said Rabinowitz. In addition, U.S. Steel is currently appealing $6.4 million in penalties, and those funds are held in an escrow account until litigation is resolved. A portion of those funds, if secured, would help to replenish the Clean Air Fund, Liptak said.

Diverting money meant for communities?

The Clean Air Fund is “meant to be utilized predominantly for supporting educational programs or direct projects that reduce air quality emission or improve air quality in fenceline environmental justice communities,” said Steve Hvozdovich, a committee member and state campaigns director for Clean Water Action. “That's not how that's going to be utilized over the course of these next four years of this process if this is adopted.”

Under the new proposal, the Clean Air Fund could be drained by the time the new regulation phases out, Hvozdovich said. 

“If you do the math,” he said, based on the county manager’s projection, “you're going to drain the Clean Air Fund by the end of 2026 by 75%. I'd be fine with that if the bulk of that was going to the community. But it's not. It's being split essentially almost evenly between the operating expenses of the Air Quality Program and the public. And I just don't think that's the right use of those funds.”

O’Connor, the county’s independent fiscal watchdog, questioned whether a regulation change that spans four years is the right path, particularly given the opportunity for a new county executive to have a hand in deciding the funding future of the program, once elected. 

O’Connor suggested that the Health Department consider increasing fines for polluters to bolster the budget, or resort to the county general fund to cover personnel.

“If this is a one-time hit just to get through for a couple of months, that's a different conversation than a four-year plan,” he said. “If you look at a four-year long-term plan, the fund is going to be dwindling. The money is supposed to go towards communities that want to use this fund for environmental purposes."

Questions of accessibility and proper use of funds

Thaddeus Popovich, who co-founded Allegheny County Clean Air Now [ACCAN] in 2014, addressed the committee, ACHD leadership and the county manager last week. 

“Since 2020, ACCAN has been asking the department to conduct a comprehensive air toxics and odor study in the Neville Island area, like the one they did in the Mon Valley,” he said. “The study would provide important information that could help the Health Department to better regulate industries in this airshed, which could better protect the health of residents in our communities.”

Miles away in Clairton, Valley Clean Air Now [VCAN] has for years attempted to access the fund to purchase home air filters for residents, with no success.

“There was no way to apply to the fund,” said Myron Arnowitt, who led efforts to secure air filter funding for VCAN. “And there still isn’t.”

The department is supposed to issue requests for proposals [RFPs] for Clean Air Fund funding, but community groups like VCAN and ACCAN say those are few and far between, with no opportunities to access funding in the interim. 

The county manager projected that $2 million in Clean Air Fund money will be spent on projects this year — more than what was spent on projects from the fund across the last three years combined — followed by $1 million for each year through 2027. 

But the Health Department hasn’t issued an RFP “in ages,” Hvozdovich said. 

The Health Department did not respond by deadline to PublicSource’s request for information on the timing of any recent RFPs for Clean Air Fund allocations. The department has yet to announce criteria for the $2 million the manager projected would soon be up for grabs.

“Why are we not spending the money every year?” O’Connor questioned. The fund has carried a balance roughly between $10 million and $12 million since 2016. “These are capital expenditures that we can be spending with community groups.” 

Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Twitter and Instagram @quinnglabicki.

This story was fact-checked by Dakota Castro-Jarrett.

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A gas industry advisory council to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection opened its meeting earlier this month by discussing the possibility of legalizing the spreading of toxic wastewater from conventional gas drilling on roads as a dust and snow treatment, despite studies showing the practice is potentially harmful to human health and the environment.

The Pennsylvania Grade Crude Development Advisory Council’s agenda included consideration of two recent studies from Penn State University, the second published in July, that concluded such roadway treatments were ineffective and potentially unsafe.

Spraying roads with “produced water,” highly saline wastewater containing proprietary drilling  chemicals as well as benzene, arsenic and radium 226 and 228, both radioactive isotopes, has been outlawed in Pennsylvania since 2016, but only for fluid that comes from unconventional, or fracked, gas wells. The DEP issued a moratorium on spraying produced water from conventional wells onto roadways in Pennsylvania in 2018 after the practice was challenged before the state’s Environmental Hearing Board. 

Despite the recent studies, advisory council members remain unconvinced that spreading produced water from conventional wells on roadways would be harmful. The meeting opened with a discussion about the feasibility of submitting a rule-making petition to the DEP to legalize the spreading of produced water from conventional wells on roads as a dust suppressant.

