Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. It's Tuesday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day. I'm Nyla Budu.

Today, the GOP's funding fight over China. Plus, white tariffs on underwear are sexist.

But first, air quality concerns linger 11 days after Ohio trained a real man. That's today's one big thing.

On February 3rd, a train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio.

Carcinogenic chemicals were on the Norfolk Southern freight train, prompting an evacuation of hundreds of local residents,

and questions about the safety of the area's water and air.

The EPA said over the weekend that it hadn't detected any levels of concern, and people have returned.

But some experts on environmental health are worried that the methods being used to monitor the area aren't sophisticated enough

to give residents accurate information on health and safety risks.

Pete Tecarlo is an associate professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University,

and joins us to discuss the airborne risks that could face the East Palestine area.

Can you start by summing up what toxins were released in this derailment and how dangerous they could be to people?

The main chemical that was released that was contained within those tank cars is vinyl chloride,

which we know to be toxic to humans, animals, and just generally bad for the environment.

There was also need to set some of those on fire to kind of burn off some of the chemicals that weren't able to be released,

leading to a very large black cloud of smoke which got trapped by the atmosphere and kind of contained it from going higher in the air.

So both the initial release of the chemical and the products of that large fire led to very large concentrations of toxic chemicals downwind of that accident.

So how does the EPA or other government agencies monitor risk in a situation like this?

Well, they initially look for high levels of air contaminants that they know to be toxic,

and they use the tools that are available.

In this case, they used handheld sensors that were not designed to measure the chemicals of interest.

They're measuring using something that measures all organic chemicals that are in the air.

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