25 ways to stay warm this winter that won’t break the bank | CNN

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CNN
 — 

As wintry weather whips across the United States, one challenge may be staying warm if you can’t afford or are cutting back on indoor heating.

Staying warm is necessary “for a variety of health reasons” in addition to comfort, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association. For people with arthritis, stiffness “in your back and neck and sore joints do occur more in colder weather. … People who have metabolic conditions can be sensitive to the weather, like diabetes, for example, and heart disease. The more cold you are, the more stress you put on your heart.”

A little savvy based on our warm-blooded bodies, food, appliances, furniture, the outdoor elements and more can go a long way. Here are 25 ways to stay warm this winter — with or without indoor heating — that won’t break the bank.

How to warm your body

1. Warm up with store-bought hand warmers, microwavable heating pads, hot water bottles or heated blankets. Following the manufacturer’s instructions and concentrating on your torso are key, said JohnEric Smith, an associate professor in the department of kinesiology at Mississippi State University. “If you warm the core you can warm the hands and feet. It is harder to warm the core by warming the hands and feet.”

Be careful that you don’t burn yourself, Benjamin said. “They’re very effective on a knee or shoulder or the back of the neck. … You rarely put it directly on your skin. You usually wrap it in something, maybe a thin towel.”

2. Move your body. Physical activities like indoor exercise or dancing can help you warm up, but don’t get to the point where you’re sweating, Smith said. “We sweat to lose heat and sweating will make us colder.”

3. Think twice about taking a warm shower or bath. “While a warm bath or shower will feel good for the minute,” Smith said, “you will be cold after you get out and your wet skin is losing heat more quickly.”

4. Cuddle. Snuggles really can keep you warm. “Each of us produces heat through our metabolic processes. We lose our heat to the environment as we maintain body temperature,” Smith said via email. “Increasing skin contact decreases opportunities for the heat to be lost to the environment around us. If two people are under a blanket both of their heat losses combined can increase the temperature under the blanket more quickly than either could do independently.”

5. Change how you perceive cold. Some people have trained their minds to perceive cold as an objective, acceptable sensation rather than something dreadful to control. The best ways to adapt include wearing clothing in layers then removing it, or gradually lowering the thermostat and putting on a sweater, Benjamin said.

Enjoying warm foods and beverages is a two-in-one solution: You get heat from the appliances when you cook the food, then warmth when you eat it.

6. Enjoy warm beverages and foods, and use the oven and stove to cook them. Since foods higher in fat and protein are metabolized slowly by the body, those could make you feel warmer, Smith said. “Consider hearty soups with beans and meat.” Slow cooking meals can help generate heat throughout the day.

Drinking warm beverages “certainly helps take the chill off,” Benjamin said. Leaving the oven or stove on is “a bad idea because it burns fuel,” Benjamin said, “but more importantly, people fall asleep, they forget and leave the stove on. Sometimes things on the stove can catch on fire. So like any tool, you should use it for the purpose in which it was designed.”

“It only has to go poorly once to be life changing,” Smith said. If you don’t have children or pets, when you’re done cooking and you turn off the oven, what doesn’t hurt is leaving the oven door open to let residual heat escape.

Cozying up underneath layers of clothing or blankets (or both) can help insulate you from the cold.

7. Layer on the clothes. “Layering is critical,” Smith said. “Even thin layers added together to increase one’s ability to retain heat … focus on keeping the torso warm. Often an extra shirt or vest can warm your hands and feet more than an extra pair of socks or gloves.” Inexpensive pairs of tights or long johns can be worn underneath clothes. However, be sure that layering doesn’t make your clothing tight, he added, since that could reduce blood flow and thus your body’s ability to get warm blood to those areas. Wearing a hat, too, can also keep the heat in.

8. Wear thick socks and slippers. Fuzzy socks, slippers or a pair of shoes you reserve for wearing around the house can add extra comfort.

9. Pile on the blankets. “The more layers you put on, the better it helps trap the air between you,” your sheets and your blankets, Benjamin said. Since you lose a lot of heat from your head while you’re under blankets, he added, wearing a skull cap can help also.

10. Embrace less breathable clothing and linens. Breathable linens (such as the cotton-based variety) are often recommended during the summer, but linens with other materials and higher thread counts may be better for winter since higher thread counts have more weaving per square inch.

Optimize your home and appliances

There are multiple ways to make your heating system work better, or to create your own warmth.

11. Work with the weather. Open your curtains or blinds to let the sun in during the day, or when outside is warmer than inside your home.

12. Seal your windows and doors. Even if your windows and doors are totally shut and locked, drafts can seep in through small crevices. You can use caulk or shrink film to seal those cracks. Placing inexpensive, transparent shower curtains over windows can keep the sun in but the cold draft out. For the bottoms of doors, cloth draft stoppers are “very effective,” Benjamin said.

13. Close off unoccupied rooms. By shutting the doors of rooms no one is using, you can create additional barriers between yourself and the cold outdoors. This can also aid preventing heat loss from the room you’re in.

14. Reverse your ceiling fan. If possible, send your ceiling fan in a clockwise direction so that it sends the warm air down.

15. Sit near indoor heaters. You can safely use portable heaters if they are space heaters that have automatic shutoffs and can be plugged into a wall outlet instead of an extension cord. Since space heaters are a common cause of fires, they should be at least 3 feet away from any drapes, bedding or furniture. To prevent high levels of carbon monoxide — which can cause potentially fatal poisoning — ensure you have a carbon monoxide monitor installed and that you don’t “use any type of outdoor gas heater or anything that is not electric,” Benjamin said.

16. Move anything that’s blocking heat vents or radiators. The heat will better circulate throughout your home that way.

17. Spend time and sleep in the upper levels of the house. Heat rises, so moving your working, sleeping and living spaces upward may be more comfortable.

18. After showering, don’t run the bathroom fan or close the door. Unless your bathroom is prone to growing humidity-induced mold, the warm steam from the shower can make the nearby air less dry and cool for a short period of time.

19. Buy magnetic vent covers from home improvement stores. Used to cover vents, they can be inexpensive and help to force heat to exit vents in the occupied rooms only.

20. Put down rugs or carpets. These can be warmer to the touch than bare floors.

21. Insulate your attic. If you can afford to, padding your attic with insulation from hardware stores can help to retain some of the heat you usually lose through the attic since heat rises.

22. Research what your residential area offers. Some locations may be running warming centers set up for safety during the pandemic.

Sitting near a fire is a method that's always reliable.

23. Light a fire. If your fireplace runs on wood instead of gas, a fire is another way to keep a room warm and enjoy a cozy night. “Make sure that your flue is properly opened and clean to make sure that smoke doesn’t come back in the home but goes properly up the flue,” Benjamin said. “When the fire is out, you should of course close the flue because it’s like having an open window.”

24. Keep warm and enjoy s’mores. If your state, city, county or neighborhood allows, have a (moderate-size) backyard bonfire to keep warm for a while.

25. Don’t light candles. Candles can emit a small amount of heat, but using them as a source of warmth can be dangerous. “People will light candles and go to sleep, and they fall over,” Benjamin said. “The cat comes in and kicks it over and starts a fire.”

With these tips in mind and any others you find, be “broadly thoughtful about how to stay warm in the winter,” he added. “If it sounds like it’s a bad idea, it probably is. Look it up and check it out before you do it.”

