Hi everyone, welcome to Positively Dreadful with me, your host, Brian Boynler.

We touched briefly last week on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

We want you to discuss how certain elected officials had seized on it for political purposes.

And they were doing nothing for you, they were intending to do absolutely nothing for you.

What we've seen is industry goes to Washington and they get their way.

They got their way on a Christmas tree of regulatory changes that the last administration made

on its way out the door in December of 2020.

Let's put this in perspective within two hours of that derailment.

The EPA was in there within two hours.

But beneath that political jockeying and even beneath the policy failures that made the derailment more likely,

there's a real environmental health dimension to the story that seems likely to persist until long after the political vultures scatter

and the policy recriminations are behind us.

And I say seems likely because as best I can tell, there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the questions

how severe the contamination is and what the risks of acute and chronic exposure to these particular chemicals are.

There are actually dozens of chemicals on that train, some of them burn, some seeped into the ground and the water supply.

And we know because reporters have documented it that nearby residents are presenting with skin and eye and long irritation.

So it would be better belief for anyone to say everything is currently safe and there's no long term danger to anyone.

But my sense, just as a lay person, is it's hard to provide locals any definitive guidance because for obvious reasons,

we don't intentionally expose humans to burning vinyl chloride or make them drink unusual amounts of N-butyl acrolate

to see what happens to them over the course of a decade or 25 years.

At the same time, we're living through a period of scientific and industrial history that seems to drown us in information about what is toxic

what is carcinogenic and so on, and it feels like all of us, not just residents of Eastern Ohio, ought to have a clear sense of what really poses risks to us,

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