Norfolk Southern’s CEO did not attend an East Palestine, Ohio, town hall meeting where concerned residents detailed their health symptoms and grilled officials on why they have not been relocated away from the derailment site.
Darrell Wilson, assistant vice president of government relations for Norfolk Southern, joined several other federal and local officials for Thursday’s meeting.
“We are sorry. We’re sorry for what happened,” Wilson said before the crowd began yelling questions at him.
“You need to get some of our people out of here today!” one resident screamed. “What’s happened here is not right, people are suffering!”
Wilson attempted to explain Norfolk Southern’s recovery and cleanup plan following the Feb. 3 derailment, but he was bombarded with questions.
Another resident asked the officials not to dismiss people who have health concerns.
“The chemicals in the atmosphere could be affecting people differently so people that have symptoms they shouldn’t be dismissed, they should be looked at and they shouldn’t be here. I want to know why we were allowed to come home and why we haven’t been removed from here,” the resident said. “Just out of an abundance of caution. … What happened is not right.”
It’s not clear if Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw was expected to be at Thursday’s meeting. Shaw has been asked to testify under oath in a coming hearing hosted by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to talk about the derailment.
The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The 150-car Norfolk Southern Railway train was traveling from Madison, Illinois, to Conway, Pennsylvania, when it crashed in East Palestine, a small community near the Pennsylvania border, on Feb. 3.
A report by the National Transportation Safety Board said that a defect detector built into the railway transmitted an alarm message to the train’s crew after it recorded that the temperature of a wheel bearing on the 23rd car was 253 degrees hotter…
Read the full article here