Keepers of the Times Beach story and a Pitt study land in the region this week

We saw an interesting news report the other day while sitting in a Columbiana, Ohio, restaurant and watching Marilyn Leistner share memories of Times Beach, Missouri, with a dozen people from the East Palestine area.

University of Pittsburgh researchers, we learned, are conducting a study to determine the impact of all those chemicals released during the 2023 East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and burn off.

The Morning Journal of Lisbon, Ohio, published a detailed report on the study and what it seeks to accomplish. We reached out to Dr. Maureen Y. Lichtveld, one of the principal investigators, and subsequently played phone tag, but she did leave this message: “We would love for people to sign up now. We will be contacting participants throughout the summer, from now until August.”

We’ll reach out Lichtveld again and pass along any new details. Meantime, you can visit the study’s website for more information and a link to sign up.

At the Columbiana restaurant on Tuesday, former Times Beach resident Frank Purler opened an overstuffed photo album and showed those in attendance dozens of photographs of his former town, which was bulldozed and buried in the early 1990s. Some black-and-white pictures dated back to the 1950s and ’60s. In one, two young children sled down a snowy front yard; in another a boy in a cowboy hat holds a BB gun.

Those are followed by 1982 images of workers in protective gear collecting samples in the town, photographs of a flood, and then page after page of images showing empty houses with overgrown yards. Purler includes a bumper sicker from the era. It shows an oil truck labeled “Dioxin” beside the phrase “Ignorance is Bliss,” a tweak at oil hauler Russell Bliss, who sprayed contaminants on the town’s streets in the 1970s.

Leistner and a few residents from East Palestine then went outside for a few interviews with a Pittsburgh TV news crew. Leistner told a brief version of her story for the camera. Then reporter Sheldon Ingram turned his attention to toxicologist George Thompson. Leistner and Christa Graves, a Unity Township, Ohio, resident, stood out of camera view and held hands, a sign of how close the two have become since first meeting two years ago.

Leistner told her story later in the evening at the Columbiana Arts Theater, and then again on Wednesday at Homestead United Presbyterian Church. She was joined by Thompson, who described the chemical fallout from the derailment and subsequent fires.