Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the very concept of a “sacrifice zone” wouldn’t exist. And yet, in America, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working-class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and government abandonment. America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers; they are, in fact, a harrowing model of the future that lies in store for most of us if the corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires destroying our communities aren’t stopped. And residents of different sacrifice zones across the country, fellow workers on the frontlines of all this reckless and preventable destruction, are connecting with each other, learning from one another, and working together to fight back. In this Working People liveshow, recorded on Oct. 19 at Red Emma’s worker cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, we speak with a special panel of residents from four different sacrifice zones in the US about how the situations they’re facing in their own communities and their struggles for justice and accountability are connected. Panelists include: Hilary Flint, communications director of Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community and a former resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, a few miles from the site of the Feb 2023 Norfolk Southern train derailment and chemical disaster in East Palestine, Ohio; Melanie Meade, a community organizer, educator, and life-long resident of Clairton, Pennsylvania, the site of US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, which was named the most toxic air polluter in Allegheny County in a 2021 report by PennEnvironment; Elise Keaton Wade, a real estate attorney by trade, longtime environmental justice activist, and a native of Southern West Virginia; Angela “Angie” Shaneyfelt, a resident of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, who lives just blocks away from an open air coal terminal owned and operated by rail giant CSX Transportation, which has been polluting her community for generations. Special thanks to Dr. Nicole Fabricant and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for organizing this live show. Additional links/info below… Coal-Free Curtis Bay Facebook page and Instagram South Baltimore Community Land Trust website, Twitter/X page, Facebook page, and Instagram Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community website, Facebook page, Instagram, and Twitter/X page Hilary’s Instagram Nicole Fabricant’s Instagram Melanie’s Facebook page Angela’s Facebook page Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “South Baltimore residents on the toxic reality of living in a ‘sacrifice zone’“ Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “East Palestine residents demand fully-funded healthcare“ Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “One year later, East Palestine residents want Norfolk-Southern held accountable” Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “‘Towns are gone’: In Helene-devastated Asheville, NC, volunteers battle misinformation and ‘apocalyptic’ wreckage” Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times / The Real News Network, “Scenes from a sacrifice zone: South Baltimore residents fight back against industrial pollution“ Maximillian Alvarez & Molly Crabapple, In These Times, “Wasteland warriors” Laura Gottesdiener, The Nation, “You can wipe out coal, but you can’t bring the mountains back” Nicole Fabricant, University of California Press, Fighting to Breathe: Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore Nicole Fabricant, The Real News Network, “Opinion | CSX explosion in Curtis Bay should alarm Baltimore City and accelerate real change” Adam Willis, The Baltimore Banner, “A state-backed report found coal dust across Curtis Bay. CSX isn’t convinced“ Melanie Meade, PublicSource, “Family history, loss and hopes for a bright future fuel my fight for clean air in Clairton” Daniel Shailer, PublicSource, “The Mon Valley holds its breath as the latest U.S. Steel settlement promises a fresh approach” Permanent links below… Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show! Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page Featured Music…Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song Studio Production: Max AlvarezPost-Production: Jules Taylor Transcript The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible. Hilary Flint: Hi everyone. My name is Hilary Flint. My pronouns are she her. I am from Enon Valley, Pennsylvania that is a town of less than 300 people that borders East Palestinian, Ohio. I have a background of chronic health issues and I’m a young adult cancer survivor, and I’d always been very conscious of the environment and very conscious of health issues, but it wasn’t until the East Palestine trained derailment and chemical disaster did I start organizing full-time in this work. So I’m director of Communications and community Engagement at Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community. And we really work around fracking and the Shell Plastics plant in Beaver County and also around the East Palestine trained real as well. And then I also work with Clean Air Action Fund. It’s a C four. And the reason I do that is so I can put on a different hat and do things like lobby and help write bills that would prevent these types of things from happening. And then I also just started working for Center for Oil and Gas organizing around the issue of LNG, which is kind of the next big thing that we need to be working on. But a lot of the work I do is through a lens of disability justice, solidarity building and trying to change the way nonprofits work. So getting more mutual aid, getting money directly to grassroots instead of big green except food and water watch, they can have all the money. So yeah, just figuring out a different way to do the work because I’ve seen that the system currently just does not work. Melanie Meade: Hi everyone. My name is Melanie Meade. I’m from Clairton, PA, and I came into this work in 2013 when I was burying my father, when six months later I buried my mother. And from the span of 2011 to 2020, I buried all of my immediate family. I live next to one of the largest plants, USX coing plants in Clairton pa, and I’m so thankful to have sisters like Hilary and everyone on the panel to stand in solidarity with. Elise Keaton Wade: Hello, my name is Elise Keaton Wade. I am from Southern West Virginia. I am a real estate attorney by trade, but I got started in my activism 25 years ago on Payford Mountain with Larry Gibson, looking at mountains being blown up for tiny seams of coal through the process of mountaintop removal, strip mining. And that is how I came to my environmentalism. It’s how I became a lawyer trying to find out why it was legal to blow the tops off mountains to get coal. Turns out it’s legal because we made a law allowing it. So it’s a policy issue, right? So I lived in Colorado for a little while. I was licensed to practice out there, and I came back to West Virginia in 2011, reconnected with Larry Gibson in 2012. He passed away shortly thereafter, but I was involved with the organization where I met Dr. Fabricant. And so she and I, 13 years ago sat on Payford Mountain and dreamed of a regional coordination of efforts. And here we are today with multiple states in this room, and we’ve spent two days together talking about how we’re all interconnected. So I’m honored and pleased, and I’m so grateful for each of you being here. Angela Shaneyfelt: And I’m Angela Shaneyfelt and I am a community member of Curtis Bay here in Baltimore. And I got started in this in December 30th, 2021 when the CSX Coal terminal had their explosion. And the reason why I am here is just when you look into your child’s eyes and they’re mentally checked out and you don’t know why. So that’s why I am here. Maximillian Alvarez: All right, welcome everyone to this special live show of