Locals who live near the train derailment and release of toxic chemicals near East Palestine, Ohio, have complained about various health problems since the incident unfolded earlier this month, including rashes, headaches, and other issues. And they’ve expressed concerns that these new symptoms may be tied to the chemicals that were burned or released.
The Feb. 3 derailment triggered officials to initiate a controlled release and burn of various chemicals as they cited concerns that those materials would explode and send out deadly shrapnel. Chemicals carried on the Norfolk Southern-operated train include toxic vinyl chloride gas, which was vented and burned, releasing a large cloud of black smoke that hung over the area for days.
A plume of chemicals from the train derailment was also detected heading down the Ohio River, although some Ohio environmental officials assert that they may largely be fire retardant substances used to put out the fire. Other chemicals carried on the train include butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether acetate, and 2-ethylhexyl acrylate, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said (pdf).
Residents of East Palestine were told they could return to their homes on Feb. 8. Since then, there have been reports from locals of adverse health events they’ve suffered amid separate reports of animals, including fish and chickens, dying off.
“When we went back on the 10th, that’s when we decided that we couldn’t raise our kids here,” local Amanda Greathouse told CNN, adding that in the area, there was a smell that “reminded me of hair perming solution.”
About 30 minutes after returning home earlier this month, she developed nausea and a rash, Greathouse told the network. Her house is located about a block from the train derailment site.
“When we left, I had a rash on my skin on my arm, and my eyes were burning for a few days after that,” added Greathouse, who said she has two preschool-age children.
“The chemical smell was so strong that it made me nauseous,” Greathouse said. “I just wanted to quickly pick up what I needed and leave. I only took a few pieces of clothes because even the clothes smelled like chemicals, and I’m afraid to put them on my kids.”
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Another local, Katlyn Schwarzwaelder, said she and her boyfriend, Chris, returned home to East Palestine earlier this month. A rash broke out almost instantly after she came back, she told NewsNation.
“I undressed to get into the shower, and I had a rash all over the side of my face on both sides and all over my chest,” Schwarzwaelder said, adding: “My boyfriend Chris also had a rash on his left side, and I mean to this moment, right now, I have just a really low-grade constant headache.”
Dave Anderson, a farmer in nearby New Galilee, Pennsylvania, told the Washington Post last week that both he and his family have experienced a burning sensation in the mouth, tongue, and lips about a day after the crash. Other symptoms reported include tongue swelling, runny nose, and watery eyes.
Anderson added that “our tongues still feel like they have been scalded—like if you drank something that was too hot.”
“I’m going to East Palestine and will get a glass of water, and I’m going to ask him to drink it because I don’t believe it,” said Dave Anderson, a farmer in nearby New Galilee, Pennsylvania. Anderson, a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern, said his cattle have had diarrhea since the disaster.
A spokesman for DeWine told the Washington Post last Thursday that no doctors have seen patients who have been able to identify the chemical release as the cause of their symptoms. “There’s usually another explanation for those symptoms,” including colds and influenza, spokesman Dan Tierney told the paper, although he did not provide specific evidence for that statement.
And over the weekend, the CEO of Norfolk Southern, Alan Shaw, visited East Palestine and again vowed to clean up the crash site. His firm is already facing several class-action lawsuits connected to the derailment.
“I know there are still a lot of questions without answers. I know you’re tired. I know you’re worried,” Shaw said in a statement. “We will not let you down.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Funny how the gov just dismisses peoples symptoms as caused by something other than say the experimental bio-weapon shots or of those chemicals in the air and water in Palestine. Have we not learned anything from the fake covid scam? Do not trust ANYONE in government…..EVER!!!!!!
“No doctors have seen patients who have been able to identify the chemical release as the cause of their symptoms.”
You can’t prove that your symptoms -which only appeared after a million gallons of carcinogenic material was spilled down the street and was burned, creating phosgene gas, outlawed since WWI – caused those symptoms. What evil lurks in men’s hearts.
The CDC state that he Chemical Release was Safe and Effective for those that have been vaccinated.
Chiggers?
This is much more serious than the government appears willing to admit. Only idiots and Democrats believe trains are better for transporting liquids than pipelines.
These Palestine people are just killing the planet with every breath, so the more that no longer breath the better…be sure and go get some boosters while you are at it……
I’m disgusted to be an American.
These government officials are cowards. Live, drink and eat from their gardens and livestock for a few months and we’ll see how you really feel.
One of my early jobs was in a foundry and we used a chemical that was based on vinyl Chloride that we mixed in the molding sand to harden the sand. After some time of exposure to it, I started to black out from inhaling the smoke from the molds as they were poured, then I started getting red splotches all over because it got into my blood stream. Doctor told me to get away from it or I wouldn’t make it to 40 an d I was 36 then. I went back and gave my notice and this was in the mid 80’s when there were no jobs to be had. Well, I’m still on the green side of the grass thank You Jesus!
BTW, East Palestine is just one of three train derailments to happen in the US in the last few weeks. The other two must have been test runs. Glossed over is the fact the rail service violated federal safety laws by failing to document the presence of these dangerous chemicals on the train in the first place. So it’s anybody’s guess as to what WAS listed on the cargo manifest. I suspect something less toxic, which is why they thought it would be OK to set a match to the stuff and contaminate 200 square miles of the country with the resulting fallout.
Let’s have EVERY Biden cabinet member drink a nice big glass of East Palestine tap water on national TV since it is so safe.