'Anywhere that smoke landed, there are dioxins'

Canadian toxicologist, Douglas Hallett, weighs in on Norfolk Southern’s train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio and what it could mean for Canada

Sometime after Norfolk Southern’s freight train was headed eastbound out of Cleveland, Ohio, but before it derailed in the village of East Palestine on February 3rd, the crew was notified three times that an axel on hopper car #23 was heating up. The Fort Wayne Line, which runs from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Crestline, Ohio, is equipped with a series of what are called “hot box detectors.” Essentially, these infrared detectors, positioned periodically on the rail line, can assesses the temperature conditions of the wheel roller bearings as the train passes over them. When bearings overheat, audible real-time warnings are announced to the train crew. According to a press briefing held by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), there were three such detectors on route before the train derailed, each showing a bearing on car #23 was getting progressively hotter. The final reading before the derailment occurred, recorded the temperature of the bearing as being 253 degrees F above the ambient temperature. According to NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy, temperature thresholds are not universal, but are instead established by each railroad company. But Homendy noted that roller bearings fail, and when they do, “they fail catastrophically, so the problem has to be addressed early to avoid catastrophe.” Homendy:

[The derailment] was 100% preventable. We call things accidents. There is no accident. Every single event we investigate is preventable.

Homendy says that in 2021 alone, for “Class 1 freight railroads” there were 868 derailments, 68 collisions, and 330 other obstructions on the rail tracks.  

Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, U.S., February 6, 2023. Screengrab was obtained from a handout video released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

According to Homendy, since the temperature of the hot axel did eventually enter “the range of what is considered ‘critical’” the train should have been stopped, the bearing inspected, and if necessary, rail car #23 could have been “set out” or removed. But none of that happened. Instead, when the train decelerated because of a train ahead, the wheel bearing failed on the hopper car, making it the first in a 38-car derailment. A list of what the derailed cars were carrying can be found here.

“The combination of the hot axel and the plastic pellets started the initial fire,” explains Homendy.

Eleven of the tank cars that derailed were carrying hazardous materials, which subsequently ignited and damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars. Of the total 149 railcars, 20 of them contained hazardous materials, combustible liquids, flammable liquids, and flammable gas, including five cars carrying 115,580 gallons [525,437 litres] of vinyl chloride, a flammable petrochemical used in the manufacture of polymer polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

According to the NTSB press briefing, first responders noted that the temperature inside one of the vinyl chloride tank cars—the one that was situated closest to the burning car #23—was reading 140 degrees F (60 degrees C) and increasing.¹

According to the NTSB, this indicated the substance could have been undergoing a chemical reaction called polymerization, which causes the temperature to increase to a certain point after which a “runaway reaction,” could take place. Something that could lead to a “catastrophic explosion.”

According to the NTSB preliminary report, in an effort to avoid the runaway reaction, Norfolk Southern “responders scheduled a controlled venting of the five vinyl chloride tank cars to release and burn the vinyl chloride.” They also “expanded the evacuation zone to a 1-mile by 2-mile area, and dug ditches to contain the released vinyl chloride liquid.”

Then they threw in some flares and set it ablaze.  

Screen grab of Fox8 news clip of “controlled release” of vinyl chloride resulted in an opaque black plume of toxic byproducts including dioxin, phosgene and hydrogen chloride.

A letter penned by the American Rail System Federation to Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of the US Department of Transportation, indicates that when Norfolk Southern instructed about 40 of its employees to come on site to begin cleaning up the wreckage, the responders were not provided with the appropriate personal protective equipment—respirators, eye protection, protective chemical restraint suits, rubber over boots and gloves—all rated for working safely in toxic spill conditions, and specifically for working around vinyl chloride. Many of these workers are now experiencing health effects – such as migraines and nausea. The rail unions are linking the breach with Norfolk Southern’s (NS) “reckless business practices,” and cost-cutting business model.