One member of the council likened spreading liquids on roads to the game Russian roulette. “Anything can go on roads,” said Arthur Stewart, president of the oil and gas services company Cameron. “Except we’re not putting produced water down because that’s the one out of the many that we’ve stopped to study.”

Another said he doubted the results from the two studies. “I’m not alarmed by this report,” he said, in reference to the July study. He was equally skeptical about the health ramifications of spreading produced water on roads. “I don’t believe any of this is harming, in a significant way, human health or the environment,” he said.

The DEP, asked about comments by advisory council members, said in a statement that it “considers all research, impact analysis, or regulatory action, as we work to protect public health and safety and the environment from potential impacts from oil and gas activities.”

The agency noted that spreading produced water from unconventional wells is illegal in the state, but that its regulations allow for an industry to demonstrate its waste is safe for another purpose. 

“To date, no conventional oil and gas operator has made the necessary showing to use conventional oil and gas produced water for roadspreading,” the DEP said. 

The agency did not directly address whether it supports legalizing the practice, saying only that it “will make changes as needed to protect Pennsylvanians’ health and environment.” 

David Hess, the retired former DEP secretary who now edits a blog called the PA Environmental Digest, watched, recorded and transcribed the live-streamed meeting and published a summary of the proceedings. 

“The reality is, even though dumping on roads is illegal, it is happening all the time, every day,” said Hess, who does not support the practice. Local reporting and watchdog organizations who follow the uses of produced water have also reported that produced water is still dumped on roadways in Pennsylvania, despite the moratorium. 

Read more: Concern for my daughters’ futures steered my architecture practice toward environmental solutions

Scientists in Pennsylvania who study the chemical composition of produced water and its effects once spread on roadways have found that it is an ineffective means of suppressing dust and melting ice, and is potentially harmful to human health and the environment.

At their peak, conventional wells numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Pennsylvania before eventually drying up. Now, unconventional wells, which bore deeper than conventional wells and run both vertically and horizontally, account for most of the gas produced in the state. Pennsylvania’s oil and gas industry generated over 2 billion gallons of produced water in 2022, the vast majority of which comes from unconventional wells.

Produced water from unconventional wells is “very similar physically and chemically,” to produced water from conventional wells, said Hess. “The only difference may be there are some other chemicals in the unconventional wastewater.”

Produced water spread on roads “washes off the road, and doesn’t suppress dust,” said Bill Burgos, a professor of environmental engineering at Penn State and a co-author of the studies discussed at the advisory council meeting. “It’s a terrible idea.”

Burgos and a team of scientists at Penn State began publishing studies on produced water in the late 2010s, and, after years of studying the chemical makeup of the material, Burgos was shocked to discover the term “road spreading” in one of his data files. “Surely this stuff isn’t spread on roads,” he remembered thinking.

“There’s plenty of examples of seeing stressed vegetation in the gullies by the road because there’s so much salt” in the produced water, he continued. “Health issues are often slow to develop — you don’t see them right away.”

In the last two years, Burgos has co-authored two studies that examine the efficacy and consequences of spreading produced water on roads as a dust and winter weather suppressant. The first, released by the DEP last May, found that “when applied as a dust suppressant, oil and gas produced waters were essentially no more effective than rainwater.” 

Read more: Allegheny County executive election puts environmental decisions up in the air

The second, published this July and the subject of the most recent meeting, found that many organic and brine-based materials spread on roads have potential health and environmental consequences — including produced water. The difference was that many of the other materials the team studied worked as a dust suppressant or winter weather mitigator, whereas “you get all the risk and no benefit of the product from oil and gas materials,” Burgos said.

Burgos, who has been invited to past advisory council meetings to discuss his work, finds it “frustrating to hear those guys taking things we’ve done and twisting it to fit their position.”

At the meeting, Kurt Klapkowski, the acting deputy secretary of oil and gas management at the DEP, initially sounded skeptical of the arguments Stewart and others were making, at least from a regulatory perspective. “Because produced fluids are waste material, we have to treat them, regulate them as waste material,” he said.

The challenge the conventional oil and gas industry faces, he continued, is finding a way to get produced water designated for “beneficial reuse.” Klapkowski acknowledged that that outcome may be unlikely.

That last point particularly rankled Tom Schuster, the director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Sierra Club, a conservation organization. “We should all be skeptical when we try to classify industrial waste as beneficial. Beneficial to whom?” he asked. “The beneficial part is only for the industry.”

Schuster said the Sierra Club would support an outright ban on produced water being spread on roadways and said that legislative efforts to regulate the industry shouldn’t stop there.

Produced water “needs to be treated as hazardous waste — because it is hazardous waste,” he said.

