Residents voice concerns about contamination from Ohio train derailment

I want to bring in Eric Olson, Senior Strategic Director of Health and Food for the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. Eric, thank you so much for being on. What are some of your bigger concerns about the chemicals that were on this train? Well, we're very concerned about the long term effects of this disaster. There are things like vinyl chloride and many other synthetic organic chemicals that have been released into the environment. Some of this is getting into groundwater. It's into the surface waters and into the sediments. And we're worried not only about the environmental effects, but the long term effects on people, especially if that plume of contamination underground starts reaching private wells and even public wells.

So those are the big worries that we have over the long term. Now, the EPA has been collecting samples at the incident location and upwind and its latest update says the agency found no air quality issues and no water quality issues. What's your response to that? Well, as I say, the big worries for us over the long term are this underground water that the groundwater can be contaminated and it moves slowly. So it may not be detected today or tomorrow or even a month from now. It's from a lot of hazardous waste sites all over the country that it can gradually spread and then it can get into groundwater. It can get into wells, private wells or public wells and contaminate them. So we may not even know for many months what the long term effects are.

So, Eric, is there more that you think could be done right now to alleviate these concerns? Well, I think certainly they need to treat this as a serious hazardous waste area. They need to be excavating. They need to do pump and treat. It's called, which is pumping up the groundwater and treating it or taking it off site. And they need to make sure they're really monitoring comprehensively, not just sort of one off monitoring, but long term comprehensive monitoring. And of course, we need to make sure we're keeping track of the people and treating them because, you know, short term effects are so important. Short term effects are certainly a worry.

But what we worry about is some of these are cancer causing chemicals. Some of them can cause chronic health problems if we don't get control of it. And we really need to make sure we're taking care of that over the long term. And once the headlines subside, we want to make sure people are being compensated and that we're making absolutely certain that there's no long term contamination affecting people. All right. Eric Olson of the Natural Resources Defense Council. We appreciate it.

Eric, thank you. Thank you for having me.

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