What this business model really involves is running longer, heavier behemoth trains that the track structures are not necessarily designed to handle. It also involves the concentrated slashing of employees from the workforce… and then shifting the workload onto those remaining workers, pushing them to work faster and longer hours. Additionally, “precision scheduled railroading” involves eliminating fail-safes or preventive safety precautions that promote safer rail operations and help prevent disasters such as derailments.

According to Homendy the NTSB will be conducting a “fact-finding” phase and holding a “rare” investigative team hearing where it will call witnesses. Ultimately, it will issue recommendations as well as determine the probable cause or contributing factors that led to the derailment. The federal agency has no power to enforce regulations or ensure any of its recommendations are adopted.  

National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy (right) and Rob Hall (left), its Director of Rail, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Investigations, brief media on the status of the NTSB investigation into the February 3^rd Norfolk Southern freight train derailment near East Palestine, Ohio. “This was 100% preventable,” says Homendy. “We’ve never seen an accident that isn’t.”  

Renowned Canadian toxicologist weighs in

I’ve interviewed Doug Hallett before. He featured prominently in a 2021 series I wrote for The Halifax Examiner about the government-approved plan by Lafarge to burn tires in its cement-making facility in Brookfield, Nova Scotia. A coalition of groups opposed to the plan filed an application for a judicial review arguing the aging cement kiln was not designed for burning tires and there was a “strong potential for adverse effects” on surface water, groundwater, and human health. The group requested new evidence from Hallett be admitted as part of the evidence. He had information about how the tire burning would result in the release of N-Nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA)—a highly mutagenic and carcinogenic compound. “One of the most powerful carcinogens ever found,” he said at the time. As it turned out, NDMA was already present in Lafarge’s stockpiles of cement kiln dust, which was being sold as an agricultural soil amendment, and is spread on farm fields in the province.  

Hallett was also retained as an expert witness in the 2007 environmental review tribunal when Lafarge’s plan to burn alternative fuels, including scrap tires, at its Bath plant in southern Ontario was challenged by local environmentalists including Gordon Downey of the Tragically Hip.

Over the years Hallett has developed an impeccable reputation internationally as a leading expert in dioxins and PCBs. His bio states that he was “well known to Dow, Occidental, Uniroyal, Texaco, Exxon, Monsanto, and most pulp and paper manufacturers.” He has been called to testify in hundreds of court cases involving contamination events or toxic exposures. He was also brought in to help control the Hagersville tire fire, and was also involved in the 1976 Seveso disaster, an industrial accident that resulted in the highest known exposure to 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzenzo-p-dioxin (TCDD) in residential populations.

The Seveso disaster may be instructive for what’s happened in East Palestine. Over the years a number of studies have been conducted that assess the effects of the industrial accident on the thousands of residents who had been exposed to dioxin. Adverse health impacts included chloracne, peripheral neuropathy, excess mortality from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, excess incidence of diabetes, increases in cancer of the gastrointestinal and lymphatic tissue, increased breast cancer, and endocrine-related effects. Male children of the mothers who were pregnant and exposed to high levels of dioxin were found to have lower-than-average sperm counts.²

Hallett says, “This right now [in East Palestine] is about what was in the black smoke which is now on the ground.  And what was left in the ditches after the fires.  This will contaminate the soil and move into the groundwater eventually. My training is to mitigate the problem before it becomes a bigger one, if you can.”

Douglas Hallett has a background in organic chemistry, toxicology, contaminant hydrogeology, atmospheric dispersion modelling and toxic chemical destruction. He’s considered a leading expert in dioxins and PCBs. Photo contributed.

