The Abandoned Americans

EAST PALESTINE, OH—Inside the gray clapboard house where Krissy Ferguson grew up, it smells like a decomposing body. Rotting meat, rotten eggs, sickly sweet. There is trash and broken glass strewn across the burgundy carpet. Gray-brown dust coats the armoire, the empty bookshelf, and the crosses hanging from the walls and on the refrigerator. 

As For Me & My House We Will Serve The Lord says a sign hanging over the entryway to the dining room.

“We’ve had to throw everything away,” Ferguson, 50, told me. She was in a flannel shirt, and her hair was mostly dyed magenta. Ferguson said her great-grandmother had bought the house in the 1940s, when the steel and ceramics factories in nearby Youngstown and East Liverpool and Pittsburgh employed pretty much everyone in this town (pop. 4,600). Her grandmother had raised her mother here; then her mother had raised her; then she had raised her daughter, now 22. The home had a porch and stained glass over the front door, and it sat directly above the creek, Sulphur Run, which snaked through town.

The creek started just north of East Palestine, and it flowed for more than two miles through the woods and under the houses and the municipal building. “It was beautiful,” Ferguson said.

In the summer, she said, “we’d play Red Dawn, from the movie, and we’d be the Americans that were invaded, and the kids from the other town, they would be the Russians. We would run through the tunnels, and we had squirt guns.” When her daughter was little, she’d take her down there for picnics.

Now she won’t go anywhere near the water. 

That’s because the creek is dangerous and a reminder of what happened: the derailment, at 8:55 p.m. on February 3, 2023, of the 53 cars on the 150-car Norfolk Southern train. The train was carrying huge vats of toxic chemicals, which spilled into the creek, which carried the chemicals through the town, where they were “off-gassed” and seeped into the floorboards and carpet and furniture inside Ferguson’s house and so many other houses in her town.

Three days after the derailment, Norfolk Southern conducted what they called a “controlled burn” of five train cars—unleashing a fiery, charcoal-gray mushroom cloud stretching over East Palestine and the neighboring villages of Negley, New Waterford, and Darlington, in Pennsylvania.

By then, most everyone in East Palestine had been evacuated.

“We watched it from the Burger King getting supper for my mom and my stepdad,” Ferguson said of the burn. She was in Chippewa Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles away. “It looked like an atomic bomb. We were just standing outside watching, crying, not knowing whether we were going to have a home to come back to.”

For a week, maybe two, the whole country talked about East Palestine. It seemed like an emblem of white working-class despair, and it energized the America Firsters: Charlie Kirk called it part of the “war on white people.” Tucker Carlson noted that East Palestine is “overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative”—and he further pointed out that the Department of Transportation had recently announced Transit Equity Day, funding projects in Detroit and Philadelphia but not East Palestine, “because the people who live there are the wrong color.” When Ohio’s newest senator, J.D. Vance, arrived in town two weeks after the disaster, he struck a less combative, more Hillbilly Elegy tone: “We need to give people confidence that this is a safe place to live, to work, to raise a family,” Vance said at a press conference. He wore jeans and a white button-down shirt, and he knew how to pronounce the name of the place he was in. East Palesteen, not Palestine.

A few days later, the beating heart of the populist right touched down in his private jet. Donald Trump had announced his 2024 presidential bid three months earlier, and the locals greeted him like he was Jesus. “You are not forgotten,” he told them, standing next to Vance, who was already jockeying to be his running mate. Trump’s visit to East Palestine coincided with Joe Biden’s visit to Kyiv, where the president pledged an additional $500 million to help Ukraine fight Russia—a war most Trump supporters thought we had no business being involved in, not when there were communities across America desperate for that kind of help. East Palestine’s mayor called Biden’s visit “the biggest slap in the face.” 

It was a reminder of why Trump easily won Ohio in 2016 and 2020—carrying Columbiana County, which includes East Palestine, with nearly 69 percent of the vote the first time around, and nearly 72 percent four years later.

The people of East Palestine did feel forgotten. They worried that the chemicals—including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, which are used to make plastic—were bleeding into their aquifer and wells. No one had died. But they kept getting headaches, welts, rashes, stomach issues. They had blurry vision. They could taste the fumes in the back of their throats. 

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The powerful people were moving on: Norfolk Southern resumed operations minutes after the evacuation order was lifted from the town, two days after the controlled burn. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Michael Regan, a little over a week later, urged locals not to worry about the air and water. 

But locals couldn’t do that.

Krissy Ferguson’s urine tests kept showing vinyl chloride in her system, like everyone else’s in her family. Lonnie Miller, 48, who used to live 1,200 feet from the tracks, said there was something wrong with her English Shepherd. “She has lumps all over her body that she did not have a year ago,” said Miller, who had owned an antique shop in town—“That was my dream, that shop”—until she had to give it up. No one wanted to browse a half-mile from ground zero. Rick Tsai, a chiropractor, ventured into the tunnels, the creek, because he wanted to know if the EPA was telling the truth.

