The Daily Signal - BONUS INTERVIEW | ‘Fact-finding Mission’: Investigative Columnist Details Trip to East Palestine, Ohio

Episode Date: February 24, 2023

Roman Jankowski, an investigative columnist for The Daily Signal and a senior investigative counsel for the Oversight Project at The Heritage Foundation, joins a bonus episode of “The Daily Signal Podcast.” Jankowski provides some insight into his trip to East Palestine, Ohio, weeks after a cargo train carrying hazardous substances derailed, former President Donald Trump’s visit on Wednesday as well as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s visit on Thursday, and what the residents of East Palestine need. The residents in East Palestine continue to complain about rashes and other issues that they believe are being caused by the chemicals that were released from the train.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Samantha Sharis here, bringing you a bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. We have new information about the train carrying toxic chemicals that crashed in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month. We now know that the Norfolk Southern crew tried to slow the train down moments before it crashed. The crash was caused by an overheating wheelbearing. Usually, this overheating would trigger a sensor that would set off an alarm, but the sensors did not work. The alarm did eventually go off and there was an attempt to slow the train,

but by that time, it was too late. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg visited East Palestine after being criticized for not visiting the site of the crash sooner. A reporter asked Buttigieg if he should have visited sooner since it took more than two weeks for him to visit East Palestine.

Here's what Buttigieg had to say via Town Hall. In retrospect, should you have come a little sooner? So again, on terms of the timing of the visit, I'm trying to strike the right balance, allowing NTSB to play its role, but making sure we're here in that show of support. The residents in East Palestine continue to complain about rashes and other issues that they believe are being caused by the chemicals that were released from the train. Roman Jankowski is an investigative colonist for the Daily Signal and a senior investigative Council for the Oversight Project here at the Heritage Foundation.

Roman, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, no problem. Yeah, so I went over to East Palestine on Wednesday to basically conduct a fact-finding mission to figure out what exactly happened there and how the residents were feeling and at least because it's still close to Washington, D.C., I felt like, hey, this is a response. of me to go out there. If I'm going to be, and one of the things that I'm sorry for saying this, but what I do on my normal 9 to 5 is that I do a lot of Freedom of Information Act request and records requests to government agencies regarding any types of, all different types of oversight.

So in this case, I'm going to already sound out a few records requests to FEMA and to EPA regarding this incident. But I wanted to go there and investigate more to see what other records request I would want to make because of this. Yeah, absolutely. If you could, you know, give us some more insight into what you saw on the ground there, you know, what the community is like in East Palestine, yeah, what you saw firsthand. Yeah, so to go back and kind of describe what actually happened during the incident, and it makes sense after.

I want to give a little background on it. So on February 3rd, the incident happened around 8.55 p.m. It happened, could have been around 30 miles out of, before it reached the East Lansing. There was a fire. It could have happened because the brake pads, they're not really 100% sure. National Transportation Safety Board is still trying to determine everything right now. Around, and there was a response. Norfolk Southern admittedly responded to this incident.

the governor of Ohio immediately responded. And it's the response that I'm investigating and how they responded. And so we all know that they did, in order to safely mitigate, they believe to safely mitigate the incident, they had to start a controlled fire, created a lot of smoke, and this is the issue that we're dealing with right now. On February 17th, Trump Jr. announced that former President Trump is going to visit East Palestine.

Eight minutes later, FEMA announced that they're standing a senior official and I met incident response team. And after that, around February 22nd, EPA came out and said that we're going to force Norfolk Southern and hold them liable to clean up this mess. And around almost three weeks later, Secretary, transportation came to East Palestine. So this is the background to it. And when I got there, there was a lot of support for former President Trump.

There was flags up, everybody. They were basically holding a parade for him. They were really happy that he was coming because it seemed in their eyes that without his assistance, FEMA would have never came, EPA would have never forced Norfolk Southern to go and do the cleanup. up that it kind of did force the Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to come out there and so on. So they were really happy.

It was a big major celebration for him that day. I was really curious, too, because I know you were there on Wednesday when former President Trump visited. And like you were saying, on Thursday, Pete Buttigieg, Transportation Secretary made a visit. can you tell us about the different, you know, response or the reaction to Buttigieg versus Trump? And, you know, do you think, yeah, yeah, if you could talk about that. Yeah. Yeah, it seems for when Trump got there, of course, he did a press conference over in the firehouse and which was broadcast on national TV.

and when Pete got there, Secretary Pete, when he got there, it looked like he was not looking for any type of press. He wasn't looking for anybody, any of the residents to be able to come and talk to him or press people. He was avoiding the press. And it looked like he was avoiding the residents as well. And he was only talking to maybe the mayor or the IMAT team, the head of the IMAT team or the EPA or Norfolk Southern. but it looked like he was avoiding the residents. While it felt like former President Trump was embracing that, he went and he did his speech, but he also brought water and some other items for the residents.

So he was there for them and also the first responders and the mayor, and he spoke to that. And you just brought up the residents and some of what former President Trump brought, But from your conversations on the ground there and from talking to different residents, what do they need? Like what is the maybe do they need supplies? Do they need resources? Like what do they need there in Ohio? It seems like they wanted to get back to normal. It was a common theme among everybody I was talking to.

This is a working town. Everybody has a job. That day, everybody took off, even the kids left school early in order to be there. But on other days, everybody's going to work. Everybody has something to do. They can't stop life because of this incident. So at this point, what they want is to know that the water is safe to drink. They want to know if it's safe for them to be there.

They want to know if it's safe for them to farm. And, you know, is it safe for animals to be around? They just don't know. There's a lot of unanswered question. And even though you could see people, you know, officials going out there and drinking the water, taking a sip, these residents live there 24-7. So when I was on the ground, there was a smell. There was a smell. It was a very chemical smell.

It smelled sort of like diesel. And in certain areas, it smelled kind of sweet. Some of those areas were like near the river. I could smell like a little sweet fragrance in the air. And a lot of times that was near the airation pump. So I know that some people have said that that sweet smell is also the chemicals I'm smelling. So these people have to deal with this on a day-in-day-out basis. So maybe you'd have the governor take a sip of the water and maybe the water is safe,

but with a constant smell like that, maybe there are some other side effects that we don't know about. Yeah. So it's, there's a lot of unknown and these residents want to know what the answers are. And they want to know them as soon as possible. Yeah, definitely. And from throughout your trip, what was the most shocking thing that you saw or that you were told or that you heard, you know, while you were in Ohio? It was the kind of geography was shocking to me. I didn't realize that East Palestine was literally on the border with Pennsylvania.

Like, there are signs that say, you're welcome to Pennsylvania, like a few minutes outside of the town. So this incident was not just an Ohio incident. It was an Ohio and Pennsylvania incident. And that's why it needed a national response. And it needed to have national leaders there on the stage to help these people deal with these type of incidents. You know, a lot of times, you know, people I was talking to, they believe that they didn't get a quick response because of the color of their skin. They believe that, oh, because we're white and rural, this administration doesn't really like to work with us, talk to us, and they put us on the backburn. And that's the feeling I got when I went through a lot of the conversations I was having with these individuals.

That's really interesting. Roman, thank you so much for joining us and providing some insight into what's going on in East Palestine, Ohio. Looking forward to covering more of your reporting. Love to have you back on to talk about it. Thanks so much. No problem. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. Executive producers are Rob Louis and Kate Trinko.

Producers are Virginia Allen and Samantha Asheras. Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geine, and John Pop. To learn more, please visit DailySignal.com.