EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — No place to call home: that’s what some residents with houses closest to the scene of February’s train derailment disaster in East Palestine are saying six months after the crash.
Several of the freight tankers were hauling hazardous chemicals and as cleanup efforts continue at the site, some neighbors said they’re left unsettled.
Following the derailment, Courtney Miller is still living in a motel. She described the sounds she heard the night of Feb.3.
“I hear screeching, and the trains are so close to my house that I knew that that sound wasn’t, wasn’t what I usually hear,” she said. “It was like metal on metal grinding.”
That was the sound of dozens of Norfolk Southern rail cars colliding, and then bursting into flames.
Miller, along with her two children, left their Taggart Street home with only the clothes on their back. They returned the next day to grab a few more belongings, but she wasn’t prepared for what met her at the door.
“It hits you like when you open up a hot oven, like that heat when it hits you in the face,” she said. “That's what that smell did.”
Several of the derailed tankers were carrying the chemical vinyl chloride.
In the days following the crash, officials evacuated a one-mile radius around the site and conducted a controlled burn of the chemicals, saying it was necessary to prevent an explosion.
“It's like we were living in a gas chamber,” Miller said. “They just like lit off this plume, and they just left us to literally just suffer."
Miller is a former nurse aide, and she said the derailment impacted her health.
“I woke up with blood pouring out of my nose onto the pillow that I was sleeping on,” she said.
It also affected her ability to work, she said.
“I get cramps in my hands, and it's like starting to be atrophy,” she said. “I get headaches. I start coughing real bad.”
She now helps with housekeeping and lives at the hotel, the same hotel as area resident Jeff Drummond.
“It’s what I call home right now, but it’s a lot different than what I had," Drummond said.
His home of 10 years is near the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line.
“It’s just convenient for me,” he said. “It’s a nice place, you know, quiet."
But he said it’s those perks that are now causing him grief.
“Because that’s where they wanted to put all the contaminated soil,” Drummond said. “They wanted it outside the city limits, which just happens to be where my house is at.”
Since the accident, the Navy veteran said he’s noticed a change in his own health.
“Especially with the breathing, and I get tired real easy,” he said.
His house now sits abandoned while he waits for word that he can return, unsure of what else may now be inside.
“I’m not gonna go lay down on a bed that’s been exposed to all that,” he said.
Right now, Norfolk Southern is reimbursing his living expenses while he’s evacuated. He’s visited his house briefly only a handful of times for testing, and to rescue a prized posession.
“Yeah, April sixth I got my bike out,” he said. “That’s the last time I been to my house.”
Miller said she isn’t slowing down her own fight for justice, including participating in independent tests and research, searching for answers.
“I won’t stop kicking and screaming and fighting until the day I die,” she said.
But she still deals with worries about her family’s future, whether she’ll see her kids graduate or get married, or even see her grandchildren.
“Everything that they're doing to us is just shortening our lives,” she said.