working people, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I cannot overstate how much of an honor it is to be sitting here with all of you here in this room here at this table. As those of you listening just heard, we have a really special installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we have been talking with working class folks, living, working and fighting for justice in different, so-called Sacrifice Zones around the US and even beyond. And we are sitting here in the great red Emma’s cooperative bookstore and cafe and organizing space here in Baltimore. Shout out to Red Emmas, thank you for hosting us. And I also wanted to shout out and thank the great Dr. Nicole Fabrican for bringing us altogether, everyone at the South Baltimore Community Land Trust for bringing us together. And thank you for all the incredible work that y’all do, and thank you all for being here. And yeah, as listeners of this show, no, I didn’t expect to be doing this kind of work. I’ve been doing this show for years, mainly talking to working people about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles, but within the context of their workaday lives and labor shop floor struggles. And that’s why I was interviewing railroad workers a few years ago, nonstop, all of whom were telling me that there was a crisis on the freight rail system. I talked to engineers, I talked to dispatchers, I talked to the folks who maintain the track, right? And all of them were saying some version of the same thing, which is that corporate greed has destroyed this vital element of our supply chain, and it is putting all of us workers, residents, and our planet at Hazard, and they were screaming for someone to listen to them, and they were demanding of those companies and of their government and of the public that we support them. And instead, as we all know, a little over two years ago, Joe Biden and both parties in Congress worked together to block railroad workers from going on strike, forced a contract down their throats and basically told them to shut up and go away. Two months later, east Palestine happened, a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed in Hilary’s backyard, and then three days later, the Norfolk Southern pressured local authorities to make the disastrous and unnecessary decision to vent and burn five cars worth of toxic vinyl chloride, spewing a massive black death plume into the air that we all remember seeing Hilary and her neighbors lived it, and they are still living in it. I mean, I think one thing that we want to emphasize here and that’s going to come out in the stories of our incredible panelists is that maybe you heard about the issues that they’re dealing with in the past, and then it faded from the headlines. That does not mean the issue has gone away. In fact, quite the opposite is true in most cases. But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been wins and struggle, and we want to make space to talk about that as well. But I really want to emphasize first and foremost that when communities are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits or government negligence or what have you, I mean, these are people’s lives. These are communities that are destroyed and then forgotten. And as a journalist investigating and talking to folks living in these areas, what I’m realizing is we’re going to run out of places to forget. And so it breaks my heart going from East Palestine to South Baltimore to communities around the country talking to folks who feel so forgotten yet who are dealing so many of the same problems caused by the same villains. And so really, we’re here to talk about what we as fellow workers, as neighbors can do to band together to put a stop to this, to get justice and to build a world in which this kind of thing is not only unthinkable, but it sure as hell isn’t as normalized as it is today. And so with all that upfront, I want to shut up and really just have you all listen more to the incredible women I’m sitting next to. I want us in the first half of this to just sort of talk a bit more for listeners and folks here about your story, about where you come from, about the kind of issues that you all are dealing with in your own respective communities. Because each has its own specificities. Every community is different. And then in the second half, I want us to talk about the significance of all of us being here together, of what y’all have seen in Baltimore, what discussions you’re getting into and what we can do to fight these corporate villains, wall Street monsters and corporate politicians who are destroying the planet upon which we all depend. So with all that upfront, Angie, I wanted to turn it back over to you since you are home based here in Baltimore. Tell us a bit more about yourself and about the struggle going on in Curtis Bay for folks who maybe haven’t heard about it yet. Angela Shaneyfelt: I grew up not in Curtis Bay or Brooklyn, I grew up just a little bit south of there in Anne Arundel County in Pasadena, a suburb of Baltimore City. And honestly, when I was younger, I said I would never live in the city, ever. And here I am 16 years later in the city that I said I would never live in. When I first moved to Curtis Bay, I never even thought about the coal other than it’s getting in my house. And I opened my windows the first year I lived there. And then after that first year, I was like, what is this black dust in my house and where is it coming from? And so we figured out that it was from the coal pile that’s two blocks, three blocks, city blocks down from where I live, just wafting into my house any way it could get in. And so that’s when I just didn’t for 15 now years that I’ve not opened my windows at all. And then never, still didn’t pay attention to it honestly. And then December 30th happened, 2021, and literally I felt the sonic didn’t know what it was, did the mental checks looking around, and my kids were in the living room with me. My husband was on his way to Dunking Donuts. I had Covid, my daughter had covid, so we couldn’t go outside. He was going for coffee and we felt the pressure from the boom, didn’t hear anything yet. And I’m just looking around, what is it? My kids are looking at me for direction they didn’t know. And then we heard it and it shook our house. There’s neighbors that had windows blown out from this explosion. And then I looked at my daughter and she, one doesn’t, even before this, never really dealt well with loud noises or balloons. And I’m looking at her and she literally wasn’t there. And my kids were around seven or eight at the time, so I had to tap on her chin three times to get her to come back to normal. And in that couple minutes time, I had to do the checks. The electricity’s still on. My windows are intact, and I live in Baltimore, so there’s nobody shooting outside my house. So we’re okay, but I don’t know what happened. And so then after the explosion, initial explosion happened, I go outside what we do here in Baltimore, go outside and talk to neighbors. We didn’t get any alerts at all from any government agency, but word on the street what we go by a lot of times in South Baltimore because kind of the forgotten part of Baltimore City word on the street was there’s no threat to the community. But if you go outside and we found this out hours later from news and whatever, if you go outside, wear a mask, now it’s 2021 and we’re in the middle of a pandemic, of course we’re going to wear a mask, but why are you telling me to wear a mask if I go outside if there’s no threat to the community, like one plus one equals two in my world and that doesn’t add up. So with C, I lost my sense of smell and taste, and I had a mask on anyway, I was coming back inside because it was don’t go outside. I had the worst suer and rotten egg smell that I’ve ever smelled in my life without a sense of smell and a mask on. So I don’t know, I can only imagine what a normal person at that point would’ve been