This story has been updated to reflect recent weather advisories.

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A quarter of Americans live with polluted air, with people of color and those in Western states disproportionately affected, report says | CNN



CNN
 — 

About 1 in 4 people in the United States – more than 119 million residents – live with air pollution that can hurt their health and shorten their lives, according to a new report from the American Lung Association. People of color are disproportionately affected, as are residents of Western cities.

Since President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, emissions of outdoor air pollutants have fallen 78%, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. But Wednesday’s 2023 State of the Air report, which focuses on ozone and particle pollution, shows that millions put their health on the line every time they step outside.

To capture pollution levels at the county level, researchers analyzed data collected by the EPA’s Air Quality System, a repository of ambient air quality data from more than 10,000 monitors. They characterized the hourly average ozone concentration and the 24-hour average particle pollution concentration for 2019-21 at each monitoring site and factored in year-round pollution information from the EPA.

There were significant improvements in some areas. Generally, 17.6 million fewer people were breathing unhealthy air than in last year’s report, due largely to falling levels of ozone in some regions.

Ozone pollution is the main ingredient in smog. It comes from cars, power plants and refineries. Exposure to ozone can immediately exacerbate asthma symptoms, and people with long-term exposure to higher levels face a significantly higher risk of death from respiratory diseases than those who live with cleaner air.

Around 25% more counties got an A grade in the report for lower levels of ozone pollution. Some of that improvement can be attributed to the Clean Air Act, according to Katherine Pruitt, author of the report and the American Lung Association’s national senior director for policy.

Emission controls have helped, she said, as has the country’s continuing move away from its reliance on coal for its energy needs. Even something simple as the increase in the number of people who work from home has played a role.

“The Biden administration has set themselves a good, strong to do list of things that will help with environmental justice and climate protection,” Pruitt said. “They’re moving kind of slow, though. So we’d like them to pick up the pace.”

Despite the progress, not everyone was lucky enough to live in a county with good ozone levels. More than 100 million people live in counties that get an F for ozone smog, the report says.

Western and Southwestern cities are the most ozone-polluted, with 10 of the 25 most-polluted cities in California. New York, Chicago and Hartford, Connecticut, were the only three on that list east of the Mississippi River.

The five metropolitan areas with the worst ozone pollution are Los Angeles-Long Beach, California; Visalia, California; Bakersfield, California; Fresno-Madera-Hanford, California; and Phoenix-Mesa, Arizona.

Particle pollution, the other form of pollution tracked in the report, still seems to be a significant issue for the US.

Often hard to see, particle pollution is a mix of solid and liquid droplets that may come in the form of dirt, dust, soot or smoke. Coal- and natural gas-fired power plants create it, as do cars, agriculture, unpaved roads, construction sites and wildfires.

Particle pollution is so tiny – 1/20th of a width of a human hair – that it can travel past your body’s usual defenses.

Instead of being carried out when you exhale, it can get stuck in your lungs or go into your bloodstream. The particles cause irritation and inflammation and may lead to respiratory problems. Exposure can cause cancer, stroke or heart attack; it could also aggravate asthma, and it has even been associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety, studies show.

The new report says the number of people living in counties with failing grades for daily spikes of particle pollution was the highest it has been in a decade. Nearly 64 million live with these kind of unhealthy spikes in counties that get failing grades.

One driver of the high amounts of particle pollution are the wildfires that have consumed hundreds of thousands of acres. In 2021 alone, there were 14,407 fires, many in the West, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. There used to be a wildfire season, experts say, but now they happen year-round.

Those fires are why the regions with the highest concentrations of air pollution are largely in the West.

When the American Lung Association started producing its report in 2004, 106 counties in 30 states got failing grades for daily spikes in particle pollution. Fewer than half were in eight states west of the Rocky Mountains. Today, 111 counties in 19 states got Fs for spikes in particle pollution, and all but eight counties are in the West, the report says.

Urban centers in the Rust Belt and the industrialized East had gotten the most failing grades in the early 2000s, but many have cleaned up and now get passing grades.

Bakersfield, California, displaced Fresno as the metropolitan area with the worst short-term particle pollution, but Fresno did not suddenly develop cleaner air. That city still had the most-polluted label for year-round particle pollution, tied with Visalia, in the agricultural San Joaquin Valley.

Los Angeles is still the city with the worst ozone pollution, according to the report, as it has been for all but one of the years included in the report.

California has some of the more progressive environmental legislation in the country, but the climate crisis has not been kind to the state, said Tarik Benmarhnia, an air pollution and wildfire researcher at the University of California, San Diego, who did not work on the new report.

“All these cities like Bakersfield and Visalia are in a valley near the forests that are seeing big fires. There’s also intense agricultural and industrial work there, so they unfortunately have all the worst conditions for air pollution,” Benmarhnia said.

There are some newcomers to the list of the 25 areas with the most particle pollution, including Denver and Fargo, North Dakota. Reno, Nevada; Yakima and Spokane, Washington; and Boise, Idaho; all made the worst list this year.

San Luis Obispo, California; Portland, Oregon; and Seattle and Bellingham, Washington; all moved off the list of worst 25 cities.

Residents in the cities ranked worst for particle pollution are living with more of it, the report says. In the top 25 cities with the worst air, the average number of days residents were exposed to high levels of fine particle pollution increased to a weighted average of 18.3, up from 16.5 in last year’s report.

East of the Mississippi, Pittsburgh and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, were the two worst metropolitan areas in the country, posting more days high in fine particle pollution in this year’s report.

Not everyone experiences pollution the same way in the US. Regardless of the region, communities of color bear the brunt of the problem.

Specifically, although people of color make up 41% of the overall US population, they are 54% of the nearly 120 million people living in counties with at least one failing grade for unhealthy air. And in the counties with the worst air quality, 72% of the 18 million residents are people of color, the report said.

Other research has also shown this trend. On maps that lay out areas with high levels of air pollution and where communities were redlined – areas where Black people were forced to live – they line up perfectly, Pruitt said.

“Then, the other aspect is, when you have a community of color that is a voluntary community, people aren’t forced to live there, those are communities that tend to have less of a voice, so decision makers place polluting sources in those communities because there’s not as much howling by people with power when they do. So those communities get the highways; they get the landfills; they get the fence lines,” she said.

There’s a myth that only poor communities live with disproportionate pollution levels, says Chris Tessum, a professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of the University of Illinois. Tessum, who was not involved in the new report, says race really is the determining factor.

“The thinking is that people with more money will buy better property, which has lower air pollution and that’s just the way of the world or whatever, but that’s just kind of emphatically not, not true,” he said.

Communities need to play a key role in making decisions to help clean air, Tessum said.

“People that have the power will use that power to benefit themselves and not the people that have been historically overburdened,” he said.

The new report says government and residents can make a difference. One suggestion is to leverage Inflation Reduction Act funding to help reduce emissions at ports and to invest in zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles and in infrastructure that would improve air quality monitoring.

States can also use the Clean Air Act authority to adopt the California zero-emissions standards for cars and trucks, the report says.

At the federal level, agencies must finalize stronger limits on air pollution to truly protect public health and advance environmental justice, the report says, including standards to move the country toward zero-emissions vehicles. The EPA also has to set stronger national standards for particle pollution and ozone, the researchers say.

Pruitt said she knows firsthand how better policies can work. She said growing up before the Clean Air Act, pollution was so high that she could see it every time she stepped outside. Today, the pollution is not nearly as visible.

