EAST PALESTINE – It’s been 71 days since an overheated wheel bearing caused the No. 3 and No. 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous material to derail in East Palestine. Railroad officials are hopeful that it will take just a few more to complete work on the south track and begin work on the northbound side as complete restoration of the crash site inches closer to the halfway mark.

On Friday, Chris Hunsicker, Regional Manager of Environmental Operations at Norfolk Southern, gave an update on the cleanup efforts from the very spot where the train derailed at 8:55 p.m. on Feb. 3. The site spans roughly a half mile.

“It’s taken a very large effort to get to this point,” said Hunsicker, as a northbound train passed behind him. “We’ve restored Track 1, but it’s not finished yet. We got rail in place and we are going to be installing continuous rail that will be permanent and we expect that to happen over the next couple of days.”

Once the permanent track is installed and settled to the railroad’s satisfaction, work will begin on Track 2. Both tracks will be briefly open to traffic as part of the settlement process and then the remediation and restoration will continue.

“Once that settlement happens, we are going to shift our rail traffic to the southside and then we are going to start working on the northside,” Hunsicker said. “It took several weeks to do the southside. We expect to repeat that on the northside. But the tracks are just one part of the process. We have property that was affected on either side of the tracks. We are looking at a couple months still before that work is done.”

Hunsicker is hoping that solving the setbacks which impeded progress on the first track will expedite work on the second. The biggest challenge was disposing of the toxic waste material. Removal efforts were hindered in March when officials of the states where licensed disposal facilities were located began turning away shipments of derailment waste. Oklahoma, Texas and Michigan all initially refused to accept the shipments before the federal EPA stepped in and ordered them to do so under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as “Superfund”.

“We had several facilities we were working with originally and they were accepting the waste and then some of the regulators had concerns,” Hunsicker explained. “That kind of changed where we could go with some things but we continued to look for different outlets that could take it legally. We have different options now so we don’t get held up getting the soil out of here.”

Where the soil goes is determined by what the soil is contaminated with. At the site, dirt is placed in designated piles. Certain piles are shipped out to certain disposal facilities based on certain criteria.

“How we manage the soil piles is very specific because we need to know what is in each different pile and that is based on where it is, where it was generated and also the constituents in it so we are doing an analytical and one pile may have a different concentration of material,” Hunsicker said. “One facility may be able to handle it at a certain level and another may be able handle it in a different way so we keep those apart to make sure they go to the right facilities for proper disposal. We’ve done that because that helps keep the project moving as fast as possible.”

Having several facilities available to take the hazardous waste also means Norfolk Southern can work around different hours of operations and keep the work and dirt moving.

“Permitted facilities may have their own restrictions that they have to comply with,” Hunsicker said. “Some don’t load on the weekend, some don’t load in the rain. We don’t want that to put a hold on us. If I can’t go here, I want to be able to go there.”

Hunsicker estimates that 24,000 tons of contaminated soil has been removed with 24,000 more tons to go from underneath the northbound tracks. The railroad began digging up contaminated dirt from under Track 1 on Feb. 22 after the railroad’s decision to lay old track on contaminated soil was criticized. Norfolk Southern insists the railroad was only following remediation plans used before in situations similar to the derailment and that those plans were approved by the EPA. Debra Shore, the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 5, contradicted that approval was granted, calling that decision “a second assault on the people of East Palestine.” The railroad claims they made the call to dig up the old soil and tracks and have excavated ground tested after hearing from the public. Shore said it was at the urging of the EPA.

Regardless of who made the call, Hunsicker explained the soil testing process.

“We dig an x-amount of feet into the soil and that (depth) is determined by where the incident was and how things were released,” he said. “We clean it to our standards, we do our testing which gets approved and if the agencies agree with us then we can move forward. After we know what is clean, that area is segregated and then we can start the restoration afterwards.”

Hunsicker also reported cleanup and remediation of the local creeks are ongoing and being conducted concurrently with cleanup efforts at the derailment site. Despite rumors to the contrary, work on the waterways is not complete.

“We still have our plans in place and are still working with the regulators to manage the creeks. We are not done yet,” he said. “We’ve seen good results and positive results in the creeks but we have not reached a point where we are calling them clean. There are still a lot of activities we still need to do in Sulfur Run here in town and creeks downstream.”

When it rains, those activities increase, despite the railroad’s best efforts to keep work reduced to daytime hours in consideration of East Palestine residents.

“We have been trying to keep our shifts to a normal day as much as possible. We want to affect the community. People don’t want to hear trucks at night or our generators or things like that, so when and where we can we have been reducing that,” he said. “We do have some operations that need to go 24 hours. If we have a significant rain event, then we have to up our man-power hours to keep the streams protected.”

While apologetic that an incident occurred to require such massive cleanup, redemption and restoration efforts, Norfolk Southern is pleased with the progress that has been made.

“We are very happy with how things have been moving along. There have been a lot of lessons learned. We have been evaluating our progress and evaluating how we can do better on the next set of tracks,” Hunsicker said. “Based on what we learned from the process, we are hoping we can gain some efficiency, but this has been a weeks-long effort working together with the community and regulatory agencies. We are proud of the progress we’ve made so far.”