Despite the majority of attention focused on the Middle East conflict involving Israel, Iran, and Hamas, the EPA recently announced there is seemingly an end of the fiasco in sight that residents of East Palestine, Ohio experienced nearly a year ago.

CBS News says there will also be follow-up and additional testing:

Officials with both the state and federal Environmental Protection Agencies will still oversee the remaining cleanup work, which includes backfilling in excavated areas and assessing chemical contamination in the area’s creeks. Residents post pictures regularly of a chemical sheen on water in the streams anytime the creekbed is disturbed.

Regional EPA administrator Debra Shore promised that her agency will make sure all the contamination is gone before signing off on the cleanup.

…Regular testing of the air and water will still take place too. Officials have said those tests consistently showed it’s safe although many residents remain uneasy.

However, the EPA continues to face criticism, including from the agency’s own inspector general, for how it responded to the East Palestine train derailment. During mid-October, a leading environmental scientist chimed in too:

A report by Stephen Lester, science director at the Center for Health Environment and Justice, found the EPA’s sampling for dioxin was “highly unusual and very subjective, and did not follow standard procedures for investigating contaminated sites.”

“The EPA is not responding to this in a way that makes any sense. It tells me that EPA may have a different agenda than to really investigate what’s happened at East Palestine and do the kind of testing that will answer questions,” Lester said.

A separate report by the EPA inspector general found “multiple instances of inconsistencies in the air monitoring and sampling data on the EPA’s East Palestine website.”

“While minor when taken individually, these inconsistencies could, when taken together, erode public trust in the data communicated,” the inspector general report said.

Interestingly enough, after launching an investigation into the East Palestine, Ohio disaster, the Government Accountability Project made multiple FOIA requests in order to acquire the EPA’s results concerning dioxin testing following the train derailment.

The Government Accountability Project made a second request to the EPA Monday, asking for expedited processing of information regarding dioxins and other chemicals of concern from the East Palestine derailment in fulfilling an original request for the information. The original request was made in September.

In a press release, the Government Accountability Project, which was formed in 1977 by the Institute for Policy Studies to “empower whistleblowers, hold the powerful accountable and advocate for change, stated that the group’s environmental investigator Lesley Pacy visited the village last month and experienced herself the same medical symptoms residents have reported.

With all of this in mind, it is small wonder that Biden will not visit East Palestine, Ohio. He’d prefer to oversee the effort to bring in his party’s new foreign-born constituency than see to the needs of native-born Americans.

PHOTO CREDIT: Screengrab of the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio – By National Transportation Safety Board – https://reuters.com/world/us/ohio-carry-out-controlled-release-chemicals-train-derailment-site-2023-02-06 (direct link), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128540829