“I’m in my mid-60s, and of course, air pollution was very tangible when I was young, but these days, thank goodness it isn’t. Most people don’t see it,” she said. Unless a person has a lung condition, they may not even feel it.

But just because you can’t see it or feel it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Pruitt encourages people to remember that no level of pollution is safe. The World Health Organization estimates that the combined effects of ambient air pollution and household air pollution are associated with 6.7 million premature deaths annually.

“People don’t really recognize that what they’re breathing is impacting their health,” Pruitt said.

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Many firefighters who responded to Ohio train derailment didn’t have the needed training, equipment | CNN



CNN
 — 

Many of the first responders who helped fight the fire that erupted after the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last month were ill-equipped and untrained to fight the massive chemical blaze that some now call “the hell fire.”

In testimony Wednesday before the US Senate’s Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, lawmakers heard about myriad issues that snarled the response and that put firefighters who rushed to the scene at greater immediate risk – and may raise risks to their health throughout their lives.

About 300 firefighters from 50 departments dashed to the scene of the derailment in East Palestine on the night of February 3. Many of them were volunteers without hazmat training or specialized equipment.

Officials investigating the derailment testified that these first responders weren’t able to access information about the chemicals that were in 11 overturned cars carrying hazardous materials.

Jennifer Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, the agency investigating the crash, urged senators to consider meaningful changes to help inform exposed communities and first responders.

“People deserve to know what chemicals are moving through their communities and how to stay safe in an emergency, That includes responders who risk their lives for each of us every single day. They deserve to be prepared,” Homendy said.

Studies have shown that firefighters have a higher rates of cancer compared with members of the general population because of toxic chemicals they’re exposed to on the job. These cancers include digestive, oral, lung and bladder cancers. A rare type of cancer called malignant mesothelioma is about twice as common in firefighters than in the general population, probably due to exposure to asbestos in burning buildings, for example.

Cancer is now the leading cause of death for working firefighters, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Wednesday that he is very concerned about the long-term health of the firefighters who responded to the derailment.

“They all need to be assessed,” he said. “There needs to be established a baseline, and they need to be assured that in five years or 10 years, there’s still a place where they could go.”

“We look to the railroad to establish that fund,” DeWine said in testimony before the committee.

The derailment occurred about 9 p.m. February 3, and the night air quickly filled with smoke. Visibility was poor, and some of the placards on overturned railcars had burned away, leaving responders clueless about what chemicals were spilling and catching fire around them.

There’s an app, AskRail, meant to give users more information about the what’s on trains involved in accidents, but none of the first responders to the derailment in East Palestine had access to it, Homendy said.

Even if they had been able to use it, the app lists what is in cars by their order on the train, and its information may have been of limited help to firefighters on the scene who were looking at cars that were “bunched up” and not in their normal order, said David Comstock, chief of the Ohio Western Reserve Fire District.

There are better ways of getting urgent information to first responders, he told the senators.

After auto accidents, for example, some telematic systems in cars transmit information about the crash to emergency dispatchers who can then send it to crews responding to the scene.

“So en route to a motor vehicle accident, I know the car has flipped three times, airbags gone out, and it has information about that car – whether it’s an electric car, things I have to worry about,” Comstock said.

No information like that was available to crews responding to the derailed train.

“They didn’t have the information for quite a long time on what was on the train,” Homendy said.

Facing criticism over its role in the response, the company that owns and operates the train, Norfolk Southern, has announced that it will create a new regional training center for first responders. CEO Alan Shaw repeated that pledge in his testimony Wednesday before the committee.

The company also intends to expand its Operation Awareness & Response program, which travels its 22-state network to teach first responders how to stay safe after train accidents.

Comstock testified that more training is important, but so is more gear. He said most fire stations in the area are lucky if they can supply each member of their crew with a single set of turnout gear: the protective coat, pants, boots, gloves and helmets firefighters wear.

“When I have to wash that, I’m out of service,” he said. “In response to the derailment, I had three firefighters who were exposed. Their gear is contaminated. I can’t use it.”

It takes six months to order replacement gear, he said.

“That means I have three firefighters who are out of service for six months who can’t respond to auto accidents or structure fires,” he said.

Even then, that basic gear isn’t designed to stand up to hazardous materials like the chemicals on the Norfolk Southern train.

For that kind of incident, firefighters need hazmat suits, which can cost $15,000 each, Comstock testified, along with specialized monitoring equipment.

“It’s unrealistic for the federal government to provide that to every department, but we do need to look at a regional approach so we can call in those teams that can supplement what we’re trying to do,” he said.

Comstock said he hopes the committee will consider the needs of firefighters as it drafts legislation to right the wrongs of the East Palestine incident.

“This incident has emphasized the need to better train and equip firefighters to respond to hazardous material incidents, specifically to derailments in rural areas, which are mostly served by volunteer fire departments that often lack sufficient resources, tax base and manpower,” he said.

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One month later, people living near a toxic train derailment wonder if their lives will ever be back on track | CNN


East Palestine, Ohio
CNN
 — 

This had been a quiet little town of about 4,700 people nestled in the rolling hills of Northeast Ohio. A sign posted on State Road 14 welcomes visitors to East Palestine, “the place to be.”

But for the past month, ever since a freight train derailed and caught fire, the town has been bustling with responders and reporters. Residents say they’re grateful for the help, but the attention and uncertainty have begun to strain the town’s hospitality.

Town halls and news conferences have taken over the school auditoriums and municipal buildings and shut down its main street. A clinic opened to address worrisome health questions and symptoms, and government workers have been going door-to-door to survey residents about health impacts.

Gov. Mike DeWine has traveled to East Palestine four times since the derailment and US Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan three times, each with entourages of aides and press wranglers. Some business owners near the downtown area are so tired of answering questions, they posted signs asking reporters to stay out.

The streets are busy with utility trucks for environmental clean-up companies TetraTech, Arcadis and AEComm. Plastic hoses snake into Leslie Run and Sulphur Run, two creeks that run through town that were contaminated by the accident. Large pieces of equipment that look like showerheads churn and bubble the water in these streams, hoping to speed the breakdown of chemicals in them.

Still, the floral, fruity odor of the chemical butyl acrylate still wafts up from the streams.

Many residents say they are angry.

Donna Reidy, 62, lives about a mile and a half away from the site in a white house on a hill that overlooks Leslie Run, one of the area waterways contaminated by the spill. On Thursday, she answered questions for a government health study that’s being conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a division of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Reidy said that neither she or her husband – who has lung problems and requires supplemental oxygen – experienced any new or worsening physical symptoms since the derailment. However, her daughter, who also lives in East Palestine, had, she told investigators.

Reidy said her daughter had to gone to the hospital after vomiting and developing a rash. Donna said the stress of trying to protect her husband and worry for her daughter had worsened some anxiety she already struggled with, and she’s afraid of health problems that could arise later on.

“I’ve already had cancer, I don’t want to get it again,” she told Dr. Dallas Shi, an officer in the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, as they stood in the front yard outside her home.

For the study, called an assessment of chemical exposure, or ACE, Shi is working with a mapping specialist Ian Dunn, a geospatial health scientist and CDC contractor, to interview residents in some of the areas believed to be most impacted by the contamination.

After Reidy answered pages of required questions, Shi and Dunn ask her if there was anything else she wanted them to know.

