‘We Don’t Know What We Are Breathing’: A Report from East Palestine

For three decades, Barbara Kugler has lived less than a block from the Norfolk Southern railway line that crosses through East Palestine, Ohio. Up until this month, the sound of an oncoming freight train’s warning whistle—long, long, short, long—used to be a comfort.

But now when she hears it, she tenses. 

“For thirty years that sound meant home. It was p…