Republicans have spent weeks criticizing the response to the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, lobbing attacks at any target close enough for something to stick. Seldom have they directly confronted the clear-as-day culprit: corporate-bought deregulation. The charade has now hit another milestone, as Republicans line up behind a party-wide push to deregulate water protection in the United States.

On Tuesday, the Republican-led House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee voted to reverse a Biden administration rule on water protection—which could affect communities contaminated by disasters like the one in East Palestine.

In 2015, the Obama administration announced a rule that expanded the definition of what kinds of bodies of water can be covered under the Clean Water Act, the now 50-year-old law tasked with overseeing water pollution and protecting the integrity of the country’s waterways.

In 2020, the Trump administration rolled back Obama’s changes, letting polluters off the hook and leaving regulators with less jurisdiction over protecting waterways. The approach limited federal protection to cover only “permanent” bodies of water and not other smaller but still impactful waterways, like streams of water that flow only part of the year. As a result, Trump’s rule deferred to states to determine what would and wouldn’t be protected by the Clean Water Act. In a case like Ohio, where the local government has been slow to respond to the contamination of water, such limits could make communities worse off.

In January, the Biden administration issued a rule...

The decision to release and burn five tanker cars of vinyl chloride and other chemicals at the site of a 38-car derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just over three weeks ago unleashed a gigantic cloud full of particulates that enveloped surrounding neighborhoods and farms in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

It is well documented that burning chlorinated chemicals like vinyl chloride will generate dioxins. “Dioxin” is the name given to a group of persistent, very toxic chemicals that share similar chemical structures. The most toxic form of dioxin is 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin or TCDD. TCDD is more commonly recognized as the toxic contaminant found in Agent Orange and at Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri, both sites of two of the most tragic environmental catastrophes in US history.

Dioxin is not deliberately manufactured. It is the unintended byproduct of industrial processes that use or burn chlorine. It is also produced when chemicals such as vinyl chloride are burned such as occurred in East Palestine.

The organization I work for, the Center for Health, Environment & Justice, has worked with communities affected by dioxins for over 40 years. We have seen the impact of exposure to dioxins in communities from Love Canal and Times Beach to Pensacola, Florida. And now, we are asking, why isn’t EPA testing for dioxins in East Palestine, Ohio? Are dioxins present in the soil downwind from the site of the accident?

At a townhall meeting in East Palestine last week...

Every four years when I was growing up, my mother would scoff at the influx of presidential nominees pretending to care about Ohio voters. Now the town of East Palestine is being subjected to that spectacle in an off year.

Long before the 150-car train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, the entire surrounding region was suffering from indifference and tepid neglect. And even after the “controlled explosion”—meant to avert a more catastrophic spill—spewed black chemical smoke over the modest homes in this neighborhood, the disaster was widely overlooked until it became popular to self-righteously accuse one’s political opponents of ignoring the disaster. Peak disaster posturing probably occurred last week, when former President Donald Trump showed up (weeks after the crash) for a publicity stunt to hand out water bottles branded with his own name­—along with bottles of “much lesser quality water,” he added. The verbal tic—meant to elevate Trump water—came across as particularly insensitive in a place where toxic chemicals have upended lives and residents had been depending upon daily water quality monitoring for safety.

At an early public meeting, East Palestine residents asked why contaminated soil was not being removed—important to keeping toxins from leaching into the groundwater. Officials assured them that returning home was safe, despite the vinyl chloride in the train’s cargo having been linked to liver, brain, lung, and blood cancers. But if it’s safe in town, residents wanted to know, why does it hurt to breathe?

I grew up about a half-hour north of East Palestine, in a town about twice its tiny size, in a wash of small cities that rose with industry in the belt between Pittsburgh and Cleveland. By the time I was born, the Mahoning Valley’s steel industry had moved offshore. Brownfields dotted our landscape; train whistles remained ubiquitous as cars chugged along old lines, onward to elsewhere.

Elsewhere was my mother’s great dream for me. Keep up my grades, get a college scholarship. Get out. It wasn’t just my mother. Unemployment was rampant in our region, and many of us felt a push to flee...