“Yeah,” she said. “This stuff sucks.”

“We got roots here,” she told them. Five generations of her family lived in East Palestine. Her husband’s father saved money during World War II and sent it home to his wife so they could buy the home they live in today. Her children and grandchildren have gone to the local schools.

“They just ruined everything,” Reidy says, speaking of Norfolk Southern.

“My kids are moving, my grandkids are moving away. They just ruined everything,” she said as she started to cry.

“I’m so sorry,” Shi said, “Can I give you a hug?”

Shi, who was dressed in her dark blue public health service uniform and black work boots, put her arms around Reidy. “I can’t imagine,” she said.

“I’m so mad at them because they’re so cheap and all they cared about was money for themselves,” Reidy went on, speaking through tears. “They should have huge fines against them.”

Then Reidy apologized for getting upset.

On Thursday night, some area residents came to the local high school auditorium for a town hall meeting – their first chance to confront Norfolk Southern since the spill – and expressed similar anger and frustration.

The company was ordered to appear at the town hall by the EPA after declining to participate in earlier events.

“One thing I would like to say … is that we are sorry. We’re very sorry. We feel horrible about it,” said Darrell Wilson, who was representing the company.

The room erupted with shouts of “Buy us out!”

“Do the right thing,” one man shouted. “Tell Alan to buy us out,” referring to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw.

Several people said they believed staying in their homes was making them ill, but they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else. They want the railroad to buy their homes, which they feel have lost value since the spill.

“Get us out!” some yelled.

“We are going to do the right thing,” Wilson said, responding to the shouts.

Wilson said the company had leased office space in town and “and we signed a long lease. So we’re gonna be here for a long time,” he said..

But when asked whether there had been talk of the company relocating residents, he said there had not.

Some said they had experienced health problems since returning to their homes after the derailment. Others said they had lost their jobs or stopped going to work at jobs they felt were too close to the site. They are worried about their children or grandchildren potentially being exposed to toxins and having health problems down the road.

Some people say they continue to experience symptoms such as headaches, vomiting, dizziness and persistent coughs, and they feel puzzled by ongoing tests of the town’s air and water that have not detected chemicals at levels that are known to pose health risks.

“Why are people getting sick if there are no toxins?” East Palestine resident Jamie Cozza asked the panel answering questions at Thursday’s town hall.

“We do have a team here that is trying to collect health information so that we have a better understanding of the potential exposures and health effects,” said Capt. Jill Shugart, who is an associate director of emergency management at CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, or ATSDR.

The agency is conducting a total of three Assessment of Chemical Exposure, or ACE, investigations – one for Ohio residents, one for people in Pennsylvania, and another for first responders to the accident scene.

Shugart said it would take about three weeks to collect enough information to get an understanding of the full picture, then the agency has to work with Pennsylvania and Ohio to present their findings to residents.

Data from some surveys are starting to come available. On Friday, the Ohio Department of Health released preliminary data from its ACE survey, and out of 168 completed, 74% of people said they experienced headaches, 64% reported anxiety, 61% reported coughing, 58% listed fatigue, and 52% said they had irritation, pain or burning of their skin. The health department is still collecting surveys through its health assessment clinic, which will be open again next week.

Many at the town hall said they felt that the evacuation order had been lifted too soon – less than a week after the derailment – and may have put them in harm’s way, before any potential dangers were fully assessed.

On Thursday, the EPA capitulated to demands from residents and said it would require Norfolk Southern to test for dioxins, cancer-causing chemicals that form during combustion. The EPA had previously declined to require testing for dioxins, saying that these chemicals are already present in the environment, so it’s hard to interpret what their levels mean. The EPA said it would require the railroad company to study background levels of dioxins in comparable areas in order to give some context to the test results.

Authorities have focused much of their concern on a 2-mile radius around the spill, but residents that live farther away, including some farmers in nearby Pennsylvania, say they’ve been impacted, too.

Dave Anderson raises grass fed beef 4 miles downwind of East Palestine, in nearby Darlington Township, Pennsylvania. After the derailment, fire and controlled burn of toxic chemicals, the thick black smoke drifted over his Echo Valley Farm.

“As far as the smoke, you could probably see 100 yards,” Anderson told CNN’s Miguel Marquez.

Anderson said his eyes, throat and mouth burned.

The cloud from the spill settled on his pastures and ponds. Anderson said now he’s not sure whether the grassfed cattle he’s raised for years are safe for human consumption.

So far, there’s been no testing of his water, soil or air on his farm.

Pennsylvania’s Department of Environment Protection, or DEP, just visited Anderson’s farm for the first time this week, nearly four weeks after the event.

In a written statement provided to CNN, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture said it launched a hotline encouraging those impacted to reach out if they have concerns about livestock or crops.

Also this week, Pennsylvania opened a community resource center in Darlington to help people who want to get their soil or wells tested. The center is also conducting medical exams for residents with health concerns. Adam Ortiz, regional administrator for EPA’s region 3 office, which includes Pennsylvania, said the center has seen about 100 people a day since it opened.

The crash occurred just feet from the Pennsylvania border. The winds typically blow east, toward Pennsylvania. The state is going house to house, testing soil and water in areas closest to the derailment. Anderson said officials are still trying to figure out if they should extend that testing to other areas.

Samuel Wenger and his wife Joyce had their fourth child, Jackson Hayes, a week ago. Wenger said the state’s response has been too slow and lacking in information to know whether Darlington is still a safe place to raise a family.

They only recently were able to get their well tested, and they were told it would take another three weeks to get the results of that testing. They said it was agonizing to bring their newborn son back to their house when they don’t have answers about contamination.

“I feel like I possibly regret the decision every day but here we live paycheck to paycheck, we live within our means, and we don’t have the financial luxury to pack up and move,” Samuel said. “It’s scary.”

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Ohio, Pennsylvania offer health services following train derailment, but some residents feel skeptical | CNN


Darlington Township, Pennsylvania
CNN
 — 

The municipal building in tiny Darlington Township, Pennsylvania, was buzzing with activity on Wednesday afternoon as a stream of locals arrived seeking information on health screenings, chemical exposures and well testing.

Darlington, home to about 1,800 people, sits just over the border from East Palestine, Ohio, the site of a catastrophic train derailment and controlled burn of toxic chemicals that sent black smoke billowing over the area for days in early February. Residents here say the wind blew acrid smoke into their homes and coated their cars with a fine ash. State and federal officials gave East Palestine residents the all-clear to return to their homes days later.

But residents in both places are now wondering whether their water is safe to drink and their air safe to breathe. The characteristic floral, fruity odor of butyl acrylate still permeates some homes and wafts up from some of the impacted streams that run through the town. Some say they’re experiencing symptoms – cough, headaches, rashes, watering eyes and dripping noses – that might be related to a chemical exposure.

Government-run community resource centers and health clinics have opened in East Palestine and Darlington to answer residents’ questions and connect them to any care they might need. More than 140 people have come to the clinic in East Palestine since it first opened on February 21, according to the Ohio Department of Health. The Darlington center opened February 28, and more than 200 people visited in its first two days, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Still, some residents are skeptical of the clinics, and the response overall. While many residents who live near the derailment site are following the testing for chemicals in the air and water, what they really want to know is whether they’ve had chemicals from the accident in their bodies, and whether those chemicals have impacted their health.

