The Abandoned Americans

EAST PALESTINE, OH—Inside the gray clapboard house where Krissy Ferguson grew up, it smells like a decomposing body. Rotting meat, rotten eggs, sickly sweet. There is trash and broken glass strewn across the burgundy carpet. Gray-brown dust coats the armoire, the empty bookshelf, and the crosses hanging from the walls and on the refrigerator. 

As For Me & My House We Will Serve The Lord says a sign hanging over the entryway to the dining room.

“We’ve had to throw everything away,” Ferguson, 50, told me. She was in a flannel shirt, and her hair was mostly dyed magenta. Ferguson said her great-grandmother had bought the house in the 1940s, when the steel and ceramics factories in nearby Youngstown and East Liverpool and Pittsburgh employed pretty much everyone in this town (pop. 4,600). Her grandmother had raised her mother here; then her mother had raised her; then she had raised her daughter, now 22. The home had a porch and stained glass over the front door, and it sat directly above the creek, Sulphur Run, which snaked through town.

The creek started just north of East Palestine, and it flowed for more than two miles through the woods and under the houses and the municipal building. “It was beautiful,” Ferguson said.

In the summer, she said, “we’d play Red Dawn, from the movie, and we’d be the Americans that were invaded, and the kids from the other town, they would be the Russians. We would run through the tunnels, and we had squirt guns.” When her daughter was little, she’d take her down there for picnics.

Now she won’t go anywhere near the water. 

That’s because the creek is dangerous and a reminder of what happened: the derailment, at 8:55 p.m. on February 3, 2023, of the 53 cars on the 150-car Norfolk Southern train. The train was carrying huge vats of toxic chemicals, which spilled into the creek, which carried the chemicals through the town, where they were “off-gassed” and seeped into the floorboards and carpet and furniture inside Ferguson’s house and so many other houses in her town.

Three days after the derailment, Norfolk Southern conducted what they called a “controlled burn” of five train cars—unleashing a fiery, charcoal-gray mushroom cloud stretching over East Palestine and the neighboring villages of Negley, New Waterford, and Darlington, in Pennsylvania.

By then, most everyone in East Palestine had been evacuated.

“We watched it from the Burger King getting supper for my mom and my stepdad,” Ferguson said of the burn. She was in Chippewa Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles away. “It looked like an atomic bomb. We were just standing outside watching, crying, not knowing whether we were going to have a home to come back to.”

For a week, maybe two, the whole country talked about East Palestine. It seemed like an emblem of white working-class despair, and it energized the America Firsters: Charlie Kirk called it part of the “war on white people.” Tucker Carlson noted that East Palestine is “overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative”—and he further pointed out that the Department of Transportation had recently announced Transit Equity Day, funding projects in Detroit and Philadelphia but not East Palestine, “because the people who live there are the wrong color.” When Ohio’s newest senator, J.D. Vance, arrived in town two weeks after the disaster, he struck a less combative, more Hillbilly Elegy tone: “We need to give people confidence that this is a safe place to live, to work, to raise a family,” Vance said at a press conference. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt, and he knew how to pronounce the name of the place he was in. East Palesteen, not Palestine.

A few days later, the beating heart of the populist right touched down in his private jet. Donald Trump had announced his 2024 presidential bid three months earlier, and the locals greeted him like he was Jesus. “You are not forgotten,” he told them, standing next to Vance, who was already jockeying to be his running mate. Trump’s visit to East Palestine coincided with Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv, where the president pledged an additional $500 million to help Ukraine fight Russia—a war most Trump supporters thought we had no business being involved in, not when there were communities across America desperate for that kind of help. East Palestine’s mayor called Biden’s visit “the biggest slap in the face.” 

It was a reminder of why Trump easily won Ohio in 2016 and 2020—carrying Columbiana County, which includes East Palestine, with nearly 69 percent of the vote the first time around, and nearly 72 percent four years later.

The people of East Palestine did feel forgotten. They worried that the chemicals—including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, which are used to make plastic—were bleeding into their aquifer and wells. No one had died. But they kept getting headaches, welts, rashes, stomach issues. They had blurry vision. They could taste the fumes in the back of their throats. 

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The powerful people were moving on: Norfolk Southern resumed operations minutes after the evacuation order was lifted from the town, two days after the controlled burn. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan, a little over a week later, urged locals not to worry about the air and water. 

But locals couldn’t do that.

Krissy Ferguson’s urine tests kept showing vinyl chloride in her system, like everyone else’s in her family. Lonnie Miller, 48, who used to live 1,200 feet from the tracks, said there was something wrong with her English Shepherd. “She has lumps all over her body that she did not have a year ago,” said Miller, who had owned an antique shop in town—“That was my dream, that shop”—until she had to give it up. No one wanted to browse a half-mile from ground zero. Rick Tsai, a chiropractor, ventured into the tunnels, the creek, because he wanted to know if the EPA was telling the truth.

“My first words to my wife were, ‘We’re fucked,’ ” Tsai, 60, told me. Referring to the water, he said, “It was all purple, blue, white.”