I reached Doug Hallett by telephone. The following is a transcript of our conversation. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Linda Pannozzo (LP): The Norfolk Southern emergency responders executed what it called a “controlled release” of the vinyl chloride from 5 of Norfolk Southern’s rail cars, which involved basically draining more than 500,000 litres into a pit and then using flares for ignition. A spokesperson from Norfolk Southern said the decision was made because it was “the safest way to control the situation.” The National Transportation Safety Board reported that the temperature inside one of the cars containing the vinyl choride was increasing, which indicated it could pose an explosion hazard. First of all, what are your thoughts on the decision? Was it better to burn the chemicals in what they called a “controlled release,” rather than risk an explosion? Or was there a safer alternative?

Doug Hallett (DH): I understand them draining a tank car that is rising in temperature. That would be a potential explosive concern. I assume they thought they needed to drain the next 4 cars of vinyl chloride as a precaution. The decision was made as to whether the hazard of a potential explosion outweighed the hazard of the decision to drain the tank cars into the pit. Draining these tank cars was not easy and they did it. I think the potential for an explosion was likely high and they did the right thing in draining them. I think we have to appreciate that it would have been far worse if they had just stood by and had an explosion. This was probably the reason for that decision. We also need to realize the situation and that this decision was made by the commander of the site on the spot. I can respect this decision.

The decision to then light the pit on fire and burn this vinyl chloride instead of covering it up was the next decision. Vinyl Chloride monomer is extremely toxic and volatile. A temporary cover would have kept the material contained in the pit and not spread toxic smoke and fumes downwind. Vinyl Chloride is also corrosive which would have been part of making this decision and I have to respect the site commander who has to make quick decisions. He was looking at a pit full of a very toxic corrosive liquid. If it was raining or snowing and the pit was collecting some of the water that was being put onto the fire that was heating up the first tank car, the commander would have been concerned about this pond of corrosive vinyl chloride moving and spreading onto a larger area of ground. Was this a bigger hazard than the plume of toxic smoke he created? Frankly, we do not know, and time will tell within the people exposed and the chemicals that they ultimately will discover when they analyze the fallout.  

When you are in charge of a disaster like this you have to make decisions. I respect the fact that they made decisions quickly. This latter decision to ignite the vinyl chloride is one that falls into ‘you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.’ There was going to be damage from this problem one way or the other, and unfortunately, there is. 

You could tell very easily on television that the smoke coming off the burning vinyl chloride was opaque. When you look at smoke, you've got to look for opacity as a measurement, as a regulator, which I used to be. So, the smoke was very, very dense, opaque, [and] illegal, if it was coming out of somebody's smokestack. And it went on for quite a distance.

What is in that smoke? Vinyl chloride is an organochlorine compound and when you light it on fire, you're going to get products of chlorinated byproducts. What are they? They're called dioxins. So undoubtedly, anywhere that smoke landed, anywhere there's that black smoke, there are dioxins. 

LP: Ohio Governor Mike DeWine told residents living within 1.6 km radius to evacuate because they were in “imminent danger” and that exposure to the burning of vinyl chloride could be lethal.

DH: That was right.

LP: There have also been reports of dead fish and amphibians in the area. Reports of pets dying. What can you tell us about the toxicity of the by-products of burning 500,000 litres vinyl chloride and if that radius should have been wider?

DH: Vinyl choride is a small molecule with a lot of chlorine. The ratio of chlorine to carbon is pretty high so, there will be chlorine in that water. The streams would have been acidified and the fish would all die. Everything would die, and if you were a human in that plume, you’d die. It would be like inhaling chlorine gas, and chlorine gas would immediately corrode your lungs and you’d die.

LP: So, given the toxicity of the byproducts of the burning, was that radius of 1.6 km was too small? Should it have been wider or was that reasonable?

DH: I don't really know. I know in the Hagersville tire fire, I evacuated everything for -- it was a larger area, that's my recollection.

LP: Who is most in danger from a catastrophe like this? Is it the people living close by, within range of the smoke plume? The smoke does travel pretty far. How do you gauge how dangerous it is?

