Feeling abandoned, community contaminated by a toxic train decides, ‘We only have ourselves’

What happens to people in the months and years after a corporation worth billions creates an environmental catastrophe that disfigures their community? Myriad answers emerged a few weeks ago in a hotel conference room in Columbiana, Ohio, where eight people from the East Palestine, Ohio, area met with a Pittsburgh psychiatrist experienced in treating people who’ve endured traumatic events.

One of the first to speak up was Lonnie Miller. She’s been open about discussing her family’s struggles since a Norfolk Southern train tumbled off a set of railroad tracks 1,200 feet from her home on Feb. 3, 2023. Flames from burning rail cars filled with hazardous chemicals lit up the night sky. Three days later, the world watched an ugly, toxic cloud rise and spread over Lonnie’s town after officials ignited enough vinyl chloride to fill six hotel swimming pools. Lonnie and her family felt they had no choice — they had to move, no matter the cost. 

She told the group she’d recently decided it was time to sort through a few of the plastic bins she’d filled while packing away the belongings from her pre-derailment life in East Palestine. She and her husband, David, keep several of these bins in their new home in Leetonia, Ohio. Lonnie lugged one to her porch and removed the lid.

Inside she saw rolls of crafting ribbon, some artificial flowers and a few other knickknacks from the antiques and collectibles store she once owned and operated near her former home in East Palestine. She placed the items one by one on an outdoor table. “I was feeling happy for the first time in more than two years,” she said.

Then Lonnie felt her nose run — not an unusual occurrence in early spring. She lifted the back of her hand to her nose. This felt like something different. She checked the back of her hand and saw blood. 

Her heart sank. Lonnie got a tissue to stem the bleeding and sat quietly for a moment. This is unbelievable, she thought. Not even craft ribbon can be trusted as safe. “I told David what had happened,” she said. “He told me to put it all in a trash bag and throw it away.”

An action intended to lift Lonnie’s spirits had quickly turned dark. She wondered, “Did I contaminate my back porch?” 

Those gathered around Lonnie listened intently, some nodded as she spoke. They understood her fears and concerns: “What’s lurking in those other bins? What poisons have I brought into my house?” 

“We second-guess everything,” Lonnie said, “because we trusted people, we trusted institutions, and they failed us.”

***

Mike Stout took it all in from a seat at the edge of the group. Lonnie’s concerns sounded sadly familiar to him. He’s not a resident, but he’s become a persistent presence in the East Palestine area during the past year and a half. He’s heard these expressions of distrust before. In fact, Stout, 76, says what’s happening in the communities around East Palestine today is a “videotape replay” of events that played out decades ago, when steel companies shut down mills and shattered the lives of thousands of working-class people in towns such as Youngstown, Ohio, and Homestead, Pennsylvania. Those people, too, felt betrayed and abandoned by companies, institutions and political leaders they once trusted.

Stout had a painful view of that era. He worked as a craneman at U.S. Steel’s Homestead Works and served as a griever, or shop steward, in United Steelworkers Local 1397 during the shutdown years of the 1980s. His experience as a steelworker mirrored that of tens of thousands of his colleagues: He endured years of uncertainty and layoffs. In 1980, he was out of work so long he lost his house and moved into the first floor of a ramshackle wood structure, where he survived mostly on cereal.

In his union role, he found purpose, battling with U.S. Steel management to secure benefits for his colleagues, sometimes years after they’d lost their jobs. It was a long slog, but it came with some substantial victories that won back pay, severance pay, pensions, early retirement money and other benefits for hundreds of workers.

“Essentially, I was their lawyer,” Stout said. “With my high school education, I beat U.S. Steel for a total of $12 million. It shows you don’t need to be a highfalutin professional to take these bastards on.”

Still, there was carnage when the Homestead mill closed. Stout described it to me shortly after we’d first met in 1993 in the small print shop he was operating on Eighth Avenue in Homestead, blocks from where he once labored as a steelworker. At that time, I was unemployed after the closing of The Pittsburgh Press, where I’d worked as a news photographer, and I was searching for someone who understood the sense of dislocation and abandonment that accompanied a company’s decision to shutter a business. Stout told me about the human toll of the Homestead shop’s closure:

“Within four years of the place shutting down, I had 81 guys that I knew of personally — not just knew of, but knew personally — who died of strokes, cancer, heart attacks, including seven suicides, within a period of 3½ years after the mill shut down. All under the age of 60.”

