EAST PALESTINE — The Region 5 Environmental Protection Agency gave East Palestine residents an update of remediation and monitoring efforts of February’s Norfolk Southern train derailment Thursday during an agency informational session at the Way Station.

The EPA’s response coordinators, Mark Durno and Tricia Edwards, reported that 81,000 tons of soil and solid waste have been disposed of and removed from the derailment site and more than 26 million gallons of wastewater have also been disposed of.

“We used to have five dirt piles but only two piles remain on site,” Edwards said. “All of the other soil has been removed.”

Edwards also reported that, along with both sets of tracks and the centerline, the north ditch and burn pits have been excavated and backfilled and the cleanup of car-scrapping Area 3 (the north side of the tracks where the burned-out tankers were broken down and removed) is wrapping at the derailment site.

Edwards said remediation will next focus on the car-scrapping Area 4 where she expects a faster removal process but also expects groundwater challenges.

“The intent is to grid this area off, and start using geo probes to take samples and characterize that waste in place. That’s not the clearance sample, we will still have to sample once the excavation is complete, but this allows us to excavate the soil and put it directly into the trucks and it can be hauled off for disposal immediately,” she explained. “But with this one we have some dewatering issues. We know there is some water moving through this area that we anticipate having some challenges with so the intent is while we are doing the waste characterization samples, we are trying to identify how far the contamination goes in each direction.”

Edwards said sheet piling will be used to encompass the area of excavation to manage water issues as digging is done. The groundwater issue was described as “perched water that always seems to be moving through that area” coming from the wetlands.

The EPA also reported that air and water monitoring continues in and around the derailment site with 22 roving air vehicles, summa canisters – uncoated metal canisters that take samples 24 hours a day – and other monitoring equipment throughout the village. No exceedances in the air to date have caused alarms.

In water monitoring updates, Edwards said that the 15 sentinel wells placed around the derailment site and the five to monitor municipal wells continue to be sampled and tested weekly. She also reported that 700 private drinking well samples have been taken and that “there haven’t been any exceedances to train-related waste” so far. She also said that the installation of more wells of both 20 and 70 feet are being considered. Edwards called the sentinel wells “the first line of defense” in protecting area drinking water.

East Palestine resident Robin Seman expressed concerns about the private well testing methods, questioning Durno as to why municipal water is being tested for 129 possible contaminants and private wells are being tested for just 29.

Durno called some chemicals “site-specific” and said that the longer list is dictated by where the municipal water supplies are located, the use of some firefighting foam at the derailment site and chemicals unrelated to February’s derailment that were discovered during excavation.

“In the groundwater sampling plan, we are doing a full line of semi-volatiles and volatiles to start. The derailment site has some legacy contamination,” he said. “They are train tracks; there are historic spills and historic petroleum products. We’ve run into a lot of spilled material that has nothing to do with the train wreck. We are doing a full-scale analysis but we end up narrowing that down to the original 29 chemicals based on what was on the train, what are the byproducts from the burn and what have we detected.”

As far as surface water monitoring, Edwards said there are 21 sampling locations. Those locations, which were sampled daily during the first four months post-derailment, are now on a three-day rotation. Edwards reported that the last exceedance of concern was last detected in March.

Edwards also said a process of air-knifing, where air is injected into the sediment to “liberate anything that was under the sediment and bring it to the surface” so it could be collected by a booming system downstream, has been replaced by a flushing process. Flushing involves disturbing the waterways by overturning rocks and stirring up sheen from the creek beds and then applying a score of 1 to 3 to the area. Edwards said the flushing process was implemented while the agency awaited the surface-water plan that was recently approved.

The EPA and the residents agreed that the surface-water plan took longer than it should have.

“For whatever reason it took so long, we would have much rather been in there assessing those streams sooner, but with everybody’s eyes on us with the whole country still watching this response, we need to make sure that those plans are tight,” Durno said “We gave Norfolk Southern a very aggressive timeline to give us the initial plans so they came in incomplete because the timelines we gave them were unrealistic and then there was a back and forth because we only have so many scientists to review 14 plans, so you are getting one one week and another another week.”

That answer wasn’t good enough for East Palestine Jami Wallace.

“It’s been six months and these are children’s lives,” she said. “This isn’t an ‘oh we went back and forth’ type thing.”

Durno said he shared in Wallace’s frustrations but said future responses will be improved based on what was learned in East Palestine.

“When we get to the lessons learned, when we’re done with all this construction and setting about all these long-term monitoring plans and making sure your groundwater is safe for 30 years, when we get all of those things set up, that’s when we will sit back and say ‘how could we have done this better;’ and some things could have been better,” Durno said.