They’re swapping information online, and seeking out blood tests they hope will identify potential problems. Some are seeking out medical care so there’s a record of their symptoms.

On the advice of a lawyer, Ron Book and his wife came to the East Palestine Health Assessment Clinic on Wednesday afternoon to have their illnesses documented. Book says since the derailment, his nose has been running constantly. He has a sore throat, and he feels stuffy.

“It’s like I have a cold, but I don’t have a cold,” he said.

Book said he saw a doctor who took his vitals and advised him to keep up with the regular blood work that he needs for his ongoing treatment for prostate cancer. He was inside for about 45 minutes, and said the experience was helpful, and about what he expected.

“They can’t heal you,” Book says, “because nobody knows about this chemical.”

At the Darlington center, tables were staffed with experts to answer questions about the chemicals involved in the train derailment, free well and air testing for residents, and potential impacts to area farms.

There were pamphlets on how to manage stress following a disaster and mental health counselors, as well as Zuko, a 3-year-old Great Dane therapy dog.

Residents are also invited to take a nine-page questionnaire to contribute data to a newly launched Assessment of Chemical Exposure, or ACE, study, which is being conducted by the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. Health investigators can use their data to inform a study into the health effects associated with the chemical exposures after the derailment.

People could see a doctor, or get referrals for a primary care physician.

“I think approximately 40% of people sought some sort of clinical evaluation,” said Nate Wardle, who is the special response project manager for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Wardle said when they opened the clinic, they weren’t sure what to expect – whether residents would be angry that it took more than three weeks to get them these services. So far, he said, people have been grateful and eager to get the help.

Jim Denes, who is 71, came to the health clinic in Darlington Township on Wednesday. He said he lives less than 2 miles from the accident site. On Friday of last week, Denes said he felt awful.

“I was just miserable. I was trying to cough up stuff, I couldn’t,” Denes said. “My eyes were all runny and watery.”

He said he took a Covid-19 test, but it was negative.

Denes said he’s extremely tired and had to drag himself to the clinic, but he’s glad he did. The doctor he saw diagnosed him with bronchitis and prescribed an antibiotic. The clinic was a lot closer than his regular doctor in Ellwood City, and he was able to walk in and be seen without a wait.

Denes said the doctor told him he couldn’t say whether it was related to the chemicals that were spilled or not.

Some residents said they have no interest in going to government-run health clinics.

“I honestly, at this point, don’t know who’s working with who and I really just don’t trust anything that has to do with the government right now,” said Giovanni Irizarry, whose family lives within a mile of the train derailment site.

In the evening hours of February 3, his wife Ashley Irizarry was driving to work when she noticed she could see thick black smoke hanging in the air, even though it was dark. Eventually, she saw the raging fire along the railroad tracks.

That night, Ashley had a red rash on her cheeks, her eyes were burning and red and a metallic chemical smell had burned her nose and throat. On Saturday, Giovanni said, his lips burned like he’d had scalding hot soup. Giovanni’s mother, who was living with them, developed a cough so severe she couldn’t catch her breath. The Irizarrys evacuated on Sunday to Boardman, Ohio, about 15 miles away.

They returned home on Saturday, February 11, in anticipation of school restarting on Monday.

As soon as they got close to town, Giovanni said, “I immediately felt my lips like start that burning sensation.”

He and his mom started coughing. His wife and kids developed debilitating and unrelenting headaches. After the kids came home from school on Monday, both started vomiting.

Ashley says she has taken the family to their primary care doctor, an urgent care and the hospital.

“It was not getting better,” she said.

Medical records reviewed by CNN show Ashley was prescribed a steroid and given a chest X-ray due to “toxic effects of gas exposure.” Her son was also diagnosed with chemical exposure.

When the doctors looked into her nose and throat they told her ” ‘Your mucous membranes are all pale. Like they were burned,’ but they didn’t know what to do at this time,” Ashley said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

On public Facebook groups, residents are sharing names of providers who will order blood testing for chemical exposures, which isn’t something either of the government-run clinics is doing currently. Some have even tried to do their own research to try to identify the medical codes needed to order tests for specific chemicals in the blood from large labs.

Instead of going to the government health clinic, on Wednesday, Ashley went to see their chiropractor, Richard Tsai, who has been ordering certain blood tests for existing patients who think they have having health problems connected to chemical exposures from the derailment.

Tsai’s practice, Blackhawk Chiropractic, is right next door to the Darlington Township community resource center and clinic that was opened by the Pennsylvania Department of Health and other state agencies this week.

The tests Tsai orders are general and standard in medical care – a test called a complete blood count, which measures levels of red cells, white cells, and clotting factors in the blood; and a test called a basic metabolic panel, which measures blood sugar, electrolytes, and kidney function. If his patients ask for it, he also orders a more specialized test that measure exposure to the chemical benzene. In the past two days, he estimates about 15 patients have asked him for blood testing.

Tsai, who lives in East Palestine, says he’s been frustrated by the government’s response.

“We shouldn’t be having to do this,” Tsai said, in an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

“Why are people having to figure this out on Facebook? These people need to know where to go and what’s available.”

Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, pushed back against the idea that the government wasn’t giving people enough information. He said that during the course of the medical assessment at the health clinic, the clinic physician might make recommendations for further testing, but that would be done by the person’s regular doctor.

If people don’t have a doctor that they see regularly, Vanderhoff said they are trying to help residents find one.

Vanderhoff said it would be important for the primary care providers to continue to monitor changes in a patient’s overall health.

“Because when we look at the chemicals involved, especially the primary chemical vinyl chloride, there is simply not a blood test that we can do or a urine test that we can do that would say ‘Aha! You had an exposure,’ ” Vanderhoff said. “That would be great, but that’s just not the case.”

Tsai, who lives in East Palestine, said that he’s legally able to order medical tests, so he does, within limits. “Why wouldn’t you do that?” he said.

Dr. Erin Haynes, the chairperson of the department of epidemiology and environmental health at the University of Kentucky, says she thinks it’s sound for residents to seek out common blood tests.

In an email to CNN, Haynes said in addition to a complete blood count and basic metabolic panel she would add a liver function test, since vinyl chloride, one chemical that was on the train, can damage the liver.

But Haynes says trying to test for specific chemicals may be a step too far.

“Testing for chemical exposure at this point is a difficult,” says Haynes, who has helped impacted communities investigate environmental exposures. “The high levels are now gone, and we aren’t exactly sure what to measure in blood or urine since we don’t know what chemicals formed during the fire. There are suspects, but not clear answers yet.”

Haynes said it would be ideal to collect blood and urine samples now, but store them for later testing, but this would be difficult for a local clinic to do.

Overall, Haynes says the government’s response to chemical spills like this one leaves something to be desired.

“The community is in dire need of an organized and coordinated health monitoring study that includes exposure assessment,” said Haynes, who hopes to bring such a study to the area soon.

Down the road, she says, there’s still a lot to learn about the health impacts of environmental exposures to toxins.

“We also need more research on what these chemicals do and methods for rapid testing,” Haynes said. “Communities with railroad must know what is moving through their community, when and how much. They also must receive training on how to safely respond when a disaster occurs.”

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High levels of chemicals could pose long-term risks at Ohio train derailment site, researchers say | CNN



CNN
 — 

An analysis of data from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s measurements of pollutants released from the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, suggests that nine of the dozens of chemicals that the EPA has been monitoring are higher than would normally be found in the area, according to a group of scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University.