Right now, there are bills in the Pennsylvania General Assembly that would close the loopholes that allow oil and gas companies to treat their waste as non-hazardous, but Hess is not convinced a swift legislative backlash to any proposal from the oil and gas industry is imminent. 

Conventional oil and gas producers “have done their best to try and block anything that even resembles change,” Hess said, “and they’ve been very good at it.” 

“They have political folks that protect them, and that’s been true for decade after decade after decade.”

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.

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After decades of industry resistance, federal safety officials are finally starting to regulate a huge part of the nation’s pipeline system.

With little attention from the mainstream media, the Biden administration has begun imposing new rules on some 400,000 miles of gas pipes. Many are bigger and more dangerous lines laid since the boom in fracking.

Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, said the move is way overdue. Explosions on the lines, he said, “have killed people and injured people and it’s high time these lines were regulated.”

Erin Murphy, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund, called  it “a significant step forward.”

At issue are what the gas industry refers to as “gathering lines.” These are pipelines that carry gas directly from drilling sites. They run mostly through rural areas and tie into processing plants, which, in turn, pump the gas in big interstate lines to population areas.

The failure to impose any safety standards on the lines or even to know where they are has long been a big hole in safety oversight.  

But that hole has grown far larger as operators have laid thousands of miles of new pipe to accommodate fracking. Those lines have been wider in diameter and operate at higher pressures than older pipelines, undermining a regulatory system reflecting earlier technology.

The first part of the new rules kicked in earlier this year when the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for the first time required operators to file basic reports about these pipelines, including their total miles, ages, widths — and any leaks the firms had become aware of. Such reports must be filed now for every gathering line in the United States.

The reports cover about 400,000 miles of pipe—and the first round of reports filed this year showed that the industry, even while acting only on a voluntary basis, found and fixed more than 5,000 leaks last year.

More stringent rules are to take effect next year for the biggest of the gathering lines, those more than 16 inches in width or near residential buildings and more than 8.6 inches. For the first time, operators will be required to carry out regular surveys for leaks and repair them. 

For these bigger lines, they will also have to install above-ground markers and new anti-corrosion controls and conduct public-awareness campaigns to alert nearby residents to the lines. These rules will apply to about 20,000 existing miles of the total 400,000 gathering-line mileage.

Even as it implemented the new rules, the agency this year proposed a major expansion of the requirement for surveys and repairs.  It wants to extend this regulation to cover about another 80,000 miles of the larger gathering lines. It would also require firms to provide geocoding information charting the paths of these lines to the National Pipeline Mapping System, closing what critics call another big regulatory gap. 

The new rules for reporting and testing are a win for regulators after decades of defeat. Efforts to regulate the lines failed in 1974, 1986, 1991 and 2006. The rules taking effect now were first officially proposed a dozen years ago.

The industry fought back. The trade group GPA Midstream, formerly  the Gas Producers Association, argued against the regulations and filed a lengthy appeal after PHMSA enacted them in November 2021. The trade organization complained that the agency had overestimated the regulations’ benefits and underestimated their cost.

While regulators had said the safety measures would cost about $13 million yearly, the trade group’s expert put it at $1.8 billion. PHMSA responded bluntly, saying in an official statement that the industry analysis was “riddled with flaws.”

In the end, the trade group agreed it would drop its appeal after the Pipeline Administration relented a bit by pushing back the effective date for the new testing requirements until May 2024. 

However, GPA Midstream still opposes the proposed extension of the tests to another 80,000 miles. The trade group declined comment for this article. 

In a critical statement filed with PHMSA, GPA Midstream said, among other criticisms, that the proposal was based on flawed science and would needlessly require repairs of minor leaks that pose no danger.

Advocates have been particularly intent on these new regulations because of the role of gathering lines in the leakage of methane, known to be an especially potent contributor to global warming.  They say that the lines, carrying newly drilled unprocessed gas, are more subject to corrosive damage and thus methane emissions.

Leaks aside, the pipes have periodically been subject to explosions.

In 2010, a bulldozer struck a 14-inch gas gathering line in Darrouzett in northern Texas, and the resulting explosion killed two workers and injured three others. Days later, in August 2018 in Midland, Texas, a failure in a six-inch gathering line triggered an explosion in a nearby 12-inch transmission pipeline, killing one worker and injuring seven others. That same month, a corroded 10-inch gas gathering line blew up 15 miles away, killing a three-year-old girl inside her home.

The following month, a new gathering line in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, ruptured, sending a massive fireball skyward and destroying a house.

