One woman’s personal battle to defend the people affected by the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio and her account of how NAFTA served the final blow to region’s steel industry.

On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying hazardous materials derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, United States, causing a major environmental and public health tragedy. Photo by Gene J. Puskar for AP

Around 10 p.m. on Friday, February 3rd, Michelle Labate-Watson took Annie, her therapy dog, out for one last walk. As soon as she stepped outside, she could smell a repelling odor of burnt plastic. She had seen the message from the Beaver County Emergency Alert System informing residents that a train had derailed in East Palestine, Ohio just before 9 p.m., causing a tremendous blaze. Michelle, who prefers to go by the name of Mickey, grew up in East Palestine. “I’ve basically been running around that town since I was a baby,” she says. “Everyone there is like a part of me.” Today, a widow at the age of 66, she lives in a condo in Chippewa, Pennsylvania, just 10 miles away.

Chippewa shares the same big, starry sky as East Palestine. As Annie’s stocky body bounced from side to side, as her short Jack Russell’s legs flicked off the pavement, Mickey gazed up and saw the dark black smoke billowing across the night sky, hazing the otherwise star-studded night. When she went to bed shortly afterwards, Mickey thought about the first responders and prayed for their safety.

When fire fighters arrived on Friday night, they were unsure of what materials the train was carrying because the mandatory plaques that list the contents had melted. The railroad company confirmed that five of the 53 cars that derailed contained vinyl chloride. Although other cars were carrying six additional hazardous chemicals, the East Palestine Fire Chief confirmed that they were most concerned about vinyl chloride.

Vinyl chloride is a gas at ambient temperature, but it is transformed into a liquid state to transport it. The rail car carrying vinyl chloride had safety features to keep the chemical in liquid form.

To mitigate the risk, the vinyl chloride was drained into water and directly into two East Palestine sewages.

The next day Mickey brought Annie to an appointment with her veterinarian in Darlington, Ohio, just six miles from East Palestine. After the appointment, Mickey took Annie for a walk and noticed the plastic smell was much stronger. On that walk, she had to keep squinting as her eyes began to burn. Then she felt as if the skin on her face was burning, too, but she attributed it to allergies. By Saturday night, Annie was furiously licking her paws, which had turned red. “What the hell did you step on, Annie?” Mickey asked her dog as she rinsed her paws off in the bathtub.

Mickey spent her weekend on Tik Tok and Facebook. She learned that the 9,000-foot-long freight train belonged to a company called Norfolk Southern. The train had left Madison, Illinois and was making its way to Conway, Pennsylvania before it had caught on fire and derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on Friday at 8:55 p.m, just west of the Pennsylvania border.

Everyone within a one-mile radius of the train derailment was ordered to evacuate, but no one in the neighboring areas, such as Chippewa, received any kind of warning or guidance to stay indoors to avoid being exposed to the harmful chemicals.

When Mickey woke up on Sunday morning, she could barely open her eyes. They were painful and filled with pus. The allergy eye drops her doctor had prescribed weren’t helping and Annie was still licking her paws.

On Monday, Mickey went straight to the eye doctor’s office to have her swollen eyes checked. She found a parking lot filled with cars and a waiting room packed with around 30 people Everyone complained about irritated eyes. The receptionist told Mickey that it wasn’t worth waiting, because there was nothing the doctor could do. “She told me that it was the train derailment and that they were getting flooded with calls,” she says. “They told people to just go get allergy eye medication over at Walmart.” That was the first moment Mickey learned that her symptoms had something to do with the fire from the East Palestine train accident. “That was Monday. Everybody in the area was exposed all of Saturday and Sunday,” she says. “They could have at least warned everyone to stay at home!”

In the early hours of Monday morning, Norfolk Southern alerted that the temperature in the car carrying the vinyl chloride had begun to fluctuate, meaning it could no longer guarantee the chemical would remain in its liquid form. There was a significant risk of “flash evaporation,” which meant the liquid would instantly turn into gas and expand into the air. With the train fire blazing, the risk of a tremendous explosion became imminent. Residents within a one-mile radius who had not already left East Palestine, were now ordered to evacuate. Still, no advisory warning was sent to the residents in adjacent areas.

The governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania, together with the firefighters, the Ohio National Guard, U.S. Department of Defense, Norfolk Southern, Environmental Protection Agency or EPA and other agencies determined that the best option was to do a “controlled burn” to avoid a dangerous explosion. At 4:35 p.m., flames were lit in the pit area near the derailed train. Three minutes later, small charges were detonated to perforate miniature holes into the cars to begin releasing the chemicals. The controlled burn had begun.

By Thursday, Mickey’s eyes had not improved and her nose had begun bleeding, so she visited her doctor. The physician was the first person who explained to Mickey that the dangerous chemicals on the derailed train were irritating her eyes. The doctor herself lived in Columbiana, Ohio, one town over from East Palestine. Her eyes had also been burning since the train accident on Friday night, long before the controlled burn had begun on Monday. Even the doctor had not received any kind of warning to shelter in place or to avoid going outdoors because she, too, lived beyond the one-mile radius of the train derailment.

Mickey believes Norfolk Southern is responsible for what happened, but she also blames lax legislation that did not require the railway company to disclose the contents of the train.

