Rail Company Already Pissed Off Environmentalists Before Ohio Train Crash

The railroad company behind a disastrous derailment in Ohio is a financial backer of a controversial police training facility in Georgia that has drawn protests from environmental groups.

Norfolk Southern gave $100,000 to a campaign to build a police facility (dubbed “Cop City”) in an Atlanta forest, financial documents show. As residents of East Palestine, Ohio grapple with financial fallout from the derailment, activists in Atlanta are drawing comparisons between the two environmental battles.

“I didn’t experience first-hand what happened in East Palestine, and people there will not necessarily experience, first-hand, the tearing down of this forest,” an Atlanta activist told The Daily Beast. “But these are inextricably tied together. They’re part of the same system. We face the same consequences to our lives and our loved ones.”

In early November, three months before the derailment in East Palestine, another set of Norfolk Southern vehicles sat ablaze. But this fire, which damaged three construction vehicles in Atlanta, was a deliberate act of arson, according to activists who took credit for the fire.

“This excavator belonged to Norfolk Southern, a supporter of the proposed Cop City Project in ATL,” the self-proclaimed perpetrators announced on a blog that month. “It was decommissioned by fire. Fire heals all. Fuck northfolk southern railways.”

The saboteurs had turned to arson after a protracted standoff with Atlanta officials. Since April 2021, when Atlanta announced plans for a $90 million, 85-acre police-training facility in the South River Forest, residents have expressed environmental concerns about the planned deforestation.

“The city’s tree canopy, which is the most extensive of any metropolitan area in the United States and a city treasure, is our best hope for resilience against the worst impacts of climate change,” read an August 2021 letter by the Sierra Club’s Georgia chapter and 15 other groups that protested the development for environmental reasons.

The open letter didn’t prevent the project from moving forward. Neither did hours of pushback in public hearings, legal challenges under the Clean Water Act, or protests against Cop City’s sponsors—a long list of foundations and corporations including Norfolk Southern. A 2022 financial report from the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is overseeing the project, shows a $100,000 donation from Norfolk Southern.

It’s unclear when Norfolk Southern made the donation. Neither the APF nor the railroad company commented on the six-figure contribution.

Norfolk Southern is headquartered in Atlanta. But while arsonists burned three Norfolk Southern construction vehicles in November, the railroad company was engaged in a more nationwide fight.

In late 2022, railroad workers threatened to go on strike, demanding paid sick days and a better scheduling model. Financial records reveal that Norfolk Southern spent at least $70,000 lobbying Congress to avoid a strike.

The then-looming threat of a railroad worker walk-off prompted columnists and historians to revisit the history of U.S. rail strikes, which have seen bloody alliances between rail companies and law enforcement. “In multiple cities, armed company guards opened fire on striking workers, killing several and escalating the conflict even more,” the New York Times wrote in September of a notorious 1922 rail strike. “Governors in several states called out the National Guard to assist strikebreakers.”

The 2022 labor dispute, however, ended bloodlessly, with President Joe Biden signing a deal that blocked a strike but did not award sick leave. Many of the workers’ key complaints remain unresolved, labor leaders say.

After the crash in East Palestine, railroad unions were quick to point to issues like understaffed crews and cuts to maintenance teams. At the time of the crash, the Norfolk Southern train had a crew of two full staffers and one trainee, Fritz Edler, a special safety representative for the Railroad Workers Union, told The Daily Beast.

“That’s the very minimum [to operate safely] depending on what’s in the train,” Edler said. If one crew member is operating the locomotive, and the crew needs to take measures like splitting cars, “a single person can't do it, even though the industry keeps pushing for that.”

Norfolk Southern repeatedly lobbied last year against legislation that would require at least two crew members on freight locomotives. Edler also said railroad companies have cut back on maintenance, which might have otherwise detected the broken axle that’s being eyed as the cause of the East Palestine crash.

“It’s a hedge fund method of organizing the Class I railroads exclusively around lowering the operating ratio,” Edler said. Rail companies “do whatever they can do to show Wall Street that they’ve lowered their operating ratio. A lot of times that means getting rid of people or selling off equipment, deferring maintenance, things of that sort.”

Sean Wolters, an activist who lives near the planned Cop City site, connected Norfolk Southern’s lobbying expenses to its donation to the police training facility.

