Reps from Bannon podcast visit East Palestine
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EAST PALESTINE -- Steve Bannon, former chief strategist for President Donald Trump, lent an ear and gave a voice to residents in East Palestine and the surrounding communities who feel they have been forgotten as the two year anniversary of the Feb. 3, 2023 train derailment nears.
While Bannon was not in the village on Friday, Ben Bergquam -- founder of Frontline America and a reporter for Real America Voice -- was and he talked to a group of residents at the former site of McKim's Honeyvine on East Taggart Street during Bannon's War Room podcast.
Those residents took advantage of the national spotlight which has dimmed in the two years since the derailment and Bannon's connections to Trump to get a message out of the president-elect on the eve of his inauguration.
"This is a message for President Trump," Tammy Tsai said. "You came here. You didn't forget about it. You came here. You brought us water and you brought us supplies and we are forever grateful and we right now are counting on you to do the right thing."
Tsai, a Unity Township resident and wife of Dr. Rick Tsai who ran unsuccessfully for the congressional seat left vacant when Bill Johnson became President at Youngstown University, was referencing Trump's visit to the village in the days following the derailment. That visit has been touted as the first step in Trump's journey back to the White House.
"Trump's visit there energized and turbo-charged, I think, the meaning and purpose behind his campaign," Bannaon said Friday. "And it turbo-charged him through the primary and to the presidency that he will at high noon on Monday take the oath to become the 47th President of the United States."
As far as calling on Trump to "do the right thing," former East Palestine resident Lonnie Miller, who lived and owned a business in town before the derailment but has since closed shop and moved to Leetonia, said Trump needs to hold officials accountable for both actions and inactions taken after the rail disaster.
"I would love to see President Trump return to East Palestine, Ohio, and surrounding communities and drain the swamp here," Miller said. "This community has been ravished by lies. Our families, our loved ones, our children, our businesses, our livelihoods have been impacted by this. We need President Trump to get back here and drain the swamp in this community. We cannot have another East Palestine. It has to stop here."
Miller has been a vocal advocate for residents who link ill health effects to the 2023 derailment and subsequent vent-and-burn of vinyl chloride.
The potential health impacts was the rally cry of residents when demanding a Presidential Declaration from President Joe Biden. That would have opened the door for those living in the impacted areas to receive free healthcare under Social Security Act 1881a, which allows for medicare coverage for people exposed to environmental threats.
With just two days left in Biden's presidency, that ship has seemingly sailed but the need for one, according to village native Jami Wallace, remains.
"We still need a declaration of federal disaster," she said. "This isn't a political issue. Politics have no room when it comes to human health. That train didn't ask if we were Republicans or Democrats before it derailed."
Wallace was a lifelong resident of East Palestine. She too has relocated outside of the village with her husband and young daughter. She is founder and president of the Unity Council for the East Palestine Train Derailment, a community coalition that advocates on behalf of themselves, and said that those who lived through the derailment continue to live with the repercussions of it. She said the Trump Administration has seen first hand the consequences left in its wake. U.S. Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, who was about to be sworn in as vice president, has made numerous trips to the village and went viral for a video he recorded while standing next to one of the contaminated creeks.
"JD Vance has written three letters to the EPA, bipartisan letters with Senator Sherrod Brown, asking for indoor testing, asking for dioxin testing, asking for a public emergency," Wallace added. "And he personally wrote a letter to President Biden asking for a disaster declaration. We have been failed by every single piece of the government down to our local government."
Biden's first visit to the village took place on Feb. 16 of last year -- a full year after the disaster. During that visit, he announced that six National Institute of Health (NIH) grants would be awarded to various institutes of higher learning to study the health impacts of the derailment. Those studies are ongoing and the impacts of any chemical exposure is still unknown.
The unknown is what keeps Kristy Ferguson up at night and away from her home in town. She has been living in Columbiana since the derailment and is still relocated as the EPA deemed her house "a special circumstance" due to Sulphur Run -- one of the creeks in town that were confirmed contaminated with derailment-related compounds -- breaching her basement. Ferguson said that relocation will stop Feb. 28. She refuses to return to her home with her elderly parents who were already dealing with health issues before the train derailed.
"President Trump, please don't let my family become homeless," an emotional Ferguson pleaded. "Please make me believe in the government again because we've been failed by all of them. Please make a difference."
Edwin Wang, the owner of CeramFab, who slapped Norfolk Southern with a $500 million lawsuit for damages, used Bannon's podcast to shed light on his plight. Wang said his businesses have been destroyed by the events of Feb. 3, 2023. His facilities are located in the thick of things, so to speak, mere footsteps from where the train derailed. All the soil around CeramFab has been excavated and removed. The building still stands on derailment site soil. The EPA and Norfolk Southern said last year that the building would undergo a vapor intrusion study to determine if the building itself was still contaminated but also said that study could take two years to complete. Wang said he had little communication with the EPA since. That leaves Wang and his businesses at a standstill.
Wang told Bergquam that he relocated his business to East Palestine years ago, renovating and refurbishing two buildings that stood vacant and unused in the village.
"I moved to East Palestine to take over two abandoned buildings and spent a lot of money to renovate both buildings. I established two plants making high-temperature insulation materials for steel mill industries. This is like a multimillion dollar investment. For a small business owner, this is a large sum of money," Wang said. "When we moved here we immediately created 50 jobs. Without the derailment, we would've created more jobs, I believe, and would have generated tremendous revenue and made a huge contribution to the local economy."
But then the train derailed.
"That one night, everything was devastated," he said. "We lost everything. We lost all of our employees, we lost our customers, all the orders received and most importantly we lost a safe facility to continue our production."
Bannon told Wang and the other residents he would take their grievances to Trump himself and to Lee Zeldin, the administration's pick to head the EPA.
"We want to get a kind of punch list together so we can talk to the president about it and make sure that President Trump is fully informed and of course Lee Zeldin of the EPA," Bannon said.
Bannon thanked the residents for sharing their stories and for playing an unasked-for, yet pivotal role in Trump's re-emergence as a political powerplayer.
"We thought it was very important today to return to East Palestine because, quite frankly, your tragedy I think changed the direction American politics and led a lot to the victory that you're going to see culminated on Monday."