smelling in our neighborhood. And so then my husband comes back and I literally was shuffling him inside because go inside, don’t be outside. And he had no clue. He was driving up the hill when the initial blast happened to the point where he felt like the car tires were lifting up off the ground and he stopped when he made the turn off of the street right next to ours and to check the tires to make sure there was still air in the tires. And that’s just one explosion. There’s been a history of explosions from CSX and they initially didn’t know it wasn’t us. We’ve heard different things like it’s not our coal that is in our neighborhood, that is in your neighborhood. It comes from across the water in Ock, but your coal doesn’t leave the terminal. We’re breathing in somebody else’s coal. They tried to say it wasn’t coal. Well, what is it? Black dust. And now the community with the help of some scientists from John Hopkins have done the research, which we shouldn’t have to do. Honestly, we shouldn’t have to do that. The MDE and EPA should be doing their job. That’s their job, not our job to protect us as a community and as a city. Maximillian Alvarez: And just to clarify for folks listening, y’all heard the episodes that we’ve done in the past with Angie and her neighbors in South Baltimore, and what we’re talking about here is the massive open air like coal terminal that is owned and operated by CSX rail, multi-billion dollar rail company that these uncovered coal cars have been coming in and out of that terminal for decades over a century. So we’re talking about the explosion that happened at the cult pier that Angie was referring to, but as you’ll hear later on in the conversation, and as y’all remember from our past episodes based on South Baltimore, this is sadly only one of many polluters poisoning Angie and her community. Elise Keaton Wade: So my name is Elise Keaton again, Elise Keaton Wade. It’s tough when you get married later in life, confuses things and complicates things. I said in my introduction that I got started with my environmental activism in college because I had to go away to college to learn about the environmental degradation happening in my backyard. And imagine my surprise at 19 years old when I’m sitting in an Appalachian studies course in Virginia Tech and I hear the words mountaintop removal for the very first time in my life, and I’m like, what are we talking about? And that visceral reaction to something so wrong, and that journey over the last 25 years has landed me in places where really tragic things are happening. For example, I graduated law school the year that Katrina happened. I was in the evacuation from Houston, from Rita where more people died in the evacuation from Rita than died in Katrina. And that’s a little known fact, right? The entire city of Houston tried to leave within 36 hours and we sat for 28 hours going nowhere. But my policy mind was always at work in those instances, what is the policy that got us here? What is happening? Why am I staring at a bridge? And I was naive. I don’t know who said it earlier about being a naive high school student, but I thought it was a great statement that I’m a student. Of course I’m naive. I don’t know what’s going on right in my naivete, I thought this hurricane was going to be something that’s shone the light on all of these policy issues. This hurricane was going to show that we weren’t able to evacuate in a big way very quickly from some mass event. What if it wasn’t a hurricane? What if it wasn’t explosion or a chemical plant or some trained derailment with deadly chemicals going into the air? We are ill-equipped across the board to deal with those types of things. That was in 2005, right? What the hell have we been doing? What have we been doing? Where is our plan? Right? So now, okay, it’s 2014. No, it’s not today. You’re glad I drank the espresso, I’m telling you. So it’s 2024 and in West Virginia right now what we’re dealing with is poisoned water in Indian Creek in Wyoming County because the coal companies are going back into the coal mines for the methane, the coal bed methane that’s down there. And one way they’re trying to figure out how to get it out of there is to flush it out with water. Well, they’ve found out pretty quickly, that’s a terrible idea, but they continued to do it and continued to pollute. It’s been about a year and a half, maybe close to two years that this community has been aware of this, and they’re just now acknowledging that they have an issue. And yesterday they withdrew their permits to continue this practice. It was because hashtag Appalachian living on TikTok, my girlfriend Lindsay Riser who’s out there beating the drum every day, calling out the hypocrisy, telling people, why are you not talking about the industry that’s poisoning us? At the same time, we have a solid candidate coming out of that district. This is my Senate district, my state Senate District nine. She is a 35 year member of Teachers union. She started teaching right out of high school. She is from our community. She’s been a teacher for decades. She is pro West Virginia. She got involved in politics because one of her children is transgender, and she had to sit in our legislature and listen to them abuse transgender individuals with their legislation. It triggered her into action. The UMWA United Mine Workers Association, the union that we wear our bandanas to remember and to support supported her candidacy in the primary. They’re supporting her Republican opponent in the general. Now out of respect for her, I’m going to wait until after the election to address this issue, but this issue will be addressed because of East Palestine. East Palestine is the reason that I am involved again in these issues. When Nikki brought me to East Palestine and I heard what really happened and the fact that very few news outlets were actually telling us the real news about what was happening up there, I realize it’s never going to stop. They are never going to stop doing this to us. The only people who have ever shown up for our communities are the people within our communities. And unless we’re there making other people show up, they don’t come. They’re not trying to help us and find out what’s going on. It is up to us every single time I’ve been around long enough to know Katrina, Rita, name your disaster, right? It’s not changing and it’s unacceptable. It is disastrous and unnecessary to quote our host. And so when you find yourself in these systems and these situations where you are somewhat powerless as an individual, right? I can stand up and scream all night long and it’s not going to get anything done, but I can work in regional coordination and support the people who are in these different areas because those trains roll through my community. The coal in your bay came from my mountains in West Virginia that we have stood on as activists. They’re blowing mountains apart. Those mountains filter clean water. That’s a very shortsighted plan, don’t you think? So everything that happens in Appalachia, in West Virginia, in East Palestine, in Baltimore, this is all coordinated together and us talking to each other and having in these gatherings and committing to supporting each other regionally is their biggest fear because we’re recognizing our power and we’re using it. So I don’t know, that’s exactly the question you asked, but it felt good while I was saying it, so I’m going to stick with it. All right. Alright, with Maximillian Alvarez: Nah, sister, preach. Everything you guys say is incredible and important. I only picked the mic back up just to note and make a very grim footnote for listeners, because we just published another installment of this series where I spoke to two folks on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina providing mutual aid and trying to repair their destroyed community, their destroyed region, and something that Byron Ballard, who’s there working at a church and doing great work, said