If the levels of some of these chemicals remain high, it could be a problem for residents’ health in the long term, the scientists say. Temperature changes or high winds might stir up the chemicals and release them into the atmosphere.

The highest levels found in East Palestine were of a chemical called acrolein, the analysis says.

Acrolein is used to control plants, algae, rodents and microorganisms. It is a clear liquid at room temperature, and it is toxic. It can cause inflammation and irritation of the skin, respiratory tract and mucous membranes, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s not elevated to the point where it’s necessarily like an immediate ‘evacuate the building’ health concern,” said Dr. Albert Presto, an associate research professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon’s Wilton E. Scott Institute for Energy Innovation, who is working on the university’s chemical monitoring effort in East Palestine. “But, you know, we don’t know necessarily what the long-term risk is or how long that concentration that causes that risk will persist.”

Much of what scientists know about chemical exposure comes from people’s contact with chemicals at work, Preston said, which generally means exposure for about eight hours a day. People now living in East Palestine are in constant contact with the chemicals, he said, and the impact of that kind of exposure on the human body is not fully understood.

The EPA and local government officials have repeatedly said that their tests show the air quality in the area is safe and that the chemicals should dissipate. As of Sunday, officials have tested air in 578 homes, and they say chemical pollution levels have not exceeded residential air quality standards.

EPA’s air monitoring data shows that levels of monitored chemicals “are below levels of concern for adverse health impacts from short-term exposures,” an agency spokesperson told CNN on Monday. “The long-term risks referenced by this analysis assume a lifetime of exposure, which is constant exposure over approximately 70 years. EPA does not anticipate levels of these chemicals will stay high for anywhere near that. We are committed to staying in East Palestine and will continue to monitor the air inside and outside of homes to ensure that these levels remain safe over time.”

However, residents have reported rashes and trouble breathing, sometimes even in their own homes, Presto said.

“When someone says to them then, ‘everything is fine everywhere,’ if I were that person, I wouldn’t believe that statement,” he said.

So who’s right? The scientists say it’s not a black-and-white issue.

“I think it’s important for the public to understand that all sides are right. No one’s lying to them,” said Dr. Ivan Rusyn, director of the Texas A&M University Superfund Research Center and part of the team that did the analysis. “It’s just that every time you’re sharing information, whether it’s Administrator of EPA Michael Regan or Governor [Mike] DeWine or someone from Ohio EPA, when they say certain things are ‘safe,’ they really need to explain what they mean.”

Rusyn says the EPA and local officials need to do a better job of communicating with the public about the risk to residents when they are exposed to chemicals released in the crash.

Communication struggles have been a consistent pattern over the years and over numerous environmental disasters, he said. Officials will often do a good job of collecting and releasing data but then fail to give the proper context that the public will understand.

“That’s what I would like to encourage all parties to do rather than to point fingers,” Rusyn said. “The general public has to trust authorities. Cleanup is continuing. They are doing monitoring. We just need to do a better job communicating the results.”

Government communication about residents’ real level of risk has been a significant source of frustration in East Palestine, Presto said.

“People are furious. They feel like they’re getting this black-and-white answer – things are safe or not safe – when it’s not a black-and-white sort of situation,” Presto said.

The EPA says it will continue to monitor the air quality in the area and in residents’ homes. It is also setting up a community center so residents and business owners can ask questions about agency activity there.

The agency said it is collecting outdoor air samples for contaminants of concern, including vinyl chloride, a hard plastic resin used to make plastic products like pipes or packaging material that can be a cancer concern; n-butyl acrylate a clear liquid used to make resins and paint products that can cause eye, throat, nose and lung irritation or damage as well as a skin allergy; and ethylhexyl acrylate, another colorless liquid used to make paints, plastics and adhesives that can cause skin and eye irritation.

The EPA also collected field measurements for hydrogen sulfide, benzene, hydrogen cyanide, hydrogen chloride, phosgene and particulate matter.

Scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon are monitoring the chemicals in the area using a mobile lab that they’ve used for the past decade to measure air pollution in real time in cities across the country. They expect to release data from their own tests in East Palestine on Tuesday.

The mobile lab has extremely sensitive equipment that can measure pollution in the parts per trillion. Scientists would then be able to plot them on a graph to show, in real time, where the concentrations of chemicals may be and at what level, Presto said.

Mobile lab workers will try to determine whether there are chemicals in the air that the EPA isn’t monitoring. They are also looking at pollution levels in places where the agency did not set up monitoring stations.

“The situation has to be monitored, and the EPA should continue measurements, and they should also communicate to the general public as to what they’re seeing and put this into context of risk, rather than use the numbers and expect people to figure it out for themselves,” Rusyn said.

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Is your school equipped to save a life? Here’s how you’ll know | CNN



CNN
 — 

When 24-year-old Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed on the field from cardiac arrest during the January 2 game against the Cincinnati Bengals, millions of people witnessed a remarkable resuscitation in real time on live television.

As a trauma neurosurgeon myself, I was in awe of the dozens of medical professionals – athletic trainers, doctors and EMTs – who put their years of training into action within seconds. The immediate recognition that this wasn’t a routine injury and the speedy administration of CPR and defibrillation saved his heart, his brain and his life. Six weeks later, we now hear Dr. Thomas Mayer, the medical director of the NFL Players Association, say “I guarantee you that Damar Hamlin will play professional football again.”

The rescue response was awesome to watch and reflected the remarkable resources and planning that go into every game played in the NFL. As a parent, though, I couldn’t help but wonder what would’ve happened if Hamlin faced this when he was still in high school. What if it would’ve happened to any of my three teenage kids at their school? Would they have been saved as well?

Sudden cardiac deaths are rare in young people, but you may be surprised to know that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there are about 2,000 such deaths in people under the age of 25 every year.

While the overall number of cardiac arrests has stayed largely consistent, there is no question that school safety efforts – and cardiac arrest survival rates – have improved over the years. Florida was the first state to enact laws requiring automated external defibrillators, or AEDs, in schools in 1999, and there are now 20 states, along with the District of Columbia, with similar mandates, according to the American College of Cardiology. Even in most of the states with no requirement on the books, AEDs are available in the majority of schools.

Most venues with more than 200 people – large businesses, stadiums, casinos and concert halls – are required to have AEDs as well, but there has been a major focus on schools in recent decades, considering that about 20% of the US population is on school grounds at any one time. In the past quarter-century, we went from hardly any AEDs being present in schools to a remarkable awareness of the lifesaving potential they hold. That increased awareness and attention to defibrillators and CPR has directly resulted in more athletes surviving, says Dr. Jonathan Drezner, director of the University of Washington Medicine Center for Sports Cardiology and team physician for the Seattle Seahawks.

He points out that when he began investigating sudden cardiac arrest in young athletes in the early 2000s, survival rates hovered around 11%. A more recent study of young athletes from 2014 to 2018 found that survival rates have climbed to an average of 68%. That’s an improvement of more than 500% in less than two decades.

Still, we can and must do better, especially at the high school level. While there is increased awareness and availability of AEDs, none of that matters if the lifesaving device can’t be accessed within two to three minutes.

As part of a CNN investigation, we wanted a detailed understanding not just of AED availability in schools but of real-life accessibility. Speed matters when someone has suddenly dropped due to cardiac arrest. The best estimates are that every minute without defibrillation reduces survival by up to 10%.