Last year, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer LP,  a big Texas-based pipeline company, pleaded no contest to environmental crimes after state prosecutors in Pennsylvania determined negligent construction had permitted the pipe to come apart. Energy Transfer paid more than $30 million in fines and settlement payments to resolve the criminal case and complaints from regulators.

Over the years, the most serious accidents have taken place when larger transmission lines have blown up.   PHMSA itself was founded after a 32-inch transmission line fractured in Louisiana in 1965, killing 17 people. 

The Pipeline Safety Trust, based in Bellingham, Washington, was funded as an advocacy organization out of proceeds from $4 million in fines paid after a 16-inch line exploded there in 1999, killing a man and two 10-year-old boys.

In the years since then, with the increased output from fracking, the distinction between transmission lines and gathering lines has been disappearing.

“Modern gas gathering lines often bear a closer resemblance to large interstate transmission lines than the diffuse network of small, low-pressure lines that previously characterized gathering lines,” federal regulators said in imposing the new rules.

They summed up: “These changes are placing unprecedented demands and increasing safety risks on the nation’s pipeline system.”

In an August analysis of the new data now flowing in from pipeline operators, the Environmental Defense Fund detailed the trend. For much of the late 1900s, the industry laid down about 14,000 miles of gathering line per decade. 

Since 2000, production has tripled, according to a report by Kate Roberts, a senior research analyst at EDF. 

Her report also identified more than 200,000 miles of gathering lines that were more than eight inches in diameter, including more than 3,000 miles of behemoth lines more than 30 inches wide.

Another aspect of the new data was disquieting: PHMSA has estimated that more than 435,000 miles of gathering lines cross the United States, while an industry data organization puts the figure at 440,000 miles. 

But pipe firms reported a total of only 344,000 miles in their first-ever disclosure, filed in March. In Pennsylvania, for instance, operators reported less than half the mileage than the figure listed by the industry data organization, Texas-based Drillinginfo. 

As Murphy, the lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund, said, it raises “a concern that operators may be underreporting their mileage to PHMSA.”

Karen Gdula lives in Center Township in Beaver County, three houses from where the 40-mile gathering line went up in flames in 2018 at nearly 5 a.m. “What woke me was the earth was vibrating. I could feel it shaking our house,” she recalled recently. “My first words to my husband were, ‘Get dressed. Get your medicine. We’re going to evacuate.’

“When we went outside, the flames were shooting as high as the ancient pine trees in the region,” she said. “And the sky was lit up like it was mid-afternoon.”

Gdula said she welcomed the new rules, but said the price paid for them over the years has been too high. “Until there are more injuries and death,” she said, “the regulations in most cases are not forthcoming.”

This article originally appeared in Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for the ICN newsletter here.

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Two hydrogen hubs partially located in Pennsylvania will receive slices of $7 billion in federal funding, the Biden Administration announced Friday. 

The proposed Appalachian Regional Clean Hydrogen Hub [ARCH2] is based primarily in West Virginia but will span parts of Western Pennsylvania. In Eastern Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic Clean Hydrogen Hub, or MACH2, will also receive funding. The two projects are among seven nationally to be designated for funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. 

A separate proposal centered on the Pittsburgh region, which had garnered support from local and state officials including Gov. Josh Shapiro, Allegheny County Executive Rich Fitzgerald and local labor and industry leaders, was not selected for funding by the White House, stirring disappointment among proponents.

The ARCH2 hydrogen hub, backed by the largest natural gas producer in the United States, Pittsburgh-based EQT Corp., will use fracked natural gas to produce hydrogen. The resulting carbon emissions from that process are to be captured and injected deep underground. The hub will center in West Virginia, but will also span parts of eastern Kentucky, Ohio and Southwestern Pennsylvania. The project is set to receive up to $925 million in federal funding.

Across the state, the MACH2 hydrogen hub will extend over parts of Pennsylvania, Delaware and southern New Jersey, and will use renewable and nuclear electricity to produce the element. The project is set to receive up to $750 million from the federal government.

The Biden Administration expects the seven hubs to catalyze an additional $43 billion in private investment, bringing the total to nearly $50 billion for “one of the largest investments in clean manufacturing ever.”

What is a hydrogen hub?

Hydrogen, nature’s simplest element, can be transported, stored and ultimately combusted with zero carbon footprint. But it takes energy to separate the hydrogen from other molecules.

Currently, 96% of global hydrogen production is powered by fossil fuels and is known as gray hydrogen. Hydrogen separated from water using electricity from renewable sources is known as green hydrogen. Blue hydrogen would be made with natural gas, and the resulting carbon emissions would be captured and buried deep underground through a process known as carbon capture and sequestration. 