that really stuck with me. If you’re trying to see the connections here, not only through manmade climate change and all the ways that that is making these massive hurricanes bigger, more destructive and going and destroying parts of Western North Carolina for Pete’s sake, but what she said, because we’ve seen those pictures of towns that have been wiped off the map, mudslides that have taken towns off the map that have killed families. She said mountaintop removal made those mudslides a lot worse. So just really wanted to drive that home. If you think that these are distinct issues that aren’t going to come back and combine in monstrous ways they already are. Melanie, please hop in. Melanie Meade: Thank you Max. In Clariton. In 2005, I was successfully working at American University in Bowie State. I was part-time adjunct professor in Spanish. I was so proud to have my job. I went home to a Clairton reunion we have during Labor Day and I woke up the next morning in the hospital being diagnosed with what is called nocturnal epilepsy. That emergency doctor did not tell me what it came from and no other doctor could find it whenever they did scans of my brain. But then in 2013, when I came home to bury my father, I met a gentleman named Dave Smith and he was working for Clean Air Council and he had taught me about the campaign leaders of 10 and he said, Melanie, get 10 friends and tell them to each get one friend and let’s start talking about our shared issues. In 2018, fires burned the size of three football fields for 17 days before the mayor and Health Department informed us little black boys because they’re typically outside and want to be outside and play outside. We’re five times more affected according to a doctor’s report. Then we came to find out months later that everyone’s health was harmed who live within 10 miles of the USX Claritin K works. And we didn’t get the right help, nor did we know what kind of help we needed. So there were people who came in to say they were helping, but we never really found out the truth. And it disturbed me to find out that those fires burned again in 2019 total of over 100 days, and it wasn’t on the news anymore. Hilary and I are very close, so we’re not in competition, but I felt like USX was in control of the media. There was a stop and desist with USXK works to talk about the trains, and those trains come through clariton as well. I can hear them all through the night and day. That’s where I realized we have to remain connected. We have to tell our stories, we have to have real news. We have to have real journalists that report the truth according to what we have experienced because it can’t be done any other way. And I’m just really encouraged to have you all to look, to call on and come together like this because this is helpful and it’s healing to know that our work is meaningful and it will result in something. So I just continue to thank you for real news. I continue to thank Curtis Bay for sharing your stories. I continue to thank Hilary. I continue to thank Elise, Dr. Fabricant, all of you who are here because you are the wind beneath my wings, not having my parents or siblings. It can be a lonely place, but you fill those voids for me and I’m so very grateful for you all and I’m so very grateful that we can say let’s blow stuff up. Hilary Flint: I just want to start off by something I feel like is not spoken about enough is that East Palestine did get a lot of media coverage, especially in the beginning, right? We were on all the news stations and it was this big plume, but I genuinely think it’s not because USX is not allowing media to do things. I think it’s because we’re a predominantly white community, and I’m going to be super frank about that. Myself and two other community members were able to meet President Biden within a year of the trained derailment. And I have to see black leaders in Louisiana and in Texas who have been doing this fight for 40 plus years, 50 years, and they do not get proximity to the White House. They get nowhere near it. So I just want to start with that because I think we talk about East Palestine a lot and it’s like, yeah, we got the media coverage because it was a white community and it was not only that, it’s a very conservative area. So it was a flashier news story than, oh, we’ve been poisoning people for 40 years. It was different. And that’s what was different about it is that we were a white, small rural community. And I try to do the work that now we can bring people with us because one thing about your whiteness is I can’t get rid of it, but what I can do is utilize it to then make sure that now the White House is contacting other communities because it’s disgusting to me that you feel this guilt that day that myself and other community members met with President Biden, I had the most extreme guilt because it was like we did this in a year and through that year I was connecting with communities all over the United States that went through environmental disasters. And I had to think like, oh, you expect, oh wow, that’s so cool. You did that in one year. And so part of it, you do have that little bit of pride and you’re like, yeah, that’s awesome. And then you’re like, but why could I do that? Watching these other women, and by the way, it’s usually women, it’s usually female activists. I’m watching them and I heard Melanie speak one day and I was like, that is a fierce woman. And if Melanie Mead isn’t getting the help that she needs, then there is something wrong with the system. And that’s what this solidarity building is. It’s so important. But I did want to talk about the day of the derailment and how people think it is the derailment. That’s the problem. I refer to this as the East Palestinian trained derailment and chemical disaster because the derailment is just a piece of the puzzle. And yes, there was all these chemicals and there was fires, but it really wasn’t until a couple of days later when they burned the vinyl chloride that my community was affected. So we know this as the East Palestine trained around it, but it’s directly on the border where this happened. Pennsylvania is right there, and other communities outside of East Palestine were affected and will be affected down the line, but it would not be as bad as it will be that vinyl chloride changed the game. So that’s the mushroom cloud that everyone saw. And I remember that day very distinctly because I was convinced I was glued to the news thinking they’re going to evacuate us. Of course they are. East Palestine at that point had been under evacuation. It was a one by two mile radius, but where I lived, you could see the smoke. So I’m thinking they’re going to have to evacuate us. And so then I’m watching the TV and I see, oh, my little brother’s school, they’re sending the kids home and our school is way further away from East Palestine than our physical home. So I’m thinking, oh, okay, they’re sending the kids home so then we can evacuate as families. He gets home and we’re waiting and we’re waiting and we’re seeing, I’m watching the press conference on the news. They’re saying, alright, at three 30 we’re going to blow this up. And the call that we were looking for never came. We were never going to be evacuated. It was just a one by two mile radius. Now we’re over a year out and there is proof that this plume traveled to 16 different states. So imagine a one by two mile radius. Us, my family chose to self evacuate. We did it very last minute. I had my go-bag prepped. My Italian grandma was like, I’m not leaving my house. So last minute we got Mimi. We got Mimi in the car. She was the last one. But as we were driving away and we had no idea where we were going by the way, it was just like, you just have to get away. And I look in the rear view mirror and that’s when they blew it up. So it felt like I was a storm chaser running away from a tornado or something. That’s what it felt like. And you see it. And at that moment, my dog just