That’s why Dr. Victoria Vetter, a cardiologist with the Cardiac Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told us that “just having an AED is not sufficient.”

“You need to make sure that there is an accessible AED that is not locked in the nurse’s office or in some back office,” Vetter said.

The American Heart Association recommends that defibrillators be placed within a two- to three-minute walk. Unfortunately, even in schools that have diligently purchased devices – typically at a cost of $1,000 to $2,000 – too many of them are not readily accessible.

One small study of secondary public schools in Ohio and southeast Michigan found that in more than 70% of the 24 public schools surveyed, the devices simply couldn’t be reached in time. Another study of schools in Oregon found that people in just half of the schools surveyed could access the devices within four minutes of a field or arena. In Vermont, 81% of the state’s 74 schools had defibrillators near athletic fields or arenas; half of the time, the AEDs were kept in the main office, with the nurse or in the lobby.

As part of our investigation, we defined AED access as knowing where the AEDs are in case of emergency. But it is essential to make sure they are always fully charged and that drills are regularly run to ensure people know how to use them.

“We have fire drills in schools generally, every month. We have active shooter drills. But we do not in most schools have sudden cardiac arrest drills,” Vetter said.

Nationally, she said, just a handful of states require schools to practice cardiac emergency plans.

Many people have held up the NFL’s cardiac response as the gold standard: quick action and accessibility. Watching the remarkable 30-person team of professionals who saved Hamlin, many would argue that most high schools don’t have the resources to employ dozens of medical professionals.

But it doesn’t take an army to save a life.

“A single person can save a young athlete’s life if they promptly recognize cardiac arrest, call for help, start CPR and someone gets the AED,” said the Seahawks’ Drezner. “The treatment algorithm really is that simple.”

For many schools, that person would be an athletic trainer, the medical professional on the field.

And yet, in about a third of the nation’s high schools, there is no access to athletic trainers at all.

“You have to ask yourself: When those athletes get injured, who’s addressing those injuries? Who’s there to provide the emergency action plan in case something like this happens?” asked Kathy Dieringer, president of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association.

Drezner’s work has found that the survival rate from cardiac arrest for young athletes nearly doubled to over 80% when an athletic trainer was present or an AED was used. Part of the reason is that schools with athletic trainers were also the ones most likely to have emergency plans and AEDs. As things stand now, schools least likely to have athletic trainers are in urban or rural areas, and the schools most likely to have them are in the suburbs, areas that tend to have higher incomes.

“If I were a parent, I would ask those questions,” Dieringer said. “Where are the AEDs in my school? Are they accessible, and does someone know how to use them if they’re needed?”

Sudden cardiac arrest is a leading cause of death in young competitive athletes, with one study finding as many as one death every three days in youth sports.

One of those deaths was 16-year-old Matthew Mangine Jr., a soccer player at St. Henry District High School in Erlanger, Kentucky. In 2020, Matthew collapsed on the soccer field.

“There were five AEDs at the school that night, and one wasn’t brought to him,” his father, Matthew Mangine Sr., told the local news. “That night, his initial shock came from EMS. They arrived roughly 12 minutes after he was down.” Matthew died an hour later at the hospital.

John and Luann Ellsessar also know that pain well. They lost their 16-year-old son, Michael, on the football field when he went into cardiac arrest during a game in 2010. “There was no ambulance or AED on the field, and it took 15 minutes for the squad to arrive,” John told CNN. “If that ambulance is arriving 15 minutes later, he’s already 150% gone.” John recalls that the doctors at the hospital worked on Michael for 45 minutes before pronouncing him dead.

Many schools have AEDs on campus, but often, they're hard to find quickly.

Fortunately, this wasn’t the story for Peter Laake. In 2021, the star lacrosse player was already on the varsity team as a freshman at Loyola Blakefield in Towson, Maryland. Peter was hit on the left side in what was apparently a normal play, but what followed wasn’t normal at all. Peter told me he blacked out and collapsed on the field.

Jeremy Parr, the school’s athletic trainer, said he immediately went to Peter’s side and checked for a pulse.

“With no pulse, no breathing, we needed to get the AED and EMS activated as soon as possible,” Parr told me when I spoke with him recently.

CPR was started, and in Peter’s case, the AED data showed that his heart was beating again within two to three minutes.

Within three weeks, Peter was back on the field.

It’s an example of how things should work and could work in all schools.

Training in CPR for all staff, athletic and educational. Availability and accessibility of AEDs with regular drills to make sure execution is flawless. An emergency action plan that is posted and reviewed.

As a parent, you can and should ask about all of this yourself. After witnessing what happened to Hamlin, I did just that with the athletic department at my own children’s school.

In a world where we have many complicated problems, saving someone’s life is possible with the knowledge and resources we have right now. With a plan, it is easy. We often prioritize buses, fields and athletic equipment, but cardiac safety must also be at the top of the list.

As Parr told me, when the unthinkable happens, “every athlete deserves the chance to survive.”

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After a train derailment, Ohio residents are living the plot of a movie they helped make | CNN



CNN
 — 

When Ben Ratner’s family signed up in 2021 to be extras in the movie “White Noise,” they thought it would be a fun distraction from their day-to-day life in blue-collar East Palestine, Ohio.

Ratner, 37, is in a traffic jam scene, sitting in a line of cars trying to evacuate after a freight train collided with a tanker truck, triggering an explosion that fills the air with dangerous toxins. In another scene, his father wears a trench coat and hat while people walk across an overpass to get out of town. Directors told the group they wanted them to look “forlorn and downtrodden” as they escape the environmental disaster.

The 2022 movie was shot around Ohio and is based on a novel by Don DeLillo. The book was published in 1985, shortly after a chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, that killed nearly 4,000 people. The book and film follow the fictional Gladney family – a couple and their four kids – as they flee an “airborne toxic event” and then return home and try to resume their normal lives.

Ratner tried to rewatch the movie a few days ago and found that he couldn’t finish it.

“All of a sudden, it hit too close to home,” he said.

Ratner and his family – his wife, Lindsay, and their kids, Lilly, Izzy, Simon and Brodie – are living the fiction they helped bring to the screen.

Officials ordered them to evacuate their home last week, a day after a Norfolk Southern train carrying 20 cars of hazardous materials slid off the rails and caught fire, threatening to explode. The National Transportation Safety Board is still investigating the cause of the incident.

“The first half of the movie is all almost exactly what’s going on here,” Ratner said Wednesday, four days into their evacuation.

In a way, the movie has provided a point of grim humor about the situation facing the residents of East Palestine – the joke no one wanted to make.

“Everybody’s been talking about that,” Ratner said of his friends and neighbors who are keeping in close touch through the crisis. “I actually made a meme where I superimposed my face on the poster and sent it to my friends.”

In the 2022 film

Scholars who study DeLillo’s work say they are not surprised by the collision of life and art. His work is often described as prescient, said Jesse Kavadlo, an English professor at Maryville University in St. Louis and president of the Don DeLillo Society.

“The terrible spill now is, of course, a coincidence. But it plays in our minds like life imitating art, which was imitating life, and on and on, because, as DeLillo suggests in ‘White Noise’ as well, we have unfortunately become too acquainted with the mediated language and enactment of disaster,” Kavadlo said.

