Board certified radiologist and Fox News contributor Dr. Nicole Saphier outlines potential health concerns following the Ohio train derailment Tuesday on "America Reports."
DR. NICOLE SAPHIER: Any time you have a train derailing, there's a potential for disaster and usually it is confined to the local wreckage. But what we're seeing going on in Ohio right now is a chemical catastrophe that has the potential to not only affect those who are immediately around the wreckage, those in the local community, but those miles and miles away. They've already announced that there has been some finding of the chemicals in the Ohio River. The Ohio River provides drinking water for over 5 million residents.
Now, on February 10... the EPA wrote a letter to Norfolk Southern, which is the train company, saying they did see substances in the water in the ground, also going into the storm drains....and then two days later, you have the EPA saying, however, they didn't detect any of the chemicals at a significant level. Now, I can tell you, listen, they have decided to do a controlled burn of this vinyl chloride.
NATIONAL GUARD CALLED IN TO ASSIST IN AFTERMATH OF OHIO TRAIN DERAILMENT
There was 20 of the cars that were labeled hazardous materials. They had a lot of dangerous chemicals, a lot of them industrial solvents. Five of those train cars had what's called vinyl chloride. That's used for PVC piping and other hard plastics. Now, that is a very, very dangerous substance and one thing that they noted is it is extremely flammable, and it can explode and with that explosion could cause shrapnel to go for miles and miles and also be in the air.
So, they decided to breach those train cars, leak out this vinyl chloride, put it into their own trench that they built and then they did a controlled burn. Well, what does that do? When you put the vinyl chloride into the porous soil, you're going to have leakage into the ground system and that controlled burn, what does that do?
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I can tell you, the metabolites from the vinyl chloride in themselves are dangerous and the EPA is saying that they are now monitoring for phosgene and hydrogen chloride. Those are the two things that vinyl chloride break down to, not to mention formaldehyde and some other things. So, while the immediate danger from this wreckage may have been lessened, I can tell you that the long-term sequel of this, the risk is very high and short term monitoring is not going to be sufficient for these local residents.