“My first words to my wife were, ‘We’re fucked,’ ” Tsai, 60, told me. Referring to the water, he said, “It was all purple, blue, white.”

He added: “I probably have some PTSD, because of all the crap that went on, all the lies.”

Tsai had grown up in South Beaver Township, Pennsylvania, a few miles away, and his wife, Tammy, came from the Pittsburgh suburbs. They had moved to East Palestine thirty years ago, bought five acres of land a mile or so from the town center, and cleared the trees, and Rick’s brother, Doug, a carpenter, had built the house for them. It was oak, and it was enveloped by black walnut trees and dogwoods, and there was a koi pond. 

“The koi pond is my baby,” Tammy Tsai told me. 

They were planning to move to a new house ten miles away, out of the shadow of the toxic cloud. They worried about the chemicals eventually seeping into their well.

They were sad, like Krissy Ferguson, like Lonnie Miller, and beneath the sadness, there was rage. 

“It’s like we’ve been discarded,” Tammy said. “This derailment and chemical bombing was a catalyst, and it opened like a Pandora’s box, and when you looked in, you see all this evil, meaning the corruption, and once your eyes were open because of that catastrophe, it was a sense of shock, and then it became like, ‘Well, this is just reality.’ ”

The poisoning of East Palestine mirrors that of another Rust Belt backwater: Flint, Michigan, 294 miles to the north and west. A decade ago, its water supply was contaminated by lead from aging pipes—killing twelve people. The youngest victim was 30-year-old Jassmine McBride, who passed away in 2019.

Like East Palestine, Flint had once been the epicenter of a booming economy. The locals worked at bustling factories and belonged to unions. Their kids went to solid public schools, and when they graduated, they could look forward to a job on the assembly line and a house and a car that was a little nicer than their parents’ had been. They knew they would find a spouse, join a church, have children, a pension, maybe a lake house. 

The only major difference between the two places was race. While East Palestine was nearly 89 percent white, Flint was 56 percent black. 

One was a cause célèbre on the right; the other, a symbol of systemic racism, championed by the left. They were both useful to their respective political beneficiaries, who liked to swoop in and give solemn, impassioned speeches and wag their fingers and conduct investigations and sprinkle other people’s money around—but were ultimately incapable of pushing back against the tectonic forces that had conspired against the American heartland.

That was how Chia Morgan saw things. Morgan was 37 and a social worker, and she had an 11-year-old daughter. Her father had been a line worker in Flint and was also a pastor. They came from the north side of town.

“People tend to think that the north side is the quote-unquote rough side, the ghetto,” Morgan told me. “That’s the area I love.”

She was shocked but not altogether surprised that all those people had died from drinking the water in Flint, and literally no one had gone to prison for it. 

“This was not an accident,” Morgan said. “This was definitely calculated by evil individuals who had no regard for what they regarded as an impoverished city.” 

Here’s what Morgan means:

In 1999, Buick City, the once-great complex of factories that comprised hundreds of acres and millions of square feet and employed some 30,000 souls, shut down after more than nine decades. In 2009, Buick’s parent company, GM, which had been losing market share for years, went bankrupt and was removed as one of the 30 stocks in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. By 2011, Flint’s unemployment rate was nearly 10 percent, it was the most dangerous city in America, the median income was just over $26,000, and the population was about 100,000—half of what it had been at its peak, in 1960.

That year, Republican governor Rick Snyder, who had been a venture capitalist before running for office, tapped an “emergency manager” to oversee the finances of Flint, which was now broke and facing a $25 million deficit. In 2013, hoping to curb costs, the city switched its water supply from Lake Huron, which had provided reliable drinking water for half a century, to the Flint River—but failed to treat it properly. That’s when lead inside Flint’s aging pipes started to leach into the water supply.

“For eighteen months, people drank the brown water,” Tonya Burns, a Flint City councilwoman, told me. “Looked like iced tea. Pregnant women drank it. Children drank it.”

Lots of people complained. No one did much. By then, Flint was no longer the epicenter of anything.

“Many people that were coming forward were, you know, they weren’t the most sophisticated people,” Jim Ananich, who was the former Democratic leader of the Michigan State Senate and had basically spent his whole life in Flint, told me. “They weren’t always the most polished. They got ignored.” 

In Flint, unlike in East Palestine, there were no pyrotechnics—no calamitous clash of railcars, no mushroom clouds. Instead of cleaning up the disaster site and papering over the rot and moving on, the powers that be pretended there was no disaster. 

Starting in 2014, the city saw a sharp uptick in Legionnaires’ disease, an especially serious form of pneumonia. Many locals did not trust the official death toll, which many estimated was much higher than the dozen officially recorded. 

The ripple effects of the water crisis were much more widespread: One in four children in Flint had been exposed to elevated lead levels—seven times the national average. That meant hyperactivity and delayed learning.

