East Palestine Train Derailment Waste: Community Impacts

As of March 10, 2023, 152,796 tons of liquid waste and 2,980 tons of solid waste had been taken off site to three injection wells and four hazardous waste disposal sites in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and even as far afield as Texas Molecular located in the heart of Houston’s Energy Corridor and Ship Channel. When it was revealed to Houstonians that Texas Molecular had already been a recipient of significant quantities of liquid waste transported by truck from East Palestine, there was immediate outrage in an area of Houston along the city’s extremely congested and polluted ship channel.

“People were up in arms about it [Texas Molecular accepting East Palestine Waste] when they heard about it here, because the waste had already started coming in before the city or the county knew about it. There are tons of train tracks through neighborhoods; what if there had been an incident with one of those trains?  And maybe some of it was coming by truck?…the uproar is apparently the reason that they stopped shipping wastewater to TX Molecular and instead to another underground injection site in Ohio…they have a “clean” record, no violations to speak of – so they seem like a legitimate company that probably does a fine job; the deeper issue is…standard operating in Texas, and this is a sort of “normal” byproduct (toxic waste either generated here or transported here) from the concentration of fossil fuel and petrochemical industry here.”

Naomi Yoder of Healthy Gulf and 

Texas’ very own Commission on Environmental Quality, which recently became the focus of US EPA concern given its careless permitting of desalination plants in Corpus Christi, attempted to provide reassurance by issuing a statement that Texas Molecular “is authorized to accept and manage a variety of waste streams, including vinyl chloride, as part of their [Resource Conservation and Recovery Act] hazardous waste permit and underground injection control permit.”

The most disturbing aspect of the Texas part of this story might be the fact that Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the first woman and Latina to serve in this capacity, told The Houston Chronicle “she first learned that hazardous waste from East Palestine is being disposed of in Deer Park from a journalist on Wednesday, “not from a regulatory agency, not from the company,” a fact she called “unacceptable.”” Judge Hidalgo pointed out that no laws had been broken by Texas Molecular or TCEQ which points to a “a ‘fundamentally broken’ system.”

This failure of regulators and industry to keep residents informed in a timely and complete manner rings true from East Palestine, East Liverpool, and Grafton, Ohio to Houston and everywhere in between including the sites in Michigan where Congresswoman Debbie Dingell herself told WDET’s Detroit Today that she, like Judge Hidalgo in Texas, felt the lack of communication from Region 5 EPA with herself and Wayne County officials did not rise to the level necessary when talking about hazardous waste transport and disposal.

“Most people don’t pay attention to the fact that we have these two sites [Romulus and US Ecology] and that toxic waste is being disposed of at them every day. Now it was incredibly politically stupid of everybody…when I got the first call from somebody in the community saying they had heard of this I called the governor and she had not heard it…You know we were very lucky um unfortunately or fortunately I don’t know which word to use I’ve had a lot of chemical spills in my district in the last couple of years in different ways and I know how to work the EPA. I know how to get on the phone, find out what’s happening and get people to pay attention to us…I’ve been opposed to this injection well. John Dingell was opposed to this injection well 20 some years ago…I don’t want people to be scared per se that they’re in immediate danger…The state is required to permit these facilities. EPA has oversight as well but when you have the presence of toxic waste in a populated area especially one like Romulus that is so close to so many arteries that go into the Detroit River. Is that really the place where hazardous waste should be stored?…Should a well be operating that keeps having violations and should it be in that place? And I think that that’s a question that coming off of this train derailment we’re going to have a national dialogue and maybe people will pay attention to it this time because people too easily roll their eyes and say it’s not my problem.”

Congresswoman Debbie Dingell with WDET’s Detroit Today program, March 1st, 2023 

The fact that hazardous waste is so casually transported across state lines or burned adjacent to homes and schools is the type of implicit subsidy the fossil fuel industry receives on a daily basis. In an apparent throw away line in her interview with The Houston Chronicle, Judge Hidalgo referred to these subsidies indirectly when asking why the waste was transported 1,350 miles to Texas she wondered whether “Texas Molecular outbid the [Romulus] facility.” A classic example of “race to the bottom” commerce in this case resulting in hazardous waste moving around and being disposed of in a far from transparent or full proof fashion.

For what it’s worth, all the sites chosen to dispose of this waste are EPA approved. However, a closer examination of these sites raises several red flags given that five of the seven sites are at the very least are not exactly the most trusted operators and at worst potentially liable for environmental and health impacts in communities with a long-term history of environmental injustice such as Vickery, East Liverpool, and Grafton, Ohio, or the US Ecology landfill in Belleville and the Romulus injection well both of which are in Michigan and both of which have a checkered past at best and have never had much support in Wayne County.

The US Ecology landfill will be familiar to FracTracker readers given that it has historically taken significant amounts of fracking waste from Pennsylvania’s unconventional oil and gas industry according to Pennsylvania DEP’s fracking waste report. The Vickery Class I deep well injection site opened in 1976 and has been owned by waste behemoth Waste Management since 1978 and as of 2014 had taken in 85% of its allotted 1.66 billion gallon capacity. According to the Ohio EPA, the Vickery site specializes in disposing of the following:

“…liquid industrial wastes and hazardous wastes generated off-site by other companies, as well as storm waters and leachate generated on-site. The wastes disposed include: waste pickle liquor from iron and steel production facilities; recycling operations process water; incinerator scrubber water; site remediation storm water; leachate recovered from other solid waste facilities; and on-site generated storm water and leachate. Some of these liquid wastes are considered hazardous due to their corrosivity (pH < 2) and toxicity caused by the presence of certain waste stream constituents. The waste stream is injected into the Mount Simon Sandstone at depths of approximately 2,800 feet below ground level.”

Here in Ohio we also have two waste incinerators that have processed a significant portion of the contaminated solids from East Palestine with one being in Grafton Township just outside Cleveland in Lorain County and the infamous Heritage Thermal Services incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio River. According to Amanda Kiger of River Valley Organizing, she and her team have been fighting the facility for years including a current lawsuit against them for Per- and PolyFluoroalkyl Substances (PFAs) or “forever chemicals”. According to Kiger, Heritage “can’t be trusted. It has hundreds, I mean hundreds of violations…It’s horrific. The EPA lets them get away with everything. I feel like there is super dark money there. They do too much wrong.”

Like the Ross Incinerator in Grafton, it appears the Heritage site has also recently asked for a zoning exception likely resulting from plans for expansion although unlike Grafton it does not appear that the actual physical footprint of the plant could expand as much as Ross appears to be proposing in Lorain County (Note: Map included in this piece includes the existing footprint of the Ross incinerator site as well as parcels owned by Ross and its LLCs). 

Ross Incinerator has been in operation since 1957 and is currently one of only 27 US EPA approved hazardous waste incinerators nationwide. This coupled with the recent news that the facility was taking waste from the East Palestine train derailment has its neighbors and residents in abutting townships concerned about Ross and its proposed expansion with some simply looking to be bought out by the company as it looks to rezone its properties from “Light Industrial” into the extremely vague and open-ended “High Industrial” with the company trying to convince neighbors that what they are doing is safe including the second of two Eaton Township Zoning Commission meetings on the company’s proposal where residents and company employees and ownership made their respective cases during a two-hour meeting that saw several residents have to wait outside as the meeting room was at capacity.