Lindsay Johnston, a 26-year-old mother of two who lives in the area still shaken by the devastating Norfolk Southern train catastrophe, usually smiles — even when she’s furious.
In a county where he received 71 percent of the vote in the 2020 presidential election, Johnston remarked on Wednesday as hundreds of people came to visit former President Donald Trump.
“Local officials and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has been telling us it’s safe to go home. But how do they know it’s safe? They don’t- They think we’re all dumb hicks who voted for Trump and they can pull anything over on us. They do know we can’t vote against them if we’re dead. It’s not surprising that President Biden chose going to Ukraine over us. Why would he care about us? He knows we’re not going to vote for him.”
After receiving intense criticism for appearing to ignore the spills, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made the journey to the community on Thursday, 20 days after the catastrophe.
The “one-mile zone” around the rail crash site, where 1.1 million pounds of toxic vinyl chloride were spilled and later burned, sending thick, black plumes of smoke into the air and contaminating soil and water sources, is where Johnston, who is married with two young daughters, Paisley 4, and Cora 1, fled the house she and her husband bought just three years ago. Only a few times since then have the two returned to pick up items.
29-year-old Erin Neiheisel is 35 weeks along with her third child, a daughter they have already named Ivory.
Like Lindsay Johnston, Neiheisel works as a waitress at the Sprinklz restaurant in the heart of East Palestine. She smiles when she talks about the catastrophe that has struck their community, but she acknowledges that she does so out of fear of succumbing to it.
Neiheisel hopes she and her family are far enough away from the railway derailment’s epicenter—a little over a mile—to be safe. She lives on a tiny farm in that area.
Shelby Walker, 48, and her husband Paul reside with some of their five children and four grandkids in a modest wood-frame home across the street from the location of the mile-long train’s derailment and subsequent explosion into a large inferno.
