The attempt at cleaning up the toxic mess in East Palestine, Ohio hit another “snag” yesterday, much to the dismay of local residents. Workers from the Norfolk Southern Railroad along with state environmental officials had been loading up trucks with contaminated soil and water and shipping them out of the area. But on Saturday, the EPA ordered a “pause” in those shipments, and five truckloads of waste that had been en route out of the area were returned to the outskirts of the village. The EPA’s Region 5 administrator, Debra Shore, has apparently been assigned the job of overseeing these activities and delivering the bad news. She provided few details as to why the shipments were halted but promised that they would resume “very soon.” So for now, the residents of the village remain in a holding pattern. (Associated Press)

Federal environmental authorities have ordered a temporary halt in the shipment of contaminated waste from the site of a fiery train derailment earlier this month in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania state line.

Region 5 administrator Debra Shore of the Environmental Protection Agency said Saturday the agency ordered Norfolk Southern to “pause” shipments from the site of the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine but vowed that removal of the material would resume “very soon.”

“Everyone wants this contamination gone from the community. They don’t want the worry, and they don’t want the smell, and we owe it to the people of East Palestine to move it out of the community as quickly as possible,” Shore said.

The explanation offered by Debra Shore once again doesn’t paint the EPA in a very good light. She explained that up until Friday, Norfolk Southern “had been solely responsible for the disposal of the waste.” The railroad company had been handling all of the collection of the waste and simply “notifying” state environmental officials of how much had been collected and when it was shipped.

That’s an easy idea to translate. In other words, the EPA hadn’t even been involved in the process. They simply handed the job of cleaning up the toxic mess to the same people who created the toxic mess to begin with. Now, according to Shore, disposal plans “will be subject to EPA review and approval.”

But there’s obviously more to the story than that, and we’ve known about it for at least 48 hours. Norfolk Southern had been shipping contaminated soil to a disposal facility in Michigan and liquid waste to a different facility in Texas. But they never told officials in either state that the shipments were on the way and the facilities have refused to accept any more for the time being. And since the EPA was once again out of the loop and not bothering to monitor what the railroad company was doing, nobody had made arrangements for the proper disposal of the materials.

The EPA finally ordered house-to-house inspections for contamination levels, though it took them three weeks to get around to it. That’s at least a start, but it may come as cold comfort to the residents of the village who seem to uniformly feel as if they’ve been abandoned and ignored. Go have a look at this video of residents of the village talking about the physical effects they are experiencing. In particular, listen to Wade Lovett. He’s always had a deep, gruff voice. Now he “sounds like Mickey Mouse.” (And he definitely does.) Has anyone sent a doctor to check this guy out?