CNN —
While the flames that tore through five cars of a derailed train that were carrying a potentially explosive chemical have died out in East Palestine, Ohio, officials say more data is needed on the area’s air and water quality to lift evacuation orders.
After Monday’s release and burn of a toxic chemical from the derailed train cars, authorities said they turned their attention to making sure that the air within the evacuation zone is safe for residents.
As part of that process, crews will be going into homes and businesses and collecting samples, said General John Harris with the Ohio National Guard.
“We are referencing subject matter experts to give us that data of what safe limits are in order to get these people home,” Fire Chief Keith Drabick said Tuesday. “I want nothing more than to get my residents back home. I can’t do that without that data. I have to know what those numbers are.”
Many residents of the area haven’t been home since Friday, when the train carrying hazardous chemicals crashed and ignited in flames, triggering evacuations and school closures in East Palestine, a village of about 5,000 people near the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. The derailment site raised fears of a deadly explosion as it kept burning for days with the chemicals still inside the train cars.
With a boom and a large plume of black smoke, officials on Monday performed controlled detonations to alleviate the risk of an uncontrolled explosion. They drained vinyl chloride – the hazardous and unstable chemical the train was carrying – into a pit to burn it away.
By Tuesday, the five cars were no longer ablaze, but questions remained over how safe the air is in the area.
“Air monitoring continues until we can verify that the area is safe and it’s gonna stay safe to allow people to return,” James Justice of the Environmental Protection Agency said at a Tuesday news conference.
Monitoring from the night of the controlled burn and the day after “did not detect anything of significance on site, outside the evacuation area,” Justice said.
The EPA had warned that residents even tens of miles away would smell odors coming from the site since the byproducts of the controlled burn can be smelled “at levels much lower than what is considered hazardous.”
Some people have noticed “odors and smoke” and teams were sent to collect air quality readings at those locations, Justice said. “We didn’t find any levels of concern at that time,” he added.
But more work needs to be done and water samples in the area are still being analyzed, officials said Tuesday afternoon.
“Once the Ohio Department of Health, the United States Enivronmental Protection Agency in conjunction with the East Palestine Fire Department, and Norfolk Southern Railroad have determined that this is safe for East Palestine residents to return to their homes – and quite frankly once I feel safe for my family to return – we will lift that evacuation order and start returning people home,” Drabick, the fire chief, said.
The National Guard – which Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine activated on Sunday – is now helping the EPA with air monitoring data, Harris said Tuesday.
“They will sample areas where in the low spaces where any effective material may have settled,” the general said. “They’ll be going into various residences and various businesses, sampling in basements, sampling surfaces.”
The chemical that officials released and burned – vinyl chloride – is a man-made chemical used to make PVC and it burns easily at room temperature.
Vinyl chloride can cause dizziness, sleepiness and headaches, and has been linked to an increased risk of cancer in the liver, brain, lungs and blood. Breathing high levels of vinyl chloride can make someone pass out or die if they don’t get fresh air, the Ohio Department of Health said.
As monitoring continues, the fire chief said it’s not just the vinyl chloride that’s a concern. Officials have to make sure the air is safe from any chemicals involved.
The train had more than 100 cars. About 20 of those cars were carrying hazardous materials and 10 of them derailed, said the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the incident.
Five train cars contained vinyl chloride and one of them in particular became a concern when its malfunctioning safety valves prevented the release of the chemical inside, officials told CNN.
On Monday, charges were used to blow small holes in each rail car, allowing the vinyl chloride to spill into a flare-lined trench that crews dug.
As of Tuesday, four of those five cars had been cleared from the wreckage, and crews were working to remove the fifth car, Norfolk Southern official Scott Deutsch said.
“They’ll be inspected by the NTSB. Once that’s complete, you’ll see us cutting those cars up and removing them from the site,” Deutsch added.
Meanwhile, the cause of the derailment remains under investigation.
NTSB Member Michael Graham has said the train crew got an alert about a mechanical issue before the derailment and that investigators found video showing “preliminary indications of mechanical issues” on one of the railcar axles.
Investigators requested records from Norfolk Southern and are investigating when the potential defect happened and the response from the train’s crew, which included an engineer, conductor and conductor trainee, Graham said Sunday.
