On a balmy evening last September, Michael Fowler stumbled out to the south rail line in East Palestine, Ohio, and sat down in the middle of the tracks. His dog, a white Chihuahua, was beside him. The sun was setting. He waited perilously for the next oncoming train.
He wouldn’t have to wait long. Dozens of times a day, freight trains blare through East Palestine, cleaving the small Ohio town in two. The stretch of tracks on which Fowler sat was just a few hundred yards west of the site where two and a half years earlier, a Norfolk Southern train carrying tank cars full of toxic chemicals derailed and burned. The accident sent dark plumes of smoke over the town, leached toxins into local creeks and soil, and ignited a national reckoning around rail safety, one that has since delivered few reforms.
Fowler, fifty-four, was upset with Norfolk Southern, an East Palestine police officer later reported in a sworn affidavit. He had not received the money he was promised from the $85 billion rail company — his cut of the $600 million settlement that Norfolk Southern had agreed to pay to resolve residents’ class action lawsuit over the derailment. Eighteen months after the settlement’s announcement, still no check had arrived.
That September night, Fowler had decided to take matters into his own hands. He hoped to “cost the railroad money,” the police officer wrote, by putting himself in the path of the trains, which ran so close to his home that he could see the tracks from his front lawn.
Fowler was not the only East Palestine resident waiting on restitution from the settlement, which was touted as “historic” by the deep-pocketed lawyers who negotiated it. Nearing the three-year anniversary of the derailment, the railroad, lawyers, and myriad companies involved in the settlement have all been paid — while many residents have yet to receive anything.
The settlement has been mired by delays and scandal. Many checks first promised in 2024 have yet to…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
