The U.S. government has a specialized plane loaded with advanced sensors that officials boast is always ready to launch within an hour of any type of chemical disaster. But the plane only flew over eastern Ohio four days after the disastrous Norfolk Southern derailment last year.
A whistleblower told the Associated Press that the Environmental Protection Agency’s ASPECT plane could have provided crucial data about chemicals spewed into the air around East Palestine as debris 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 also could have helped authorities realize there was no need to blow up five tank cars and burn the vinyl chloride inside because The plane’s sensors could have detected the cars’ temperatures more accurately than rescuers on the ground, who were having trouble getting close enough safely to check.
But the single-engine Cessna cargo plane only flew over the train crash a day after the controversial venting and burning action created a huge cloud of black smoke over the entire area near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border.
Robert Kroutil said that even when the plane flew, it only collected incomplete data. So 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 update them so they would look good if they appeared in a public records request, Kroutil said.
Kroutil said his team classified the mission as inconclusive because only eight minutes of data were recorded on the two flights and the plane’s chemical sensors were turned off in the streams. But he said EPA managers amended their report to state that the venting and flaring operation was successful because the plane encountered so few chemicals when it finally flew.
“We can say that the data provided by the two ASPECT plane flights to East Palestine on February 7 was incomplete and irregular. We didn’t have confidence in the data. We couldn’t trust that,” Kroutil said.
Revelations about the use of the ASPECT plane 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 touted by the Biden administration.
The Government Accountability Project that represents Kroutil and has been critical of the EPA’s response in East Palestine sent a sworn statement detailing its concerns to the EPA inspector general on Tuesday and requested a formal investigation. The group provided a copy of the statement and Kroutil agreed to an advance interview with the AP.
In a statement released Tuesday, the EPA said it didn’t even request the plane until Feb. 5 — two days after the derailment — and that it arrived in Pittsburgh later in the day from its base in Texas. Due to icy conditions, the crew decided it was unsafe to fly on the day of the vent and burn, but it is unclear why the plane did not pass over the derailment on its way to the area. EPA response coordinator Mark Durno also said he believed the agency had enough sensors on the ground to effectively monitor the air and water as the derailed cars burned.
The agency said its “air monitoring readings were below detection levels for most contaminants except particulates” in the first two days after the derailment and “air monitoring did not detect chemical contaminants at levels of concern in the following hours.” controlled burning”. ” Officials say data collected from more than 115 million readings since then do not show any “persistent chemicals of concern” in the air.
But many city residents who still complain of respiratory problems and unexplained skin rashes, while worrying about the possibility of developing cancer, have doubts about the EPA’s assurances that their city and the streams that run through it are safe. More than 177,000 tons of soil and more than 67 million gallons of wastewater were transported as part of the ongoing cleanup that cost the railroad more than a billion dollars.
The NTSB chief said her agency’s investigation determined that the venting and burning was not necessary because the tank cars were actually starting to cool, confirming that a dangerous reaction was not happening inside them — something the chemical company had attempted. to tell employees. But the people who made the decision to blow up these tank cars said they were never informed of what the experts at OxyVinyls determined. Instead, they only heard about fears that the tankers might explode.
The EPA said the ASPECT plane’s flights over East Palestine were consistent with previous missions and that the plane gathered the requested information, but that did not match Kroutil’s experience.
“The East Palestine derailment was the strangest response I have ever seen with the ASPECT program in more than two decades with the program,” said Kroutil, who helped develop the program while working for the Department of Defense after the 9/11 attacks. September demonstrated the need for such aerial monitoring over New York.
Kroutil said he retired frustrated in January and wants to share his concerns about the mission in East Palestine. He said this incident was handled differently than the other 180 times the plane has been used since 2001. Some of those times, the plane was even sent as a precaution to be close to political conventions and Super Bowls in case something happened.
“You want to fly over a train derailment within the first five to 10 hours after the incident and while the fires are still burning. It’s really advantageous if you have a feather. That big black plume…that’s when you want to go in and collect data,” Kroutil said. “The EPA’s ASPECT plane should have made passes over the derailment site immediately, but certainly before ventilation and burning. I think they chose not to know.”
Kroutil’s former boss, Rick Turville, is the manager of the ASPECT aircraft data interpretation program at Kalman. He said he has complete trust in Kroutil because he is one of the world’s leading experts in spectroscopy, and he shares Kroutil’s frustration over the plane not flying sooner. The experts Kalman employs knew about the disaster in East Palestine but were unable to act until the EPA deployed the plane.
“These types of fires or fires in refineries, explosions in fertilizer plants, they don’t happen very often,” Turville said. “But when it happens, you have to be there and quickly. And that’s how you save lives.”
Fortunately, no one died in East Palestine, but thousands of lives were destroyed after the derailment and concerns about future health problems will not go away.
The EPA manager responsible for the program, Paige Delgado, did not immediately respond to an email sent to her Monday with questions about its actions.
Kroutil said he heard Delgado order the plane’s operator during the mission to turn off chemical sensors as he flew over streams in eastern Palestine, even though authorities were concerned about the chemicals reaching those waterways, potentially fouling the drinking water supply downstream of the Ohio River. Kroutil said his satellite connection to the plane’s instruments confirmed that those sensors were off.
The official EPA report on the two East Palestine flights describes photos the plane took over Little Beaver Creek after a problem with its aerial camera was fixed, but does not mention Sulfur Run, which flows right next to the derailment site, or the greater Leslie. The stream that crosses the city runs.
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