started barking like crazy, just barking like crazy. And I think they have a more sensitive smell and things like that. And we just kept driving and I’m like, where are we going by the way? So I don’t know. I had family in another town. So we went and I was sat in my cousin’s driveway for hours. She wasn’t home. And then I was like, well, I guess we’re going to have to get a hotel. Because once we saw what it looked like, some of my neighbors that had stayed behind at the farm next door to me and took pictures, I was shocked. People were alive. It was black. The whole area was just black smoke. I couldn’t imagine that was safe to go home to. So we did end up getting a hotel. It was the last hotel book. We are small communities. Guess what? We don’t have a lot of hotel rooms available and the National Guard there. And we were checking in kind of at the same time. And so I had asked this man in full uniform, I said, we weren’t supposed to be evacuated, but we did anyway. What would you have done in that situation? And he said, ma’am, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t even be here right now. So this is someone in full uniform who came to respond to the crisis, who understood how dangerous it was. And at that point we were like 15 miles away and he didn’t even want to be there. And the next day they say everything’s fine, everyone can go home. And I remember I had a business trip that I had to go back, pack my bag, and then go to the airport. The minute we opened the door of our home, I knew everything had changed. It was a smell that I had never sm smelled before. I couldn’t even find the correct words to describe it except sweet bleach. It was a chemical smell, but it also smelled sugary. And within a few minutes we had health symptoms. I mean, it did not take long. So I have some preexisting health conditions. I have chronic illness, and one of the diseases that I have is called rainy odds. And in rayons it causes blood vessel constriction. So you turn purple. Now, I’ve always had rayons since I was little. My hands would turn purple, but I’d never had it go beyond that. And all of a sudden I look down, my feet are purple, everything is turning purple. And it wasn’t until later I find out that their vinyl chloride is one of the known triggers of that particular disease. And when we’re told it’s safe to go home, my question is, who is it safe for? It’s not safe for everyone. It’s not safe for people with asthma. It’s not safe with for people with preexisting conditions, but that is what we operate off of. It’s a blanket statement of, oh, it’s safe. That’s not true. It wasn’t safe for me. And then I had to get on a plane and leave my family and say, oh, I had to go to work. And so I was on this work trip and just, I smelled, there was a smell that lingered. So I get off the plane, I was flying to California and my boss and I are meeting at the airport and I go to hug him and he goes, Ooh, why do you smell like that? It came with me to California. And that smell traveled with me for a full year. I had to leave all my clothes behind. I had to leave mattresses. You couldn’t take anything that was a soft surface because this chemical smell lived in it. And no matter how many times you washed it, it didn’t matter. And it got to the point where it became embarrassing because you had a smell. My partner also has chronic illness, and the smell would make him sick just from me being in his home. And it got to the point where when I would go over, I would have to get completely naked at the door, get in a shower, shut my clothes in a basement. I would have to shower, I would’ve to put on different clothes that I had to buy to keep there. And it was so I didn’t feel like a human. And I remember at one point I was crying. I was so upset, I was so tired. And I was like, I can’t believe I have to go through this whole ritual, this decontamination ritual. And I just remember him saying, it’s not you, honey, it’s the chemicals. I’m like, I don’t know that. That makes me feel that much better, right? Yeah. He would get nosebleeds just from being around my suitcase. And so about six months in, I ended up, I worked two jobs until I could afford to move. Because when they tell you to just move, it actually doesn’t work like that, especially if you were exposed to a chemical. So now all of your belongings, you can’t take them with you. And so when I did move, I finally got a place, I was on an air mattress. Me and my grandma were sharing an air mattress on the ground. There was no furniture. I just got a couch. And I’ve been there for over a year at this point, because you are rebuilding, you were starting over again. And so I’ve had to work from the crack of dawn until it’s dark out. And that’s what I had to do to move. And that’s a privilege, right? Not everyone even has that privilege. That’s pretty shocking. I can do that as a disabled person. But I look at people with families. My family is a small, well, small business owner, but we own a lot of acreage. And my parents want to move. But when you have 10,000 acres and you have a business based on tourism, and guess what? You can’t sell it. So where are you going to go? And you can’t pull equity out of your house. So they’re stuck. I could just up and move. I didn’t have the business. I didn’t have this and that. So now my grandma and I, we lived in the home. My great-grandmother built on the land that my family originally lived on. My parents built a house in the backyard. I had moved back home because I had cancer. And I was a young adult and I couldn’t financially recover unless I did that. My plan was I live back with my grandma and then I build a house in the backyard. Cause we have 40 acres, we have our own little commune. That can’t happen now. There’s no way we used to lease farm land. And how can we ethically do that? How can we ethically, if you have farmers who want to farm that land, is that ethical? Is it ethical to sell your home? So right now, we just have our home sitting there because we don’t feel comfortable selling it. And I had someone who was a lawyer be like, oh, actually you can, it’s okay. And I said, I’m not actually asking about the law here. I’m talking about ethics. Can I sell this home so that some little kid someday gets angiosarcoma, which is the cancer that vinyl chloride is tied to? So in the beginning, I was kind of the person behind the scenes organizing, I don’t really like to do stuff like this. I’m the person who likes to prep people for these things. And about six months in, I realized I was going to have to do this and step up. And so we had a grassroots group that we started just like a volunteer. We weren’t a nonprofit, we weren’t anything. And people always said like, oh, why didn’t you become a nonprofit right away? And I said, oh, because we didn’t want the rules. So we did have some civil disobedience in the beginning. That’s how I met Robin and David. They went to the Ohio State Capitol with us. And we didn’t storm the capitol, but we had people go sit in a session and stand up and say, remember he is Palestine. My kid’s nose is bleeding. And let me tell you, once you go back to your community after you do something like that, things don’t go well. Small, rural conservative communities aren’t really into that kind of thing. But it was effective. And the reason we went when we did was one thing we thought that could help us was a major disaster declaration because we didn’t even get a state of emergency. It opened up this problem that because there was a company who was the reason this happened, the liability was with that company and it wasn’t a natural disaster. So there was just so many things behind the scenes that they couldn’t figure out how to classify the disaster essentially to give us the government services we needed. But we thought a major disaster declaration would help. In the beginning had started a petition. We had over 20,000 signatures. And then it was the next day it was, if the