The US government has a specialized aircraft packed with advanced sensors, which officials boast is always ready to deploy within an hour of a chemical disaster. But the plane flew over eastern Ohio just four days after Norfolk Southern’s disastrous derailment there last year.
A whistleblower says the Environmental Protection Agency’s Aspect plane could have provided crucial data about the chemicals that spewed into the air and water around eastern Palestine as the wreckage burned and forced people from their homes.
The man who wrote the software and helped interpret data from the plane’s advanced radiological and infrared sensors said it could also have helped officials realize there was no need to blow open five tankers and burn the vinyl chloride inside — as the NTSB recently suggested — because the plane’s sensors could have detected the cars’ temperatures more accurately than the responders on the ground who struggled to get safely close enough to check.
But the single-engine Cessna cargo plane only flew over the train crash one day after the controversial vent-and-burn action sent a huge plume of black smoke over the entire area near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border as it burned vinyl chloride. .
Robert Kroutil said that even if the plane flew, it collected only incomplete data. When officials later realized some of the mission’s shortcomings, they asked the company Kroutil worked for, Kalman & Company, to draw up plans for the flight and date them so they would look good when they appeared in a public records request, Kroutil said.
Kroutil said his team classified the mission as inconclusive in their report because only eight minutes of data were recorded during the two flights and the plane’s chemical sensors were disabled over the creeks, but EPA managers changed the report to improve ventilation and declare combustion successful. because the plane found so few chemicals when it finally flew.
“We could see that the data from the two ASPECT aircraft flights to East Palestine on February 7 was incomplete and irregular. We had no confidence in the data. We couldn’t trust it,” Kroutil said.
The revelations about how the Aspect plane was mishandled in the wake of the worst rail disaster in a decade raise new questions about the effectiveness of the “whole of government response” in East Palestine that the Biden administration is keen to tout. The Government Accountability Project, which represents Kroutil and has been critical of the EPA’s response in East Palestine, sent an affidavit outlining its concerns to the EPA Inspector General on Tuesday and requested a formal investigation.
The EPA said in a statement Tuesday that the agency did not request the plane until Feb. 5 — two days after the derailment — and that it arrived in Pittsburgh late that day from its base in Texas, near the heart of the chemical industry. The flight crew decided it was not safe to fly due to icing conditions on the day of the de-aeration and burn, but it is not clear why the aircraft did not fly over the derailment on its way to the area. EPA response coordinator Mark Durno has also said he believes the agency had enough sensors on the ground to effectively monitor the air and water while the derailed, non-aircraft cars burned.
The agency said that “air monitoring values for most pollutants except particulate matter” were below detection levels in the first two days after the derailment and that “air monitoring in the hours after the controlled burn did not detect chemical contaminants at levels of concern.” Officials say data from more than 115 million measurements show no “persistent chemicals of concern” in the air since the derailment.
But many city residents who continue to complain of breathing problems and unexplained skin rashes while worrying about the possibility of cancer on the road are questioning the EPA’s assurances that their city and the creeks that run through it are safe . More than 177,000 tons of soil and more than 67 million gallons of wastewater have been removed as part of the cleanup that has cost the railroad more than $1 billion and will be completed later this year, according to the EPA.
The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said earlier this year that her agency’s investigation found that the venting and burning was unnecessary because the tankers actually began to cool, confirming what the chemical company tried to tell officials that a dangerous No reaction took place in them. But the people who made the decision to blow open those tankers said they were never told what OxyVinyls experts had determined. Instead, all they heard was fear that the tankers might explode.
The EPA said the Aspect aircraft’s flights in eastern Palestine were consistent with previous missions, but that does not match Kroutil’s experience.
“The derailment in East Palestine was the strangest response I have ever seen in more than 20 years with the ASPECT program,” said Kroutil, who helped develop the program while working for the Defense Department after September 11. the Los Alamos laboratory worked. attacks made it clear that monitoring a chemical explosion from the air was necessary.
Kroutil said he retired in January in frustration and wanted to share his concerns about the mission in East Palestine. He said this incident was handled differently than the 180 other times the plane has been used for other derailments, fires, explosions and other disasters since 2001. Sometimes the plane was even dispatched to nearby political conventions and Super Bowls as a precaution, just in case something happened.
“You want to fly over a train derailment in the first five to ten hours after the incident and while the fires are still burning. It’s really beneficial if you have a compliment. That big black plume – and the fires that occurred after the derailment – is when you want to go in and collect data,” Kroutil said. “The EPA ASPECT aircraft should have flown over the derailment site immediately, but certainly before the venting and fire. . I think they chose not to know.”