DH: Well, the environmental people from somewhere should have gone out by now and they should have analyzed what was in the air when the smoke was moving. And then they should analyze the surface of the ground where the deposit of this smoky silt landed to find out what in hell this is and how much bad stuff is in it, and it certainly should be analyzed for dioxin. But there's probably other things that are associated with the plastic pellet rail car that caught fire.

What burning vinyl chloride forms wouldn't be good for you. My experience, again, going back to the Hagersville tire fire is that the owner of the tires who had been collecting the tires and using his farm as a tire dump -- and he’d been doing this fairly responsibly, he had the tires in groups and piles so they wouldn't catch fire. That fire was arson. The fire was right beside this gentleman's home and he had children and the first to die were his children. Then he died and his wife died, and they all died of cancer. These are carcinogens. It takes a few years for this to manifest itself but these chemicals really are promoters of cancer.

The Hagersville tire fire in 1990, burned for 17 days.

You look at the downwind buildings of the East Palestine fire to see whether they're coated with this black stuff and what's in the black stuff and how carcinogenic is. You know it’s going to be an acute hazard, and because of the chorine, anything downstream just won't be there for very long. It'll corrode right through wood and plastic and metal, chlorine is that corrosive. Hydrochloric acid is very corrosive. And that stream is full of hydrochloric acid but it's also full of these chemicals and that needs to be carefully dealt with.

Seveso was an international disaster where a chemical plant blew up. I was there looking at this area that basically had white crystals of dioxin fall out of the sky and it contaminated all the farm fields but it hadn't migrated very far. It's not that water soluble or anything. How did we remediate that? Well, dioxin is very sensitive to the sunlight so we kept tilling the fields up and tilling the fields up for about two years, and ultimately all the dioxin was broken down by the sunlight.

I think that may be something to consider in this situation.

There are three kinds of chemicals: floaters, sinkers, and swimmers. Floaters like oil, float on water. Sinkers, like PCBs, are dense and they sink in water and they will move through into the groundwater. The third kind are called swimmers, which move without water everywhere, and likely in that plume, there's all three kinds. So, they need to know, what are the chemicals? Have they moved yet? And if they haven't moved yet, they should get them while they can get them, and that’s why there's an urgency to that.

LP: A few days ago, it was reported that the US Environmental Protection Agency said they hadn’t tested for dioxins yet, but that doing so was “under discussion.” Other toxins that could have been generated by the fire include phosgene and hydrogen chloride. How and what should the EPA be testing for at this point and where?

DH: I don't know whether this is the EPA's job. I don't get hired by the EPA. I don't get hired by Environment Canada. I get hired by Lloyd's of London, and I would think it's the responsibility of certainly the railway to understand this spill and the impact of it. And the job of the EPA is to make sure that the railway, and the state enforcement agencies should be making sure that the railway is doing this, and the owners of those chemicals in the cars. I would hope the first responders, whoever they were, have some insurance as well.

If I was going in—and I've done this for years and years and years—but if I was going in, your first duty is to mitigate the loss for the insurers and to mitigate the loss in this case is to figure out what's there, do a detailed analysis, and then have an engineer do an assessment to say, what are the sinkers, what are the swimmers, what are the floaters? And it’ll be fairly obvious, and then to begin to remediate the area accordingly.

And there is an urgency to this because if you've got sinkers and swimmers there, they're going to cause long term trouble in the groundwater, and that seems to be what everybody's focused on now. But, of course you can drink the water! It's not down there yet!

But you know what? A year from now, it may be down there if you don't do something about it. It's what's up at the top right now that's important.

LP: What type of chemical is dioxin? A sinker, swimmer or floater?

DH: Dioxin would be on the surface.

LP: So, it's a floater?

DH: I wouldn't say it's a floater. But it's not very water soluble at all. It has very low solubility. So, it's going to tend not to move into the groundwater. It's going to adsorb to the soil on the surface and stay there. Most of the chemicals will probably be like that and be on the surface.

LP: Right. So, children playing outside, pets, animals walking around, these are all at risk?