Then he said, “The psychological and social damage was a hundred times more than the economic damage.”

Three decades later, Stout watched as, once again, thousands of working-class people struggled to keep from becoming human wreckage in the wake of disastrous actions by corporate and political titans.

***

East Palestine residents shudder at the memory of the “controlled burn” of vinyl chloride on Feb. 6, 2023, just as Youngstown steelworkers shudder when they recall “Black Monday,” Sept. 19, 1977. On that day, Youngstown Sheet & Tube  Co. announced the closing of its Campbell Works mill, which sent an estimated 5,000 workers to the unemployment line. Religious leaders and workers recognized this as a catastrophe, so they devised a plan to reopen the plant under worker-community ownership.

The plan got traction. Stout traveled to Youngstown to attend packed rallies and community meetings. Then-President Jimmy Carter promised millions in federal loan guarantees to support the project. After the 1978 midterms, however, Carter caved to pressure from steel industry lobbyists and withdrew his support. Hope died for the workers and their communities. Decades later, the sting of betrayal remains in dozens of steel communities throughout Pennsylvania and Ohio.

It’s an old and familiar story for working-class folks, and it replayed for those in communities affected by the derailment. Former President Joe Biden, as well as current President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance, angered and disappointed residents hoping someone with authority would do more than just make promises and hold news conferences.

Biden waited a year to visit the village, then met with only a handful of residents. His motorcade sped past dozens of people holding signs and pleading for help along Taggart Street, not far from the derailment site. A year later, on the second anniversary of the crash, Vance made a speech at a local fire hall and, like Biden, ignored a group of desperate residents corralled two blocks away. He backtracked on his support for a federal disaster declaration, which would unlock federal money and open a pathway for residents to receive free health care.

 “These people have been stabbed and scammed so many times they trust nobody,” Stout said last January. By then, he’d made more than a half dozen trips to the East Palestine area and had met with dozens of residents. “It’s betrayal and abandonment. When you get people who have been shit on like these people have, you see what it’s done to them, what it’s done to their spirit, what it’s done to their lives, what it’s done to their families and what it’s done to their mental health ….”

He paused, then added, “Every one of them knows to a person that they’re talking two, three, four generations down the road. Their kids are going to be paying for this shit.”

Charles McCollester has known and worked with Stout since the steel mill days of the 1980s. He, too, utilized his union and activist background to build community support when thousands of workers and their families were paying a painful price for corporate decisions focused only on profit. McCollester knows that Stout often makes direct and sometimes uncomfortable asks of people and organizations, and his persistence.

“He’s a pain in the ass, but he’s our pain in the ass,” said McCollester, a labor leader and activist who became a professor of industrial and labor relations at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. “I have a lot of respect for what he’s doing in East Palestine — sticking with that group of people, creating a sense of community, which is really critical for them. Mike is not a guy who gives up easily.”

Lots of organizations and people descended on East Palestine in the days and weeks after the derailment. Reporters talked with residents about their concerns, and elected leaders arrived to make pronouncements — a few even crafted legislation that would make future rail disasters less likely. These days, a few local reporters follow the story of the derailment’s aftermath, but the big national and regional outlets have moved on. Politicians stop by infrequently and hold news conferences, but the bill that could make a difference in the future — the Railroad Safety Act — has stalled in Congress.

McCollester knows the foolishness of waiting for political leaders — or corporations or the judicial system, for that matter — to make things right. Those with authority, he warned, build smokescreens to protect the status quo, which benefits industries with loads of resources they can employ in their defense. “The only way you can penetrate this is by getting people together,” he said. “It really does take a community response. When you get a lot of people who are hurting together, get them working together, that’s a base for a group that can make a difference.” 

Stout sees his role as assisting the residents’ organizing efforts, leveraging the contacts he’s formed through years of activism to provide support.

