The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on Thursday focused on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, giving lawmakers their first public opportunity to grill top officials for the accident that took place more than a month ago.
The hearing, scheduled for 10 a.m., will feature two panels of witnesses. The first panel includes lawmakers from Ohio, and the second is comprised of top officials from Norfolk Southern Corporation and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): Alan Shaw, the president and CEO of Norfolk Southern; Debra Shore, regional administration at the EPA; Anne Vogel, director of the Ohio EPA; Richard Harrison, the executive director and chief engineer of the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission; and Eric Brewer, the director and chief of hazardous materials response at the Beaver County Department of Emergency Services.
In a statement last month, the top lawmakers on the Senate committee said the hearing would focus on “the environmental and public health impacts of this incident.”
“Our focus will be to examine the local, state and federal response in the immediate aftermath of the train derailment and the ongoing efforts to clean up toxic chemicals in the surrounding environment,” Sens. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), the chair and ranking member of the committee, added.
The meeting — titled “Protecting Public Health and the Environment in the Wake of the Norfolk Southern Train Derailment and Chemical Release in East Palestine, Ohio” — comes more than a month after a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, and just days after roughly 20 cars of another Norfolk Southern cargo train derailed close to Springfield, Ohio. Unlike the first derailment, hazardous materials were not on board the second train that derailed.
Some lawmakers have been critical of Norfolk Southern in the wake of the accidents. On Sunday, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who is slated to testify at Thursday’s hearing, told ABC’s “This Week” that he was “not entirely satisfied” with the response to the second incident.
“I want to know … there are some sort of remnants of something that might have been in those cars. Those cars were mostly empty. But I want to know if there are any contaminants sort of left in those mostly empty cars that might have affected Clark County near the fairgrounds, all the way into Springfield,” he said.
“In this … train was over 200 cars, which is 50
more cars that the East Palestine train. So, the railroad’s got a lot of
questions they’ve got to answer and they really haven’t done it very well yet,
as you know,” he added.