DH: Anything in that area is at risk right now because you don’t know. But smart people would say you should take precautions because it's likely here and somebody that's in charge of this should be looking at that and letting the people know. There's a duty to respond to this correctly, and that duty rests with the railway, and whoever owns the tank cars. There’s all sorts of insurance to go after and the insurance is there.

LP: I'm wondering who is responsible to communicate the dangers to the public? Who is making sure they are aware of what the dangers are and what precautions they can take?

DH: That is the responsibility of the local officials and the mayor, and whoever is advising them.

East Palestine, Ohio is indicated by the red marker.

LP: I’m also wondering about how far the plume might have travelled, since the fire was burning for some time. Could it have gone as far as southern Ontario? Is that reasonable? Should people living there be concerned?

DH: In looking at this plume you would have to know the weather conditions and model the plume to know what the area of impact would be downstream the plume. But probably by the time this plume got to Canada, it was dispersed. Even though it was pointed that way, doesn't mean that there wouldn't be a crosswind or a change in the weather pattern that would make it go up and dilute itself or go down and into Lake Erie, say, which is probably where it ended up. That would be in the zone of impact.

I did a piece on television in September and talked about the Great Lakes a little bit and how chemicals go in and out of those lakes, and just because it went into the lake doesn't mean it's not going to come out again. Lake Erie isn't as big a deal because it has a very short half time. It's the shortest of all the Great Lakes. But if it gets in Lake Ontario the half time is seven years.

LP: What does that mean?

DH: Generally, you use that in terms of radioactive materials, but in this case, it's used in lake modelling and limnology—the study of lakes—in terms of the half time of the water [chemical] residents in that lake, and it varies from week to week and has a lot to do with the depth and other things. Lake Erie is very shallow, only 20 m deep and the half time in Lake Erie is about two years. Lake Ontario, on the other hand, is about 200 m deep and the half time is seven years. Lake Superior is very deep and it has holes in it that are 2,000 meters and the half time there is 40 to 70 years.

LP: So, does that mean that if there’s dioxin in Lake Erie, that it would take two years for it to leave the lake?

DH: It would take two years for half of the dioxin to leave the lake.

LP: Okay.

DH:  And that half would then be in Lake Ontario, where it would take 7 years for half of it to leave Lake Ontario. But half of it would still be in the lake, bio-accumulating in the fish.

LP: Yes, and then the birds who eat the fish.

DH: Yes, you got the picture. That's why there's no mink down there. I once did a study of the mink on Lake Erie--there used to be wild mink and animals like that, but they eat the fish and that killed them all.

Everybody talks about cancer risk, at least they used to. But what got rid of the mink was that they couldn't reproduce anymore. Chemicals like PCBs [Polychlorinated Biphenyls] and dioxin and phthalate esters in plastic and fire retardants. Dioxin’s real toxicity is it's a teratogen—it causes birth defects and when you have birth defects in a population, which is what the mink were suffering from, then your reproductive potential declines and the population doesn't reproduce. Pretty soon there's no mink in a wild population. People move around and so it doesn't show up as dramatically unless you've got something really, really serious going on.

Toxic chemicals are not really on the radar right now because everybody's talking about climate change, but it’s important to realize that if you go after the sources of these toxic chemicals in the air, particularly, which is what ends up in the water eventually, if you do that, you'll get rid of all of our major sources of greenhouse gases. And, you've got to seriously go after the sources of these toxic chemicals, like cement kilns. It's not about making a battery industry in Ontario, it's about going after these sources. And if you go after fires and smokestacks and landfills and areas where chemicals are just evaporating, that will also clean up huge sources of greenhouse gases.

Not all greenhouse gas sources are toxic chemical sources, but all toxic chemical sources are likely greenhouse gas sources.

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1. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 4 of the 5 cars containing the vinyl chloride were located near burning car #23: #26-29, and #53.

2. Some of the studies from the Seveso disaster: 1991: 2008: 2009.