23 Feb 2023 Bonner Cohen: EPA Fails East Palestine, Ohio By Repeating 9/11 Mistake

Bonner Cohen

In an interview with One America News Network’s Stella Escobedo, National Center Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, Ph.D. said the EPA is ignoring lessons learned from the September 11 tragedy as it fails to respond appropriately to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio:

Vinyl Chlorine… is the gas that we used in World War I. And the EPA, three weeks after the accident, has not yet checked for that, but at the same time assures the public that the air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink. It simply belies reality.

I would point out that we have seen this movie before. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, the George W. Bush EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman assured the people of Manhattan that the air was safe to breathe. Well it turns out she was absolutely wrong.  Many people died of lung-related diseases caused directly by the air.

You can’t do instant measurements of these things, which is what EPA is doing using handheld devices, and expect to have any accuracy in predicting the longer-term exposure to the pollution that is undoubtedly taking place in East Palestine, Ohio….

It is extremely cruel to the people of East Palestine, Ohio to tell them that everything is fine when that is demonstrably not the case.

Bonner noted that the Biden Administration would likely have responded differently if the train had derailed in a neighborhood full of Biden supporters:

The people of East Palestine, Ohio, the demographic that’s there — the blue-collar people in flyover country — this is not a demographic that’s of any interest to the White House whatsoever.