The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has written the Norfolk Southern Railway describing the chemicals found at the site of a Feb. 3 train derailment and controlled burn in East Palestine, Ohio, that some local residents have linked to sickness or death among animals.
The Feb. 10 letter from the EPA to Norfolk Southern notes “multiple rail cars and tankers were observed derailed, breached, and/or on fire.”
Coverage of the incident has mainly stressed the presence of vinyl chloride, a chemical used to make PVC pipes and other products. The National Cancer Institute notes that vinyl chloride has been linked to cancers of the brain, lungs, blood, lymphatic system, and, in particular, the liver.
Yet, the EPA’s letter mentions other potentially hazardous chemicals in those derailed tankers.
Specifically, it notes the presence of ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and butyl acrylate.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s online chemical database notes that the chemical solvent ethylene glycol monobutyl ether “can cause serious or permanent injury.”
“Ingestion or skin contact causes headache, nausea, vomiting, dizziness,” the website states regarding the chemical, which is found in many household products.
The same chemical database notes that 2-ethylhexyl acrylate, which is used to make paints and plastics for things like contact lenses, “can cause significant irritation” and may be explosive at high temperatures.
It states that isobutylene, a liquified gas used to make aviation fuel, can incapacitate and, in some circumstances, asphyxiate those exposed to it.
Butyl acrylate, meanwhile, is described in that database as potentially a source of serious or permanent injury and a relatively unstable substance. It is used in making things like paints, sealants, and adhesives.
The Epoch Times has asked the EPA for more detail on the potential environmental and human health risks posed by the chemicals involved in the derailment.
Norfolk Southern Responds
“Norfolk Southern received the EPA’s letter and we have confirmed to them that we have and will continue to perform or finance environmental monitoring and remediation. Our hazmat team was in East Palestine within an hour of the incident, and the response continues today in close coordination with the Ohio and U.S. EPA, NTSB [National Transportation and Safety Board], and other federal, state, and local agencies,” a spokesperson for Norfolk Southern told The Epoch Times in a Feb. 13 email.
The spokesperson directed The Epoch Times to the NTSB for any comments on the causes of the crash.
The latest details from that agency came Feb. 6, through an announcement that it had launched an investigation into the derailment.
“Additional information will be issued when available,” the NTSB told The Epoch Times in a Feb. 13 email.
While some online influencers have said Norfolk Southern paid only $25,000 to the town of East Palestine, the company’s spokesperson said that sum was just an initial donation to the Red Cross to establish a shelter at East Palestine High School.
“In total, more than $1 million has been distributed directly to families to cover costs related to the evacuation,” a Feb. 13 press release from the company states.
EPA’s letter describes Norfolk Southern as potentially liable under the federal government’s Superfund law.
It wouldn’t be the first Norfolk Southern derailment site to end up under that regime.
One derailment in Decatur, Alabama, involved the contaminant hydrofluoric acid, a chemical that can be deadly if inhaled in large quantities.
Local Waterways
The EPA’s letter states that “materials related to the incident” were seen flowing into storm drains.
Chemicals released during the event have also been detected in various local waterways, including the Ohio River, according to the letter.
The Ohio River watershed is home to 25 million people and spans parts of 14 states. The river ultimately empties into the Mississippi River.
West Virginia American Water has not detected any changes to water in portions of the Ohio River that it monitors, as reported by WCHS.
Buttigieg Under Fire
The derailment has provoked strong rhetoric from lawmakers, some of whom have blamed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, formerly a McKinsey consultant and mayor of a college town in Indiana.
“This is another transportation failure under Mayor Pete’s leadership. Where is he?” asked Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) in a Feb. 13 post on Twitter.
Buttigeg did not mention the incident while delivering remarks on Feb. 13 while speaking at the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference.
He did, however, mention the threat from “balloons,” drawing laughter from his audience.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the EPA for additional comment.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
