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From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is now and then.

I'm Heather Cox Richardson and I'm Joanne Freeman.

Today's topic was sparked by an event that happened in February in East Palestine, Ohio, in which a train derailed and released toxic chemicals over this town and it has obviously been a big deal because they were very toxic chemicals.

That has sparked us to want to talk today about how environmental disasters and pollution and actually just garbage have been dealt with in the past and more importantly, how people have fought over who's responsible for where they go.

But before we plunge in there, let's talk a little bit about what happened in Ohio because that's actually going to frame really well what we're going to be talking about today.

Now on February 3rd, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in the eastern part of the state.

It ignited a fire that covered East Palestine in smoke and it had a lot of toxic materials on it, but perhaps the most dangerous was vinyl chloride, which is a toxic flammable gas.

So a number of things happened immediately.

What happened was that the federal government began to respond as was normal for what was a train accident, a derailment, which are actually fairly common that did not cause injury or loss of life immediately.

So the environmental protection agency was on the scene by about two o'clock the following morning, the derailment was about nine o'clock on the third.

They were there by two o'clock on the fourth and the national transportation safety board, which is an independent federal agency.

So that part of the transportation department, which is responsible for overseeing train accidents was also on the scene almost immediately.

So there was an immediate federal response to what was happening there in East Palestine on a state level on February 5th, both Ohio governor Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania governor Joshua Piro instituted an evacuation order on both sides of the Ohio Pennsylvania border.

So the state, more foot southern conducted a kind of controlled release and burn off of some of the chemical cargo, hoping to avoid an explosion that would cause even more damage.

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