Air samples collected around East Palestine, Ohio, continue to show higher-than-normal levels of several hazardous chemicals three weeks after the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train, a team of university researchers said Friday.
But the Biden administration said the concentrations of those substances are not high enough to cause concern in the short term — and they will not persist long enough to create long-term health risks after crews remove contaminated soil from the crash site.
One of the lead researchers agreed with the EPA that the pollution levels do not pose an “imminent threat to health and safety.”
“This could be a concern if those levels were sustained over the long term,” said Weihsueh Chiu, a professor of veterinary physiology and pharmacology at Texas A&M University, which conducted the analysis of EPA data collected between Feb. 4 and this past Tuesday.
If you read further in the article, it looks like they're finding some acrolein in the air - considering that there were some acrylates involved in the crash, I suppose that's not too much of a surprise.
(It's remarkable and not very surprising that all sorts of folks who have access to the relevant instrumentation are coming out of the woodwork to monitor the environment around East Palestine. I sure hope that this surfeit of data will result in some good science being practiced...)
This is a weird "analysis" to me, since it looks like they've averaged all the test data from 2/4 through ~2/24. The reported acrolein levels have been around the median level for a couple of weeks now and at that level, the preliminary lab concentrations are very close to the reporting limit (so they may even be overestimates).
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