governor didn’t ask President Biden for that, then you could never get it. And so we went because we knew we had to put pressure on Ohio’s governor to win Pennsylvania’s governor. I found out couldn’t even call that disaster declaration because it physically didn’t happen. So where an accident happens is really important apparently. So we went and we put the pressure on, and guess what? The next day DeWine did ask for the disaster declaration. So it worked to the whole community hated us after that. And I mean, still to this day, Facebook groups terrify me like what they’re saying about us, but it’s what we had to do. And that’s what I’ve realized. Some of these decisions I have to make in this work is like, I have to do this and I’m not going to be liked after, and I have to do this in a way that I can stay in the work too. So maybe sometimes that means not organizing as close to home. I learned that federal policy actually can help us a lot more than talking to my representatives when they tell you, oh, talk to your representatives, talk to your counsel. That is true in some cases, but in this case, that wasn’t true. So a lot of my work has been about going to the very top and figuring out what we can get from the government. And unfortunately, it doesn’t happen quick. It does not happen quick. And so by the time we are going to get the things we’re fighting for, people are going to be sick. There’s already people sick. There’s people with rare forms of breast cancer. There’s young girls getting their period super early. There’s respiratory issues. I was hospitalized multiple times. My sibling was life-flighted multiple times. My three-year-old sister has obstructive sleep apnea, which only happened after the derailment. So the system was horrible. And that’s kind of what I’m trying to change. And we found out when we did get to meet at the White House, something I had asked later, I said to them, what got us here? What was the difference maker? And they actually said, we noticed you were working with other communities and other industries. And they talked about the fact that we were working with labor, we were working with unions, and then they found out that we’ve been working with the Gulf South and we were working in West Virginia. And that scared them. It should. And that got us in the door. And that’s why I think what we’re doing here is more important than anything we could do because this is what scares them. People coming together and realizing it’s not left versus right. It’s not Republican versus liberal. It is us versus them. And we are the people. We’re the everyday people. It’s us versus the billionaires in the systems and that’s scaring them. So we have to keep doing this in other communities because this is what gets the attention. Sometimes it’s not the rallies or the op-eds, sometimes it’s them simply understanding your network. So anytime I go to another community, I was in Louisiana at a public meeting and someone from industry said, oh, who are you and why are you here? And I said, oh, we all work together. And they were like, oh no. So letting industry know like, oh yeah, I know Elise in West Virginia. I know Nikki in Baltimore, and that’s really scary to them. Maximillian Alvarez: Well, let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table before we open it up to q and a. And I want to acknowledge that as y’all had laid out, and as Hilary, you were talking through some of the gains that you made by not going away. And I know that that has happened in your respective communities. Y’all are true heroes, love warriors for justice because you refuse to go away. And in that way, you were also an inspiration to all of us. So I want to acknowledge the fact that here in South Baltimore, y’all got together high school students, folks from Johns Hopkins doing community science to provide the proof that CSX without which CSX could keep on saying, no, that black shit in your home is not us, must be something else. So that’s a victory. But yet they’re still denying culpability. Their operational permits still up for renewal in coal country, right? It’s like, oh, well, we stopped mining coal, now we’re fracking the shit out of everything and still poisoning the water that way. So I say this by way of asking if in our final turnaround the table, if y’all could say a little bit about what the communities have been doing and achieving through struggle, but also what this week has shown us in regards to as valiant and essential as those local efforts are to take on these international corporations. We need solidarity that’s operating at the level that they are and what we can do working together, building on what Hilary kind of got us started on. So yeah, could you say a little bit about what y’all and your communities have achieved and have been working towards, but also where you’re seeing that that’s not enough and that we need to band together to take this fight to the higher level higher. Elise Keaton Wade: So I want to start this. Can you hear me okay? I want to start this because their fights are more current in time than mine, and I want to kind of build on what Hilary said and then hand it to them to talk about their current struggles. But now you understand why Palestine at Palestine set me back on fire right now. You understand that I got there and realized that everything I’d seen wasn’t true. They were misleading the rest of the world about what happened there. And it wasn’t until I sat in the room and heard these people talk about why the people with no marks on their skin or their hair falling out were the ones who got to go into the White House, how they divided the community. And I stood next to my friend Dustin White who is here tonight with me. He was at that meeting and the entire time they were talking about how that community and how the officials responded in that disaster. We were looking at each other across the room. That’s exactly what they did in 2014 at the Elk River Chemical disaster in West Virginia. The leak spill, whatever, nearly verbatim responses. And then the split, you have a coalition of people and we cobbled ourselves together. And now they’re going to pick and choose who they bring into the room so that when you leave that room, there’s division within your community. They did exactly the same thing to us. And I sat there with my jaw on the floor and they’re going to keep doing it to every community. There’s their standard playbook. So yes, what scares them is that we talk to each other now that we stand in solidarity with each other, that I go and raise hell with the union in West Virginia for our railroad brothers and sisters in East Palestine who stood for two months and screamed about the safety issues on this railroad, screamed to the people in this country about what was happening and what was going to happen if they didn’t shut it down and address it. And we told ’em to sit down and shut up because our economy needed those trains to roll. Now, if you’ve been with me for the past couple of days, I’ve been on a bit of a diatribe about the failed economic theory of capitalism. Happy to go into that more on another podcast Max. But this is a great example. This is a great example of why it doesn’t work, because if it worked in theory, they would’ve taken as long as they needed to clean up that mess because it would’ve been what was safe and best for the community and for making sure that the altruistic idea of what happened happened. That’s not what happened in West Virginia. If they cared about the community and the long-term effects, they would’ve addressed the issues that caused that chemical spill, which are mountaintop removal and contamination of local water sources from coal mining and chemical production. If they care, they don’t care. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. The only people who have ever shown up for us are us. And then we have to support each other. Don’t let them divide us. Don’t let them go back and forth. So I want to step back and just say that the fact that it has become more egregious, they are pushing that boundary, right? They are pushing it constantly and they will continue. Every community in this country has a train rail through it. This could be Hinton, this could be any town that has a railway through it. And what are they going to do? They’re going to destroy your lives with their contamination and they’re going to point fingers at each other and they’re going to point fingers at you and tell you it’s really not as bad as you say it is, because how do you know it wasn’t the nail polish you were wearing that caused the toxicity in your body? Yeah, that’s what they told me. Do you wear nail polish? Do you color your hair? Well, how do you know you didn’t poison yourself? Do you smoke cigarettes? Do you drink soda West Virginia? Maybe you’re the problem. I want to say one thing about the myth of the inbred hillbilly, because this is one of my favorite things to talk about in broad groups, and I think it goes back a long time in our history, and I know everybody’s heard about the inbred hillbilly. If you haven’t heard about the inbred hillbilly, raise your hand. This is so diffused throughout our culture, right? Well, I went into the world carrying the identity of the hillbilly that had to do better. I had to prove that we’re not all inbred, that some of us aren’t. So I let them tell me who I was. I accepted their identity of who they told me I, I carried it with me into the world espousing it. I came back to West Virginia because I love my state. I wanted to come back and do the good things that I’d learned out there that nobody taught me here, come back here and do those good works. And when I got back here with a little bit of perspective and context and some world experience, I realize that may be the biggest hoax of the 20th century. Because what happens when you live next to unregulated pollutants? You have high instances of birth defects, cancers deadly diseases. You die young, you die sick. You have offspring that are compromised and sick and young. And 150 years ago, all of these toxins were going unchecked into the community. And what better way to marginalize that community than they say, well, don’t look at that ugliness. They inbred and they changed the narrative and they framed a region for decades. The myth of the inbred hillbilly is still carried forward. So it is on purpose. It is deliberate. If they can tell you who you are and what you’ve done to f your life up, then they’re not responsible. So don’t let them gaslight you. Stand firm and speak your truth to power because you’re right at the end of the day. You’re right. And what did Larry Gibson teach us? Teach us while we stood on Payford Mountain? If you’re telling the truth, what are you afraid of? Speak your truth to power and stand firm. And you’ve got brothers and sisters in West Virginia standing with you and you’ve got brothers and sisters in Pennsylvania standing with you. You’ve got brothers and sisters in Curtis Bay standing with you. So thank you for standing up East Palestine, we are with you in this. Thank you. Angela Shaneyfelt: Thank all of you. And I’m so, so glad that we’re sitting all here in this room together tonight because Curtis Bay, we’re at a point right now. We’re pushing. We’re getting the attention that East Palestine got. And I mean, I said it two years ago at a rally. Let’s take this to Annapolis and to dc. We’re so close to DC that we can’t stop fighting the fight. And it’s not for us. It’s for my kids who are in middle school right now. And my daughter joined us today for as long as she could hang, and she got up on the steps and she said her, she was awesome. And we have the higher cancer rates in Curtis Bay, like asthma rates. I never had asthma growing up. And I found out I had asthma in 2020 in the hospital for surgery. And they’re like, this is your breathing treatment. And I’m like, breathing treatment for what? Nobody ever told me I had asthma. And we have been fighting. We’ve been going to city council. And at one point they didn’t listen, but then we kept fighting and we kept calling the news. And Max, thank you for starting the whole podcast thing and just getting the word out. I’ve gone through times. I mean, the fight is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. And I’ve had my own thoughts. What am I doing this for? I doing it. And I just, I’m so grateful right now that I’m sitting in this room with you guys because we’ve gotten to a point where what is our next step? And I’ve even said it along the way. There’s this lull of large numbers, and I see it happening right now. I didn’t know any of you guys before today. So I knew Nikki for a few years and I never would’ve ever imagined before 2021 that I would ever be sitting in circles that I’m sitting in now. And now I’m 16 years ago, I wanted to be out of Curtis Bay as fast as possible no matter what. And then kids happen. And Curtis Bay is where I can afford to live in all honesty. And in two years, I’m like ready to, the plan is to buy a house. Is it going to be in Curtis Bay? A hundred percent, no. But I’m invested now. So even if I move out, I’m still coming back to keep the fight going and keep the story going, to make the change because that’s what I need to do. Melanie Meade: My father taught at the University of Pittsburgh, Dr. Thomas Vme. He passed in 2013. And the reason he stayed in Clariton is because the family land that we had called Randolph Hollow was taken over for mill housing and he felt like it was worth it to sacrifice his life and his health so that our history could not be forgotten. And so when I hear Hilary stand in solidarity, and the new friend I have in Curtis Bay stand in solidarity, Elise and Dr. Nikki standing in solidarity with me, I know that I’m on the right path. I know that I have not forgotten my history, who I am and what I’m capable of. And I think each and every one of you are fierce in your own way. And it is so wonderful that we have this opportunity because we need it. We need to check in with ourselves, check in with others, because we are the ones showing up for ourselves, as Elisa said. And I need each and every one of you for the long haul. So thank you again, and let’s keep doing the work. Hilary Flint: To go off of what Melanie said, it’s stuff like this that keeps me in the work. So that’s a question I ask myself a lot, and I see other activists and I think, what do they need to stay in the work? What do I need to stay in the work? And every once in a while it’s going to a community and getting inspired by their wins. I noticed how closely the communities here, the EJ conversation is happening with housing injustice and you’re talking about racial justice, and we don’t see a lot of that in our corner of Appalachia. That type of solidarity building doesn’t happen. And so I get to leave and be really inspired by that. I have been working with a group of folks from the Gulf South, and we’re talking about creating an area where climate refugees can live. So I’m looking at the passive housing and I’m thinking, oh, interesting. And I bet a funder would fund something like that. So I get to think about those different ways of doing the work. And we just don’t celebrate joy very much in Appalachia, unfortunately. And to see the positivity and the solutions, I got to see solutions to problems instead of just problems where we are just stuck in the doom and gloom. So for me, coming to this, this is what keeps me in the work. It keeps me going, but then as most people know, I’m a homebody. So I’ll go home and you won’t see me for three weeks now because this social battery, but we all have, that’s such an important lesson. As an activist, what are your boundaries? What keeps you in the work? What are you comfortable in and what are not? What type of hate are you willing to put up with? What’s going to cross the line for you? It can get really bad. I always say being an activist