The night of February 3, Ratner was watching his daughter’s basketball game at the local high school when the crash happened. He didn’t hear it over the noise of the game, but when they walked out of the building, he could see the massive blaze. He shot a few seconds of video on his cell phone.

His family returned to their house, which sits less than a mile from the crash site. Throughout the night, he said, they heard sirens but got little information. “We weren’t sure exactly what the danger was.”

While his family slept, he stayed up, nervously watching the fire and the news.

The next morning, activity around the site had picked up. “There was a lot of commotion, helicopters and people hightailing it out of town, and it was it was a little intense,” he said.

His wife and kids headed to stay with his wife’s parents, who live about 2 miles from the crash site. Ratner went to work running the coffee shop he and his wife own, LiB’s Market, in nearby Salem.

By that afternoon, an official alert warned that people needed to move even farther, beyond a 2-mile radius. Roughly half of the town’s 4,800 residents had to evacuate.

A friend offered to let them stay in their pool house. They later moved to another friend’s house next to their café.

School was canceled for the week. They got their dog out of the house, but they had to leave the pet turtle behind.

For now, they’re keeping their distance. But even after they go back, they have to decide whether they’ll stay.

East Palestine is in an economically depressed area, Ratner said, but it had been on a rebound. He and his wife had been considering opening another café there, but now they’re worried that plan is in jeopardy.

“That’s where we’ve been raising our kids, finishing college, buying a business, and that’s been our place,” he said. “In the future, are we going to have to sell the house? Is it worth any money at this point?”

Five of the tankers on the train that overturned last week were carrying liquid vinyl chloride, which is extremely combustible. Last Sunday, they became unstable and threatened to explode. First responders and emergency workers had to vent the tankers, spill the vinyl chloride into a trench, and then burn it off before it turned the train into a bomb. Authorities feared that an explosion could send shrapnel up to a mile away.

But that didn’t happen. The controlled burn worked and the evacuation order for East Palestine residents was officially lifted Wednesday after real-time air and water monitoring did not find any contaminant levels above screening limits.

“All of the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal backgrounds, which you find in almost any community,” James Justice, a representative of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said at a briefing Wednesday.

Support team members prepared to assess remaining hazards in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 7.

Although authorities have assured the residents that any immediate danger has passed, some residents have yet to return home. Ratner said they’re worried about longer-term risks that environmental officials are only beginning to assess.

Real-time air readings, which use handheld instruments to broadly screen for classes of contaminants like volatile organic compounds, showed that the air quality near the site was within normal limits.

The decision to lift the evacuation order was based on analysis of air monitoring data, according to Charles Rodriguez, community involvement coordinator for the EPA’s Region 5 office.

Up to this point, officials have been looking for large immediate threats: explosions or chemical levels that could make someone acutely ill.

“Under this phase, it’s been the emergency response,” Kurt Kohler of the Ohio EPA’s Office of Emergency Response said Wednesday. “As you see the emergency services go back home, off-site, Ohio EPA is going to remain involved through our other divisions that oversee the long-term cleanup of these kinds of spills.”

The cleanup and monitoring of the site, he said, could take years.

Although the explosion risk is past, Ratner said, people who live in East Palestine want to know about the chemical threats that might linger.

Fish and frogs have died in local streams. People have reported dead chickens and shared photos of dead dogs and foxes on social media. They say they smell chemical odors around town.

When asked at Wednesday’s briefing about exactly what spilled, representatives from Norfolk Southern listed butyl acrylate, vinyl chloride and a small amount of non-hazardous lube oil.

“Butyl acrylate is a lot of what we’re gathering information on,” said Scott Deutsch, a regional manager of hazardous materials at Norfolk Southern.

Butyl acrylate is a clear, colorless liquid with a strong, fruity odor that’s used to make plastics and paint. It’s possible to inhale it, ingest it or absorb it through the skin. It irritates the eyes, skin and lungs and may cause shortness of breath, according to the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. Repeated exposure can lead to lung damage.

Vinyl chloride, which is used to make PVC pipes, can cause dizziness, sleepiness and headaches. It has also been linked to an increased risk of cancer in the liver, brain, lungs and blood.

Although butyl acrylate easily mixes with water and will move quickly through the environment, it isn’t especially toxic to humans, said Richard Peltier, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

“Vinyl chloride, however, has a specific and important risk in that is contains a bunch of chlorine molecules, which can form some really awful combustion byproducts,” Peltier said. “These are often very toxic and often very persistent in the environment.”

Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed February 3 were still on fire the next day.

A spokesperson for Norfolk Southern acknowledged but did not respond to CNN’s request for more information on how much of these chemicals spilled into the soil and water.

The Ohio EPA says it’s not sure yet, either.

“Initially, with most environmental spills, it is difficult to determine the exact amount of material that has been released into the air, water, and soil. The assessment phase that will occur after the emergency is over will help to determine that information,” James Lee, media relations manager for the Ohio EPA, wrote in an email to CNN.

Lee said that after his agency has assessed the site, it will work on a remediation plan.

Vinyl chloride is unstable and boils and evaporates at room temperature, giving it a very short lifespan in the environment, said Dana Barr, a professor of environmental health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.

“If you had a very small amount of vinyl chloride that was present in an area, it would evaporate within minutes to hours at the longest,” she said.

“But the problem they’re facing here is that it’s not just a small amount, and so if they can’t contain what gets into the water or what gets into the soil, they may have this continuous off-gassing of vinyl chloride that has gotten into these areas,” Barr said.

“I probably would be more concerned about the chemicals in the air over the course of the next month.”

State officials said they would continue to monitor the site for exactly that reason. They are also continuing to try to dig and remove contaminated soil.

“Right now, we have a system set up. As the data comes, it is distributed to a network of people to look at both on an immediate-phase – ‘Hey, is there anything really alarming to look at’ – and those smaller numbers that really matter to long-term health,” Kohler said at Wednesday’s briefing.

He said the local health department would test residents’ wells to make sure their drinking water is safe. Officials are also offering to test the air in residents’ homes before they come back.

Norfolk Southern is funding a phone line for residents to speak to a toxicologist with the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, an environmental consulting firm.

No one is quite sure whether to trust the help, though, since it’s coming mostly from the company behind the spill. Some residents have already filed a class-action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern.

“We’re definitely signing up for the air testing of the home before we get in there,” Ratner said.

The first trains to pass since the accident started rolling through again midweek, Ratner said. The roar of the trains, a sound he used to tune out, is now jarring.

Even the sounds of loud trucks are “off-putting,” he said.

Don Cheadle, left, and Adam Driver star in

Ratner said it was fun to be part of a disaster movie – a stylized, darkly comedic Netflix streamer starring Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle.

In real life, the situation has been gutting.

“Those are great actors, but it was hard to see it as a put-on,” Ratner said.

He shares the sentiments of Lenny Glavan, a local tattoo artist, who wrote a letter to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw on Tuesday to express the town’s anger and frustration over the accident.

“You just ripped from us our small-town motto ‘A place you want to be,’ ” Glavan wrote.

“It may not be beach-front property, it may not even have the highest paying jobs, or much else to offer, but in my experiences in life, the place I and most people want to be is when you need a helping hand, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to pray with, or a place to call home East Palestine has always been that place to want to be,” he said in his note, which was publicly posted on Facebook.

“With the events in which have occurred, the railroad that gave this small town life has now taken the life, the heartbeat, the unity and that security that families or individuals long for in this wild world away … possibly indefinitely.”

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