“This is the time for long-distance runners, not sprinters,” he said. “We are here for the long haul.”

***

Stout and his wife, Stephanie, were visiting St. Simons, Georgia, in February 2023 and, like millions of other people, watched TV news reports of the derailment. Stout’s a longtime member of the Izaak Walton League, a conservation organization, and has formed a number of relationships with people working with and for Pittsburgh-area environmental groups like the Clean Air Council, which quickly mobilized to provide residents with cleaning supplies, respirators, drinking water and air purifiers. He reached out to them to see if he could help.

Within days he got a call from Steve Zeltzer, a San Francisco union organizer who was putting together a coalition to advocate for free health care for those affected by the derailment. Stout joined that effort and began meeting with East Palestine residents such as Chris Albright, who was struggling with a severe heart ailment in the derailment’s aftermath. Stout saw Albright as a “quintessential working-class guy.” The two hit it off.

In September 2024, Stout and Albright gathered with a handful of other residents — among them Ashley McCollum, who temporarily relocated from her East Palestine home and was living with her partner, Matt McAnlis, and her son in a camper south of Salem, Ohio; Christa Graves, who lives slightly more than a mile from the derailment site; and Toledo documentary filmmaker Mike Balonek. Others joined via Zoom. The list included toxicologist George Thompson, who’d been researching the toxic effects of the derailment, and Robin Lesko with the environmental group Food & Water Watch. Claudia Miller, a professor emeritus at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, also joined the group. She’s spent decades studying the effects of toxic exposure.

At that meeting, Stout laid the groundwork for a nonprofit organization, Ohio Valley Derailment Mutual Aid. The group established bylaws and a governing board (I accepted an invitation to be a member) and began raising money. Balonek built a webpage directed at donors. Stout is a musician with a long history of playing at union and political rallies and fundraisers, so he staged a concert in Homestead and raised more than $3,000 for the organization. Residents organized a survey of needs, and the newly established nonprofit used the money it had raised to write checks of a few hundred dollars each to Ohio and Pennsylvania residents struggling financially because of the derailment and needing help with vehicle repairs, medical co-pays and energy bills.

Stout and a few members from the Izaak Walton League teamed up with residents Nadine Luci and Christa Graves and her mother, Jean, to organize a food pantry. Within a few months volunteers from the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, were driving to Squirrel Hill once a month to load their vehicles with donated produce, vegetables and canned goods and then delivering those items to a Darlington, Pennsylvania, parking lot, where residents distributed the items to hundreds of their neighbors.

Through Graves, the organization built solidarity with another contaminated community — Times Beach, Missouri — by inviting that town’s last mayor, Marilyn Leistner, to speak at two events, one in Columbiana and another in Homestead. Leistner was joined on stage by Thompson, the toxicologist, who presented the findings of his research. The list of organizations co-sponsoring these events included the Battle of Homestead Foundation, Breathe Project, Food & Water Watch and Homestead United Presbyterian Church.

The organizers of OVDMA hope their efforts can serve as a template for other mostly forgotten communities that are victims of toxic dumps, landfills and corporate abandonment. A common refrain at the meetings is the phrase “We only have ourselves.”

An increasing number of people in the impacted communities are taking responsibility for the organizing involved in staging events, fundraising and meeting each other’s needs. Residents secure hotel rooms and restaurants for meetings, develop spreadsheets and lists for the food distribution, compile lists of health symptoms that residents experience, and help each other with home repairs.

They often share their anxieties and concerns and vent their frustrations to each other. The legacy of an environmental catastrophe skews to the darker side: strained marriages and family relationships; excessive drinking; arguments among community members over the town’s future, the level of danger posed by chemicals, and payouts resulting from a $600 million settlement with Norfolk Southern. Maintaining solidarity in contaminated communities is difficult, Stout realized, just as it had been during the shutdown of the Homestead Mill, when workers fought over a shrinking number of jobs. Residents struggle with a scarcity of resources, trust wanes, tempers grow short.

“We’ve got to get a trauma shrink in here,” Stout said a few months ago. “I don’t know where to look. I don’t have any contacts. These people are dealing with trauma. Of all the shit I’m witnessing, the trauma is the worst.”

