Newly released federal records provide further evidence that, following the February 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment and toxic chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, the Environmental Protection Agency withheld vital information from area residents about the potential dangers they faced while repeatedly reassuring the population that their community was safe.

The records reveal that federal officials possessed models projecting severe and potentially fatal chemical exposures that were never shown to residents and internally characterized hazardous substances released in the disaster as an “imminent and substantial threat to public health and the environment.”

They also show that EPA intervened to narrow portions of Norfolk Southern’s environmental testing program while monitoring residents and independent investigators who challenged the government’s assurances.

Together with evidence established since the disaster, the documents reveal a pattern of withholding and minimizing information about potential dangers on behalf of the railroad industry.

Federal chemical danger models withheld from residents

On February 3, 2023, 38 cars of Norfolk Southern train 32N derailed in East Palestine, 11 of them carrying hazardous materials.

Three days later, five tank cars containing more than one million pounds of vinyl chloride, a known human carcinogen, were deliberately breached and burned, producing a huge black chemical cloud over the Ohio-Pennsylvania border region.

On February 4, two days before the vent-and-burn, EPA requested plume projections from the federal Interagency Modeling and Atmospheric Assessment Center (IMAAC), which models where airborne chemicals may travel and at what concentrations.

Internal correspondence obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by the Government Accountability Project (GAP) shows the models were distributed within the federal government but not shown to residents.

One early model projected that 17,972 people could potentially fall within an area where phosgene concentrations might cause severe injury, including 1,901 in a zone where death was possible. For hydrogen chloride, the corresponding projected populations were 312 and 185.

Phosgene, which can form when vinyl chloride burns, can cause severe lung injury and death at sufficiently high concentrations. Hydrogen chloride can seriously injure the eyes and respiratory tract.

These projections were not measurements of what residents actually breathed. Early models were based on limited information and included worst-case scenarios; later modeling produced substantially smaller danger areas.

Nevertheless, Ohio and Pennsylvania evacuated an approximately one-mile-by-two-mile area immediately before the February 6 burn. Residents outside that zone were never shown federal maps depicting potentially broader severe-injury and possible-death areas.

Internal correspondence shows federal personnel discussing whether at least one plume plot had become public. When informed that apparently it had not, one replied, “Glad to hear it didn’t.”

Another federal employee, referring to video of a resident approaching the fire, suggested he might have behaved differently “if only he had seen our plots first.”

EPA’s later public plume reconstruction focused principally on estimated soot deposition rather than showing the earlier health-hazard zones for phosgene and other chemicals.

The National Transportation Safety Board later established that the vent-and-burn was unnecessary. OxyVinyls, manufacturer and shipper of the vinyl chloride, concluded that available evidence did not indicate polymerization. Norfolk Southern and its contractors nevertheless continued to present polymerization as an imminent threat and failed to communicate OxyVinyls’ conclusions to the East Palestine fire chief, who served as incident commander.

The NTSB found that Norfolk Southern and its contractors created “unwarranted urgency” and supplied incomplete and inaccurate information, compromising the integrity of the decision.

An “imminent and substantial threat”

The pattern continued after residents were allowed to return home.

On February 20, EPA reported that “air quality in the community remains normal” and preliminary laboratory analysis showed “no air quality issues.”

The following day, EPA on-scene coordinator Ralph Dollhopf signed an Enforcement Action Memorandum determining that hazardous substances released by the derailment constituted an “imminent and substantial threat to public health and the environment.”

The memorandum identified vinyl chloride, benzene and other hazardous substances, documented contamination of waterways and large-scale fish deaths, and described potential human-health effects.

EPA’s internal assessment was far more serious than its public assurances. At the same time, residents were reporting headaches, rashes, coughing, burning eyes, respiratory problems, gastrointestinal symptoms and persistent chemical odors. These reports were documented by the WSWS, numerous other news organizations and government health surveys.

EPA altered Norfolk Southern’s testing program

From the beginning, EPA placed Norfolk Southern and its contractors at the center of residential and environmental testing, under EPA oversight—a clear conflict of interest given the railroad’s financial and legal interest in minimizing the extent of contamination.