“Norfolk Southern has worked very hard to reduce the power that their workers have; the power to go on strike or have sick days,” Wolters told The Daily Beast. “They’ve been trying to maximize profits, to please shareholders on Wall Street, to the detriment of their own workforce. In order to ensure that this kind of discipline of the workforce can be enforced, you need a workforce.”

The apparent money-cutting methods, from a rail company that posted record revenue numbers and paid its CEO more than $4 million last year, rubbed some East Palestine residents the wrong way after a Norfolk Southern train derailed there this month, leading to the release of carcinogenic chemicals such as vinyl chloride.

Following the derailment, Norfolk Southern announced financial aid for nearby families, including $1,000 checks for residents of the 44413 zip code, where East Palestine is located. A Norfolk Southern spokesperson told The Daily Beast that the railroad had distributed “over $2.2 million in direct financial assistance to more than 1,530 families and a number of businesses to cover costs related to the evacuation. Those include reimbursements and cash advancements for lodging, travel, food, clothes, and other related items.”

But some residents say the funds pale beside what they anticipate to be long-term expenses. East Palestine resident Nathen Velez who lives and works near the train tracks was one of the derailment’s first witnesses. Velez and his family have spent approximately $3,000 on Airbnbs since the National Guard evacuated residents earlier this month, Velez’s friend Ty Boor told The Daily Beast. (Boor has been running an online fundraiser to cover the Velez’s expenses. In a description for the fundraiser, which has raised $6,600, he lambasts Norfolk Southern for its profits and its cost-cutting measures.)

The Velez family and other locals are considering leaving East Palestine, Boor said. But the family worries that the derailment two streets from their house has caused their home value to crater, making the mortgage “south of value-less,” Boor said.

Regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency have begun testing air and water around the derailment site, with varying results, most of them showing chemical readings within safe levels. Still, experts have urged bottled water and caution as testing continues.

“Nobody trusts that,” Boor said of some initial testing, citing the huge number of fish found dead in local streams, which authorities have attributed to the chemical leak. “The fish are belly-up. They almost look like they have chemical burns on them—nobody’s fooled in this town.”

In East Palestine and Atlanta, demands for answers have led to tense encounters with the law.

While covering a news conference days after the East Palestine derailment, NewsNation reporter Evan Lambert was arrested during a live news shot. Police told Lambert that he was “out of line for talking when the governor was talking” the New York Times reported. They made Lambert lay on the ground, where they handcuffed and arrested him for criminal trespass and resisting arrest. His charges were later dropped.

In Atlanta, meanwhile, protests against Cop City have ended in terror charges and one activist’s death. Since the domestic terrorism charges were handed down in December and January, legal experts have expressed concerns that the charges were a “politically motivated” overreach, intended to quash unruly protests (like the burning of Norfolk Southern construction vehicles). While some of the defendants have been charged with burning unspecified construction equipment, those property offenses rarely incur dramatic enhancements like terrorism charges. And some of the defendants are not even accused of property damage—in nine of the 19 arrests reviewed by Grist, the alleged terrorists were not accused of taking any illegal actions beyond misdemeanor trespassing.

In late January, police killed one activist on the land that is slated to become a police training ground. During a raid on a protest encampment in the forest, police fatally shot Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, an environmental activist known as Tortuguita. Police accuse Tortuguita of shooting an officer, a claim Tortuguita’s fellow activists dispute.

The killing is under review. May, an Atlanta activist who asked to withhold her last name, likened the opaque situation to East Palestine, where Norfolk Southern officials initially declined to attend community meetings after the derailment.

“When I saw the experience of people in East Palestine, trying to ask for justice, to be done right by this company that poisoned them, and having my own experiences with poisoned water, I felt their pain,” May told The Daily Beast. “The company refused to see them face-on.”

Though separated by hundreds of miles, East Palestine and Atlanta are connected—as is every town “where we might face a derailment like this,” she said.

On Thursday, officials in Texas announced that toxic wastewater that was used to fight the chemical fire in East Palestine was being shipped to a Houston suburb, where it would be injected into the ground for disposal.

Texans told the Associated Press that they were concerned about accidents during the chemicals’ cross-country journey.

“It’s foolish to put it on the roadway. We have accidents on a regular basis,” one told the outlet.