The EPA says clean-up efforts in East Palestine, Ohio are wrapping up after crews removed more than 175,000 tons of contaminated soil, but officials continue to monitor air, land and water pollution.
At the University of Virginia, a team led by neuro-psychiatrist Aaron Reuben warns of another long-term problem – the mental health of people who lived within 65 miles of the derailment.
“We find that most people in the area are concerned. Most feel they could have been exposed to something, and something like 92% said, ‘I’m worried about how this is going to influence my health," he says.
Many were forced to leave their homes, and some are still haunted by memories of the disaster and fears it could happen again.
"We found that 15% of folks responding to our survey + meet criteria for PTSD and 13% meet criteria for major depression, and to put that in context, that’s about twice the average national rate for PTSD and 60% greater than the average national rate for depression," Reuben explains.
We’ve heard about PTSD in connection with wars, but what does that mean for people who live through environmental disaster?
“Having thoughts and feelings about the event that are intrusive – that get in the way when you’re at work or with your relationships. What we call hyper-vigilance, being on guard for the next traumatic event to try to avoid it, and then physical symptoms like difficulty sleeping, irritability. There are a wide variety of symptoms that fall within the PTSD bucket, and if you have enough of those we say you could benefit from treatment.”
Reuben also found widespread distrust of the information people got as giant plumes of black smoke filled the air and what they were told months later.
“Fewer than half felt confident in what they were being told or felt that they trusted the information provided by public officials about the event.”
This finding, he says, has implications for how the nation handles future natural and technological disasters.
“As psychologists, we are increasingly seeing that the kinds of information we give people – the sources of the information, the ways we communicate risk, these we believe could make a difference to whether someone goes on to develop psychiatric problems.”
And, he adds, we should expect future accidents of this kind.
“In some ways it’s a hard-to-predict event, because you don’t know where a train is going to derail. You don’t know when it’s going to release hazardous compounds. In another way it’s one that we should be preparing for, because we know up to three trains a day on average in the U.S. derail.”
That’s about a thousand derailments each year, and Reuben explains that there are two big reasons why the risk is rising.
“We know that we have aging infrastructure. We know that climate risks a lot of that infrastructure both through extreme heat, but also through fires and flooding, so I think we all acknowledge that disasters – both natural and technological – are going to increase.”
On a more positive note, he says there are good treatments for depression and PTSD, so emergency planners should build longer-term mental health care into their recommendations for future responses.