It wasn’t until January 2016 that President Barack Obama declared an emergency in Flint—freeing up federal funds. Michigan has spent $350 million and the federal government has contributed another $100 million to replace old pipes and provide healthcare, among other resources. Major philanthropies donated $125 million on top of that, and then there’s the $626 million settlement to be paid by the state to Flint residents. (The settlement was reached in 2021, but claimants have yet to receive any money.)

That same month—January 2016—Hillary Clinton, then battling Vermont senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination, jetted to Flint between campaign stops in New Hampshire. The next week, at the Democratic primary debate, she recalled her visit: “We’ve had a city in the United States of America where the population, which is poor in many ways and majority African American, has been drinking and bathing in lead-contaminated water, and the governor of that state acted as though he didn’t really care,” Clinton told the crowd. 

Lots of Democrats showed up in Flint: Obama, Bernie Sanders, congressional candidates, celebrities. Also: Trump.

“For a while,” Ananich said, people felt like they “had to come. Some of it was genuine, some of it was just, I think, an effort to look like they cared about the community.”

When, in November 2023, Democratic state attorney general Dana Nessel declared the Flint water-crisis investigation officially closed—after the state Supreme Court rejected an effort to convict Governor Snyder—it surprised few, if any, people in Flint.

The consensus was that politicians actually cared little for the people of Flint. “They’re poor. They don’t fund campaigns,” said Jamie Roe, who served as chief of staff for a former Michigan Republican congresswoman, referring to the townsfolk. “It’s very much like East Palestine. They might be reliable voters for one side, but even then, they don’t vote in big enough numbers to move heaven and earth for them.”

Chia Morgan, who is black and supporting Kamala Harris, said she thought race was “a major factor” behind the water crisis, but that wasn’t the only problem. East Palestine, she said, proved as much.

“There is a level you get to where they don’t care about skin color,” she said. “Being white alone won’t help, and it doesn’t matter whether the politicians are Democrats or Republicans. This is a class issue as well.” 

She added: “This was domestic terrorism.”

Back in East Palestine, Lonnie Miller wondered if anyone was going to save the city. She didn’t think so. She figured that, in five years, it would be “a ghost town.”

Rick and Tammy Tsai didn’t agree, but they weren’t sure what would be here, or who, or what they would do for a living.

There was supposed to be a $600 million settlement—with Norfolk Southern paying up to $70,000 per household—but a recent appeal had delayed those payments by as much as two years. 

Bitterness and division had engulfed the town. More lawsuits. More appeals. More internecine battles. People who trusted Norfolk Southern. People who thought Norfolk Southern’s CEO was Satan. People who thought the mayor, who had spoken at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee in July, was a puppet. Or a dupe. Neighbors no longer on speaking terms. Family members infuriated with each other. 

On Monday, the city manager, Chad Edwards, announced he was stepping down. “There are just too many divides,” Edwards said in his resignation letter. “I thought I could help breach them, but that no longer seems possible. I love East Palestine, and I hate leaving like this.”

Krissy Ferguson recalled that, after she started speaking up about the chemicals in the creek beneath her home, she started getting anonymous death threats.

“One day,” she said, “I came outside, to the porch, to get the mail, and I found a tongue.” It was sitting on the swing. She showed me a picture on her phone. “They dumped the blood there and there, and then they put the tongue in the middle.” The FBI determined that it had come from a lamb. No one knows who put it there. Ferguson believes someone was trying to scare her.

That was the kind of thing that enraged Lonnie Miller, who sounded permanently enraged these days. 

“I think God has things in store for me, and one of those is fighting Norfolk Southern for as long as I have to,” she said. She and her husband, Dave, were not about to sign on to the settlement. No one could buy their silence. She had worked for years to make the antique shop happen—until it just went kaboom. She could barely talk about her home—“that was my forever home”—without tearing up.

“I had my dream laundry room off my kitchen—it was just country and pretty, with all the Pinterest crafts. I had to give it all up, because when I’m trying to sleep at night, and the trains are going through town, you can still hear them. It was triggering these horrific dreams.”

When I asked Miller why she didn’t just sign on to the settlement and take the money and move on and not waste any more time fighting a war that could not be won, she sounded exasperated. 

“Someone needs to take a stand,” she said. 

When she moved to East Palestine three decades ago, it took her a while to get used to the trains rolling through town every fifteen or twenty minutes. 

Then, she and Dave had their son, Austin.

“The first six years of Austin’s life, we had a train set that ran around our living room ceiling,” Miller said. “It was just a way of making it normal for us.” She meant the intermittent rumbling and whistling outside. The metronome around which life in East Palestine revolved.

Now, the metronome courses through their nightmares. It reminds them of their powerlessness, Miller said. 

Friends in North Carolina and Pennsylvania had offered to let Austin move in with them, but he didn’t want to leave, she said. When she said it, her voice quivered. 

She recalled her son aged two or three. “He always had his little face pushed against the window looking outside—he was always looking, always waiting for the train,” Miller said. “We were a train family.” 

Peter Savodnik is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @petersavodnik, and read his piece, “The Kids vs. the Empire.”

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