***

Examples of the divisions plaguing affected communities are easy to find on Facebook. In one recent post about the Trump administration’s announcement of a grant to study the health effects of the derailment, Graves called instead for people to be removed from the communities and wrote that “studying people while living in a toxic environment is like watching people burn in a house fire to study how … people burn to death in a fire.”

A number of people responded in support of Graves’ comment, but one man responded with dissent:. “Money Money Money. That’s all anyone is interested in,” he wrote. “If I didn’t like where I lived and thought my life was in danger, guess what I would do?”

The comment gnawed at Graves. It’s easy to talk about moving, she said. But the reality is complicated by finances — homes in the East Palestine area are relatively inexpensive compared to those in nearby communities such as Columbiana — and ethical concerns. 

“People that didn’t experience it don’t understand, and they don’t realize they don’t understand,” Graves said. “They think it’s easy enough to just move. Or trust what the government is telling you. But they’re not the ones watching their loved one’s health decline. They’re not watching their friends deal with homelessness or living in a trailer because their home is contaminated. They’re not agonizing over the decision whether to sell your home to an unsuspecting family and then seeing them get sick.”

Other residents, such as Ashley McCollum, have often expressed the same reservations about selling homes they fear could make others ill. It bothered Graves so much that, after the social media exchange, she asked AI assistant ChatGPT what the Bible would say about selling a house in a contaminated area. 

The thread of answers contained a few Bible verses, including Habakkuk 2:12 — “Woe to him who builds a city with bloodshed and establishes a town by injustice!”

ChatGPT added. “Letting people stay or sell homes in a toxic area, while knowing the danger, mirrors fraud or neglect. A buyout upholds moral responsibility — not just for current residents but for all future buyers.”

***

Ken Thompson, the psychiatrist, heard about Stout’s efforts in the derailment communities and offered to meet with residents. Thompson knew of Stout’s work decades ago in the Mon Valley. The two drove from Pittsburgh to a Columbiana hotel on June 11, where a small group of East Palestine-area residents waited.

Thompson got things started by discussing his experience in treating others who’ve endured traumatic events, including the 1994 crash of USAir Flight 427 in nearby Hopewell, Pennsylvania, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Then, in a session that lasted nearly four hours, the residents unloaded their anxiety, their anger, their frustrations. Some also raised practical questions. For example, one woman asked a question that reflected Lonnie Miller’s experience with items she’d packed away while moving out of East Palestine: “How do you decide what to keep and what to throw out when you consider your entire house to be contaminated? I’m having to get rid of all these things I’ve collected over the years, things that I’m emotionally attached to.”

They discussed the various health studies underway — this would become a bigger issue several days later, when Vance announced the Trump administration’s launch of a new five-year $10 million health study.

“I don’t want to be a lab rat,” said a resident. “If I have a health issue, it should be covered. I don’t want to be monitored. I want to be covered.”

Others seethed at hearing repeatedly from officials and some other residents that their communities are now safe, and that any health problems they experience are the result of factors other than the derailment. 

“We’re told the chemicals aren’t the problems; it’s just the trauma,” one resident said.

“I’ve got breast cancer,” said one woman. “I didn’t have any lumps or bumps before the derailment, but they’re telling me, ‘Oh, that has nothing to do with it.’”

Another chimed in: “You guys just sit here and rot. That’s what we’re told.”

“They consider us expendable,” said another. “Why? We love, just like they do. We have families. We have sons and daughters and parents and grandparents. Why are they doing this to us?”

Lonnie Miller said she’d been transformed by the train crash and subsequent fires and smoke, as well as the threats of chemical contamination and the betrayals.

“For the first few months, I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror,” Lonnie said. “I’m not an angry person. It’s like there are two of me. There’s the angry Lonnie. Then there’s the person I was before the derailment — I want that Lonnie back. I’m afraid I’ll never see that Lonnie again.”

Next to Lonnie sat Ashley McCollum. The two were strangers before the derailment brought them together. Ashley leaned over, put her arm around Lonnie’s shoulder and pulled her close.

Those wanting to donate to OVDMA can do so at givebutter.co/OVDMA.