For nearly a month, EPA did not require direct off-site testing for dioxins, highly toxic compounds that can form when chlorinated chemicals burn and persist in the environment and food chain. Only on March 2, after repeated resident demands, did EPA order Norfolk Southern to conduct direct testing, saying the action came “in direct response” to community concerns.

Newly disclosed documents show EPA subsequently intervened to narrow parts of the soil-testing program proposed by Norfolk Southern contractor Arcadis. After Arcadis submitted its plan March 6, EPA directed revisions that included removing five chlorinated benzenes and phenols relevant to understanding combustion products and chemical pathways associated with dioxin and furan formation.

Their removal reduced the evidence available to reconstruct what was produced and deposited during the fire and vent-and-burn.

EPA also changed locations used to establish background contamination. The agency had said dioxin levels would be compared with locations “not impacted by the train derailment.” Norfolk Southern ultimately sampled 146 locations, including 25 designated as background, while EPA directly oversaw the sampling and collected split samples at some locations. EPA later reported that most dioxin concentrations were consistent with typical urban and rural soils.

GAP and industrial hygienist Stephen Petty contend some background locations may themselves have been affected by the shifting smoke plume. If so, contamination there could have raised the baseline, making contamination elsewhere appear less exceptional.

A broader record of concealment

The latest GAP disclosures follow previous revelations in which EPA actions repeatedly aligned with Norfolk Southern’s interests while residents were denied information and independent testing.

EPA cited its Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology aircraft, or ASPECT, as evidence of “robust air-quality testing.” Former ASPECT contractor Robert Kroutil later alleged that the aircraft was not deployed in time to collect critical data from the February 6 burn, that some chemical sensors were turned off during February 7 flights over contaminated waterways and that only about eight minutes of usable data were collected.

EPA disputes his allegations, saying weather prevented the aircraft from flying February 6 and subsequent missions followed standard procedures.

Earlier FOIA disclosures in 2025 also showed EPA monitoring residents and independent testers who challenged its assurances. Agency personnel collected and circulated social-media posts from residents and community groups, including activist Jami Wallace, and tracked independent tester Scott Smith after he publicized elevated dioxin readings.

Information about residents and Smith was circulated among public-affairs staff and senior officials, while FEMA provided EPA with “Social Listening Reports” summarizing public discussion of the disaster and government response.

Thus, while residents demanded disclosure and independent investigation, federal agencies were systematically gathering and circulating information about those challenging their conclusions.

Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for the disaster

GAP released details from more than 900 pages of Defense Department records on August 25. Three days later, Vice President JD Vance and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin requested an EPA inspector general investigation explicitly focused on the “Biden-Harris Administration’s response.”

No faith can be placed in an investigation conducted within the same federal apparatus implicated in the response. After the disaster, Vance, then an Ohio senator, promoted railroad-safety legislation that predictably never became law. Another version introduced in April 2026 remains in committee.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sharply reduced EPA staffing and accelerated deregulation. More than 4,000 EPA employees left between January 2025 and January 2026.

The East Palestine catastrophe was not the product of one administration. It resulted from decades of railroad deregulation, corporate cost-cutting and the subordination of health and safety to profit under Democratic and Republican administrations alike.

Trump exploited East Palestine politically in 2023 after pursuing transportation and environmental deregulation during his first administration. Biden, meanwhile, had intervened only weeks before the derailment to impose a contract on 120,000 railroad workers and block a nationwide strike over staffing, scheduling, sick time and dangerous working conditions.

Norfolk Southern, meanwhile, has faced no criminal prosecution. Its $600 million class-action settlement contained no admission of wrongdoing.

The disaster was made possible by the profit motive. The railroad corporations operate to maximize returns to investors, while the government agencies charged with regulating them function within a political and economic system that treats corporate profitability and uninterrupted operations as overriding concerns. In East Palestine, the health and safety of railroad workers and residents were subordinated to those interests.

More than three and a half years later, residents still lack answers to basic questions: Who possessed the federal hazard models before the vent-and-burn, and why were residents not shown them? How reliable was the testing used to assure them the community was safe? What will be the long-term health consequences?

All government and corporate records must be released. Residents must receive lifelong medical monitoring and health care at no cost. An independent investigation must give residents, railroad workers and independent scientists full access to the evidence, free from control by Norfolk Southern or the agencies whose own conduct requires investigation.