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The Ohio town where a Norfolk Southern train derailed Saturday may have “missed a bullet on this one” because its cars apparently weren’t transporting toxic chemicals like last month’s disaster in East Palestine, Rep. Mike Turner said Sunday.
“This train may have been empty. It looks like hazardous material is not going to be a threat to the community,” Turner (R-Ohio) told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
But US Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said he spoke to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and law-enforcement officials and that he is “not entirely satisfied” with the response from Norfolk Southern on the latest debacle.
“Because I want to know if … there are some sort of remnants of something that might have been in those cars,” Brown said on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Those cars were mostly empty. But I want to know if there are any contaminants sort of left in those mostly empty cars, that might have affected Clark County near the fairgrounds all the way into Springfield,”where Saturday’s crash occurred, Brown said.
Springfield is about 300 miles west of East Palestine.
Brown said the train that derailed in Springfield had more cars than the one that crashed in East Palestine on Feb. 3, when a toxic mix of chemicals were spewed into the air, ground and water in and around the town of about 5,000 people and caused widespread evacuations.
“This train was over 200 cars, which is 50 more cars than the East Palestine train,” the pol said of the Springfield crash, which involved about 20 of the containers going off the rails.
So the railroad’s got a lot of questions they’ve got to answer, and they really haven’t done it very well yet,” he said.
Turner noted that Ohio stands in the “crossroads of America” for rail and road travel and that an “unbelievable amount of goods travel though Ohio — some hazardous.”
“What we’ve seen recently with the risks to communities is unacceptable,” Turner said.
Asked if the railroad industry should face stricter regulations, he said, “Absolutely.
“The fact that we’re having derailment after derailment shows really the lack of investment, the disinvestment in our infrastructure, and that needs to change,” he said.
The Clark County Emergency Management Agency asked residents living within 1,000 feet of the crash site to shelter in place.
The agency later shared a tweet from DeWine saying, “We don’t believe hazardous materials were involved.”
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who was criticized for the government’s slow response to the East Palestine derailment, tweeted Saturday night that he had received an update on the Springfield crash and been in contact with the Ohio governor.
“I have been briefed by FRA leadership and spoke with Gov. DeWine to offer our support after the derailment today in Clark County, Ohio,” Buttigieg wrote.
“No hazardous material release has been reported, but we will continue to monitor closely and FRA personnel are en route,” he added, referring to the Federal Railroad Administration.
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