Authorities released a toxic chemical gas into the air Monday after it sat in train cars for days following a fiery Ohio derailment, sending a gray column of smoke into the air that darkened the skies as residents just across the Pennsylvania border in Beaver County watched warily.
The planned controlled release of the industrial chemical vinyl chloride occurred late in the afternoon. Officials in both states had spent the day urging residents to leave an area of 1-2 miles around the small Ohio village of East Palestine, about 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, where the 50-car derailment Friday left the scene burning for days and sparked concerns about whether the air was safe to breathe.
“If you are in this red zone that is on the map, and you refuse to evacuate, you are risking death,” Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro said earlier Monday, displaying a map with red and orange blobs stretching from the derailment site into Beaver County. “If you are within the orange area on this map you risk permanent lung damage within a matter of hours or days.”
In the minutes after the gas was released, Dan Potts, who had left his hometown of Darlington Township in Beaver County because of the evacuation order, saw the column of smoke reach into the sky. Over the next hour, he watched the sky grow darker as the smoke spread. He described the spectacle before him simply as “strange, not something I’ve ever seen before.”[
By about 5:30 p.m., much of the sky near Chippewa Township was covered in dark clouds of smoke. The early-evening winds appeared light and it wasn't yet clear if or how much they would blow the smoke into Beaver County.
Mr. Shapiro held a short briefing at 8 p.m. where he stressed that the dramatic images notwithstanding, the controlled release was going as planned and should be wrapping up soon. He said the state is continuing to monitor the air quality around the burn and that “thus far no concerning readings have been detected.”
“Out of an abundance of caution,” Mr. Shapiro asked that Pennsylvania residents who live within a 2-mile radius of the train derailment continue to shelter in place, keeping windows and doors closed.
“We will learn from this,” he said.
Earlier in the day, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said the contents of five rail cars containing vinyl chloride were unstable and could explode, which would have risked the deadly spread of both toxic fumes and shrapnel. The controlled release of the gas would help alleviate the risk of shrapnel, which could fly up to a mile in an explosion, he said.
“We had to weigh different risks with no great choices,” Mr. DeWine said.
Shortly after 5 p.m., Norfolk Southern, the rail operator, said that “the controlled breach of several rail cars has been completed successfully.”
“Some of the material is now burning off consistent with expectations from the earlier models, and is expected to drain for a short number of hours,” the company said. “We have been, and will continue, monitoring air quality with the Ohio EPA.”