is choosing to be a target, and not only to industry, but sometimes community, sometimes politicians. So again, it’s like what’s going to keep me in the work creating solutions to some of those problems? So something we’ve been trying to do is, again, bring mutual aid into the work. Because what we found out is in East Palestine and Beaver County, they go, oh, well there’s not property damage and there’s not this and there’s not that. So no one’s coming to help you because you don’t fit in a box. And mutual aid is the answer to that, right? It’s community care. It’s, we’re not looking for a box to check off on a grant. You tell me you need a mattress, we get you a mattress. And so how do we make sure that that’s present in the nonprofit industry? So we are fighting really hard to get mutual aid funds set up at small grassroots nonprofits that are just meant for answering community need, peer support. So something that we’re working on is building up mental health resources within the movement. And what does it look to make sure other nonprofits are trauma informed, because what I saw was a lot of groups coming in and taking advantage of people, and I was expected to tell my story of my battle with cancer, and then I turned purple and I wasn’t getting paid for any of that. So something that I’ve been doing is I call people out and I say, you can build paying community members into a grant. And so we do it with everything. We build that money into a grant. And I did a video project where I made sure we paid everyone and paid them well. And this one funder said, that’s revolutionary. We don’t do that. And I said, paying people for their work is revolutionary. I said, and we are the progressive industry. No, we’re not. So thinking about what does care look like in every aspect, because we are not going to stay in this fight. And as we’ve seen it as a long fight, if we don’t think about those things and we’re just, I’m an action oriented person, I’m like, I got to keep going. I got to keep going. And so that gets tiring. And it’s like sometimes I need Melanie to be like, Hilary, have you checked in with yourself today? Are you doing your self care? And we don’t always get that in our own community because when you’re fighting so closely together, people want to do the work differently. And there’s just so much division going on. The minute I decided that I was going to meet the president and then continue a relationship with politicians, it was, she’s been bought off. We can’t trust her anymore. And I had to be okay with that and say, that’s fine. I’m going to work silently. I’m going to get done what I know is going to work because I have been with all of these people now for a year. I know what the needs are and I don’t need to be liked anymore, but I do need to be liked by someone. So that’s where activists come in. They remind me, okay, Hilary, you’re loved and respected in some just not your own home right now. So, okay. So it builds that friendship. And when I get to come and be with Melanie, or even I work very closely with Robin at home, and just to have people that keep filling you up, even if it’s just a couple people in the community, a couple people in different neighborhoods, or when you go through a really heavy situation and no one in your community can relate to it, I can say, Hey Melanie, have you ever experienced this? What does it mean? Can you just be my friend right now and talk me through it? No one else gets it in the community. So again, there’s nothing more important than the solidarity building that we’re doing right now. It’s what scares them. I heard it from the highest up mouth that I could find in the United States. This is what scares them. So the more we do it, the more we win. Especially when it comes to public hearings, public comment periods, vinyl chloride, the chemical that ruined my home on October 23rd, you have until October 23rd to submit a public comment about what you think about that chemical, should it be banned. They’ve known since the 1970s that it was a carcinogen. It was the reason the EPA started something called tosca. Yet it has yet to be banned by tosca. This is the first year it’s up to be banned. Just letting each other know, Hey, I have a public comment period. I would really appreciate it. Because then guess what? They look and they go, oh crap. They got all these public comments from Pennsylvania. They’ve hit every state. Now we’re going to have to do something no longer. Oh no, we poisoned this one community. We poisoned this one community. And they talk to this other poison community, and they talk to this house that has these people that have been dealing with racism. And then they talk to these people that are dealing with transgender rights and they go, oh, so reminding each other, we have some group chats that’ll be like, Hey guys, public comment period here. Submit. And just finding ways to engage with each other outside of this stuff is really important. Mutual aid fundraisers, some people I meet will have a chat where we’re just like, oh, here’s a GoFundMe. Everyone send $5. And it doesn’t ruin my day to send someone $5 at this point. So it’s like, it’s so simple. But if you keep building out these networks and someone has a crisis, and I know people all over the United States, we can get a lot of money. I think we got $3,000 and not even 24 hours. And that’s just like us being random people. It wasn’t a part of our work. It’s just like you can get it because your network is big and your relationships are the work. And if people trust you, they’re going to donate to that. They trust you. So this is how we win Melanie Meade: In all aspects. Relationships are the work is powerful. And hills is, Hilary Flint: It wasn’t me, my colleague Andrew Wooer said it the first time, and I’ll never forget it because I don’t like emotional labor. I am someone who I don’t feel often. I just want to do. I want to solve problems. I want to keep going. And so I was getting so upset that people would be crying and I didn’t know what to do. I’m like, I don’t know what this means. I’m like Googling. I’m like, why would someone cry about this? So I was getting so frustrated and it was going to take me out of the work. It was because I was so bogged down and people would want to have two hour long conversations to tell me about their feelings. And I’m like, I am not the one I truly wish I was, but I’m not. So then you have to find your person who’s the one who does Melanie Meade: The feeling. And I think what I learned here in Curtis Bay is education is important and valuable, especially for our youth in Clariton right now in 2024, we do not have climate change or environmental justice spoken of, nor will they allow me to go in and volunteer to talk to the youth. Our newest superintendent, who is an African-American woman, would not allow us to prepare a lawyer clinic because there are three remaining class action lawsuits for the 2018 and 2019 Christmas fires. So our youth are disengaged. Our little league football team practices directly across the street from the industry. And the coaches say to me, who are sickly, this is not harming us. It hasn’t harmed us. We did it when we were little. And that is what must stop aligning with Hilary, aligning with Elise, Dr. Nikki and Curtis Bay gives me voices to now take back to those coaches to say, look, here it is a problem and let’s stop it. Let’s unite. Let’s stop allowing them to divide. Because our youth in Clariton are winning football games for 40 years and dying at the age of 20, overdosing on Fentanyl or other drugs less than 30 years. And we don’t have the time. We’re 50 years behind in the conversation. So we need to pick it up. And I’m able to pick it up because I have Hills, tiktoks and Curtis Bay and you Max real-time news. So that if you don’t understand, take a moment to listen here, check in and let’s continue this work. We are not defeated because we are together. Give it up for our incredible panel.