Ohio River not being tested for dioxin, head of river commission says
The head of the commission that oversees the Ohio River said last week that the river water is not being tested for dioxin in the wake of the Feb. 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Richard Harrison, executive director and chief engineer of ORSANCO, the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, said the last dioxin testing they did on the river was several years ago.
They’re not monitoring it now, he said, because the Environmental Protection Agency has not indicated that there are dangerous levels of dioxin on the site of the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
“We have not done anything special with this and we’re just following EPA’s lead on this,” Harrison said in a phone interview with Crossroads Report last week.
“I think the initial thought here is it’s [dioxin] going to be something that does not have a significant impact. I mean, that’s what they’re saying on site. So, you know, beyond that, we’ll just follow EPA’s lead on that.”
The EPA announced on March 2 that in response to the concerns of people in East Palestine, it was requiring the railroad, Norfolk Southern, to test for dioxin on site.
In the same press release, the agency also said it was sampling for indicator chemicals and that test results “suggest a low probability for release of dioxin from this incident.”
But environmental groups are calling for the EPA to do the dioxin testing itself and they dispute the agency’s finding of a low probability that there are dioxins present.
In a March 13 letter to the EPA, they wrote:
“Responders reportedly punctured and burned more than 115,000 gallons of vinyl chloride in uncontrolled conditions for numerous days, making it likely that dioxins and related chlorinated substances were formed and released into the communities surrounding the disaster site. Four train cars of polyvinyl chloride plastic also burned, also likely forming dioxins. There have been elevated levels of dioxins released in other major accidents involving chlorinated chemicals—from the 2004 explosion at the PVC plant in Illiopolis, Illinois, to the 1997 Plastimet PVC recycling fire in Ontario, to the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.”
The Ohio River begins in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It doesn’t run through East Palestine, Ohio, but waterways connect the town to the river. A creek that runs through East Palestine leads into a river that feeds the Ohio River, putting all communities downstream at potential risk.
Harrison indicated ORSANCO is aware of the dangers of even low levels of dioxin as there is a standing advisory to not eat fish out of the Ohio River — called an “impairment” — because of dioxin, as well as PCBs, that were detected in prior testing done several years ago.
But no regular testing for dioxin is done, says Harrison.
When asked why, he says:
“It’s very expensive. Very complex. Very hard to do. And we focus on the chemicals that we typically would find.”
He calls dioxin “a legacy chemical that is not commonly produced.”
Dioxin was made infamous in the 1970s by the revelations that Agent Orange, the herbicide containing dioxin that the U.S. military sprayed on Vietnam during the Vietnam War, had caused serious health problems in hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps millions — mostly Vietnamese, but also U.S. soldiers who were exposed, and their children.
Herbicides containing dioxins were used in the Pacific northwest a few years later, to control undergrowth to support logging operations, resulting in miscarriages among women living in the valley that was fed by streams that had been sprayed.
Independent journalist and activist Eric Coppolino has written extensively on dioxin on his website, Planet Waves: https://planetwavesfm.substack.com/
Heard there is some cobalt they want to dig up and lots of computer chips manufacture that needs that water, now that it is too poisoned for food production. Their logic is obvious, a land taking opportunity.
This argument by the EPA is remarkably superficially-thought-out in my mind. The dioxins formed from burning vinyl chloride won't be found at the site; they'll settle down wind and be washed into the water table, and eventually into the Ohio. To not test even once the river based on the EPA's flawed thinking indicates the terror of technocracy: install the useful idiot you want and you can get any outcome you want.