I’ve been waiting to blog on this incident. My first impression about the response was when the local fire department for East Palestine, a city of fewer than 5,000 people, stated the day after the incident that they were monitoring the air and no pollutants were evident in the samplings.
It was then that I asked myself, “Are they sophisticated enough to do accurate monitoring of the air?” For myself, in an incident like this, I would equivocate everything being said. My stance would be, “Out of an abundance of caution, until we have all the information possible people should continue to [do xyz] in order to protect themselves and those who they love.”
Because we live in an era of mistrust in all institutions — government, business and, yes, even the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) — we have to be very careful about what we say, when we say it and how the information is expressed. Trust is not fungible. Once it is gone, it is gone for a very long time.
NPR reported that the Norfolk Southern Railway did not send a representative to a community meeting where several hundred residents had gathered to get an update. Not being there and being the “responsible party” for the spill sends all the wrong messages to the community.
Then there is the fact that the railroad’s priority is to reopen that railroad corridor to freight traffic. That might be good and appropriate if it followed another accident that did not include hazardous materials in or very near a populated area, so it again sends all the wrong subliminal messages: “You are not important, getting our freight moving and us making money is the No. 1 priority!”
This could end up being a textbook case of what not to do in responding to an incident of this nature. To his credit, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has visited the town several times already.