Hydrogen is a key component of the Biden administration’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, but it is restricted to uses that are difficult to electrify, such as steel and cement production, heavy-duty transportation and shipping.

Pittsburgh left out?

Locally, business and labor organizations expressed disappointment with the decision to fund the West Virginia-based ARCH2 proposal over another hub that would have been based in the Pittsburgh Region, the Decarbonization Network of Appalachia [DNA], which was also among 33 finalists. 

“While we are disappointed that the [Southwestern Pennsylvania]-based DNA project was not chosen, we’re pleased that the eastern side of the state has the potential to benefit from the jobs and investment associated with the MACH2 project,” said Jeff Nobers, executive director of Pittsburgh Works Together, a labor and industry organization, in a statement Friday morning. 

“We will have a role in the WV-based ARCH2 project, and some jobs will be created here and in other areas of the state, but certainly not at the level we had hoped. It is critical that we work together to attract as many jobs and as much investment as possible from the ARCH2 project” into Southwestern Pennsylvania.

Joe Rockey, the Republican nominee for Allegheny County executive, called the Department of Energy decision “an example of what happens when local leaders don’t unite behind important projects.” In a statement, he accused Democratic nominee Sara Innamorato of opposing the energy industry.

Innamorato later issued a statement that ARCH2 “has the potential to benefit thousands of skilled union workers in Western Pennsylvania.” She said more federal funding is likely. “We will win our fair share.”

According to the Department of Energy, ARCH2 is projected to create more than 3,000 permanent jobs in addition to 18,000 construction jobs, some of which are likely to be spread across parts of Western Pennsylvania. 

(Left) A screenshot from a Shale Insight presentation shows a projected distribution of jobs from the ARCH2 project. (Right) A screenshot from Shale Insight shows a projected distribution of hydrogen production from the ARCH2 project.

Demand for hydrogen?

At a town hall meeting in Moundsville, West Virginia, last month, EQT CEO Toby Rice acknowledged a fundamental issue with the hydrogen economy: “The biggest problem with hydrogen right now, there’s nobody that uses hydrogen,” he said. He added that hydrogen is a “classic chicken and the egg situation,” in that you need supply to fuel demand, and vice versa.

Another issue, he said, is cost.

“To use hydrogen pure is going to require completely new infrastructure,” he said. “Completely new pipelines, transportation networks. Guess what? That’s going to make it very costly.”

The carbon dioxide pipelines needed for carbon capture and sequestration in a Southwestern Pennsylvania hydrogen hub could cost $10 billion, according to a 2021 study by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Underground storage and other infrastructure would add to that price tag.  

“Right now, there isn’t sufficient demand for either hydrogen or carbon capture to justify the construction of a bunch of pipelines for either carbon or hydrogen,” said Sean O’Leary, a senior researcher for energy and petrochemicals at the Ohio River Valley Institute. 

O’Leary said the buildout of facilities that manufacture and consume hydrogen, along with carbon capture infrastructure, is “something that’s going to play out over time.”

The federal funding awarded, O’Leary said, “isn’t enough to even begin constructing the pipelines and other infrastructure that are necessary for this. It barely scratches the surface.”

Concern for health and environment

A consortium of 32 environmental and health advocacy organizations, meanwhile, expressed deep concerns with the decision to fund the Appalachian hub.

“Whether it’s the continued operation of fossil fuel power plants, the increased risk from new pipelines and underground storage of carbon, or locking in more toxic air and water pollution from shale gas development, the public will have to bear the significant health burden of this hydrogen hub” said Alison L. Steele, executive director of the Environmental Health Project, in a co-signed statement Friday morning. Steele pointed to recent studies by Pitt and the Pennsylvania Department of Health which found increased rates of cancer, asthma attacks and low birth weight among people living in close proximity to fracking. 

“The commitment to continuing these harms just weeks after the findings of the Pennsylvania health study highlights just how deeply our leaders are failing Appalachian communities.”

The statement also pointed to research that questions blue hydrogen’s role as a climate solution.

“Hydrogen produced from natural gas perpetuates our reliance on fossil fuels and locks in our dependency on an unsustainable energy system,” said Shannon Smith, executive director of FracTracker Alliance in the joint statement. “Misrepresenting fossil-fuel derived hydrogen with carbon capture and storage technology as an effective transitional energy source fails to account for a wide array of adverse environmental and social impacts.”

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with additional comment on the Department of Energy’s decision.

Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at quinn@publicsource.org and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.

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