The train was not considered a “high-hazard flammable train”, according to federal law, because only 20 of the 149 train cars contained hazardous materials. Therefore, the railway company was not required to notify the state of Ohio that the train had toxic chemicals onboard. In the days that followed, several media reported on Norfolk Southern’s significant lobbying efforts to exempt trains hauling dangerous materials from the “high-hazard” classification and to block the introduction of more stringent safety requirements such as requiring a two-man crew or introducing an electronic braking system to stop trains more quickly. Experts believe that if this last measure had been implemented, the East Palestine train accident could have been prevented. Surveillance footage shows that the train had already caught on fire when it was passing through Salem, located around 18 miles from East Palestine.

Mickey is familiar with hazardous materials and the mandatory EPA forms that must accompany them. Her father had owned one of the region’s biggest steel foundry suppliers, which made products for steel mills around the country. The company employed more than 500 people, many of them from East Palestine. Mickey was in charge of distributing EPA and Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, forms to the manufacturing facilities. These forms specified the toxicity and hazards of the materials being shipped.

She is proud of Ohio’s tradition of steelmaking. The state’s access to the Great Lakes, as well as its network of rivers and deposits of coal and iron, all contributed to the rise of a prosperous industry, which managed to survive numerous threats, such as the growth of substitutes for steel such as aluminum and plastic, as well as a period of increased steel imports from Asia, Russia and Brazil. However, Mickey believes that the final blow was the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement that created a trade bloc between Canada, the United States and Mexico.

“We were trying to explain to everybody that it was gonna destroy us,” she says. “We were a major steel-producing area. There were a few major plants such as Dale, J&L and ours. My father was telling the workers and the steel mills that if NAFTA went through, they’d all lose their jobs. And, look, it’s bankrupt us.” In 1993, Ohio had close to one million manufacturing jobs. By 2018 the state had lost 28.5% of those jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“We are basically all poor, white, disabled seniors, you know. There’s no young blood going in there. These people have been there for generations and generations.”

This accident isn’t the first time local residents have had to defend themselves against hazardous materials.

Just north of East Palestine is the town of Negley, which holds the PennOhio Waste landfill, a 153-acre expanse that has been under intense scrutiny from residents for its sloppy containment of garbage and runoff water.

Mickey runs a Facebook group called “You wish you weren’t from Negley, Ohio”. It is filled with hundreds of photos and videos of pollution and contamination from this landfill. Several videos show white streams of rainwater flowing out of the landfill and directly into surrounding creeks that lead to East Palestine. Others show train cars dumping regular house garbage mixed with flammable and hazardous construction debris that would blow off into the area in the form of white powder. These images were used as evidence to accompany a petition that residents began in 2019 to permanently close the dump. While the landfill remains open, the group has managed to stop the trains. Today, only trucks can dump garbage in the landfill. It infuriates Mickey to see how the landfill hurts the residents of Negley, where her family still owns a farm.

The train derailment is an additional tragedy afflicting the region. “I’m just so tired. I´m sick of government and I’m sick of the EPA. Now we have this disaster that could have been avoided.

Everybody has anxiety, depression. No one is sleeping.” For many years now, Mickey hyperventilates when she feels anxiety rising inside her chest. To combat it, she begins to sing. Her doctor explained that it was a quick way to bring extra oxygen into her lungs and restore a normal breathing pattern.

Sometimes Mickey wishes President Joe Biden would declare East Palestine a national disaster zone. “Today, our homes are only worth like 50 or 60 thousand dollars. We’re not going to be able to go find another home for that amount of money nowadays. Biden should have declared it a disaster zone, then just pay everybody and level the whole town.”

Many residents are worried because the EPA was only testing the air and water for the hazardous chemicals that the train was transporting. However, it was not testing for the new chemicals that may have formed in the combustion, such as dioxins, which are a dangerous and persistent kind of pollutant created when plastic is burned. Mickey had more faith in the private universities such as Carnegie Mellon and Purdue University that had arrived to do their own testing. She also took note that the lawyers who quickly appeared in East Palestine to prepare a class-action lawsuit, would include anyone harmed within a 30-mile radius, which was well beyond the one-mile radius the authorities were still referring to. On March 3rd, exactly one month after the train derailment, the EPA announced that it was ordering Norfolk Southern to test for dioxins. “Everybody is so mad,”says Mickey. “But we’re sitting ducks.” Just waiting for instructions.”

By now, one monthsince the derailment, Mickey’s eyes are no longer swollen and Annie has stopped licking her paws. The residents of East Palestine, wary of whether the drained chemicals or resulting dioxins have seeped into any of the town’s five spring-fed wells, have been relying on donations of bottled water. Mickey feels at ease drinking filtered water since Chippewa’s drinking water comes from a different source than East Palestine’s.

When she was 40, Mickey had given birth to her only child. During the childbirth, a blood clot slipped into Mickey’s lung and doctors thought she wouldn’t survive. It left her with a cognitive impairment, making it very difficult to read and write as she did before. After surviving, Mickey gave herself a new name, “Faith of Steel”, because as she explains, “I had made steel my whole life.”

“After having died on that operating table and then making it out alive, I was sure I had a purpose, but I never knew what it was,” she says “Now I know what it is: to represent the disabled, the seniors and the single parents.” She is working together with other residents on a proposal for an early-alert system to avoid future accidents.

“Nobody would listen to me about NAFTA and all the jobs were lost with the free trade agreement. But now that the whole town’s blown to shambles, maybe we can get some laws changed. I mean these laws gotta get changed.”