President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency waited nearly a week to send up a special plane to test the air and water around East Palestine, Ohio following last year’s toxic chemical train spill — and officials tried to cover up the delay once they did get around to launching it, a whistleblower has said.
Former EPA contractor Robert Kroutil came forward Tuesday with his shocking claims to NewsNation and the Associated Press, raising fresh questions about the White House’s much-scrutinized response to the Feb. 3, 2023, disaster.
According to Kroutil, who resigned this past January, the EPA’s Airborne Spectral Photometric Environmental Collection Technology (ASPECT) plane should have been in the air “in the first five to 10 hours after the incident and while the fires are still burning.”
However, he says, it took “five days” to get the ASPECT plane to Pittsburgh, the nearest major city to East Palestine.
“That deployment was the most unusual deployment I’ve ever seen,” Kroutil told NewsNation. “You just wouldn’t do it that way.”
Kroutil, who helped develop the ASPECT program while a Pentagon employee following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, added that had the craft been airborne on the night of Feb. 3-4, it may have helped officials realize it wasn’t necessary to blow open five train cars and burn the vinyl chloride inside, a tactic known as “vent-and-burn” that sent a massive plume of black smoke over the town of 4,700 people.
“The EPA ASPECT airplane should have made passes over the derailment site right away but certainly before the vent-and-burn,” Kroutil reiterated to the AP. “I think they chose not to know.”
In a statement to The Post Tuesday, the EPA said it didn’t request the plane until Feb. 5 — two days after the derailment — and it arrived in Pittsburgh late that day from its base in Texas. Due to icy conditions, the flight crew decided it wasn’t safe to fly it on the day of the vent-and-burn, but it’s unclear why the plane didn’t make a pass over the derailment on its way into the area.
“EPA’s ASPECT plane was just one component of a comprehensive air monitoring and sampling network that included several instruments to collect air samples and measure contaminants at and around the site,” the agency said, adding that it takes “takes seriously any allegation of violations or misconduct” and remains committed to the “highest level of scientific integrity and transparency.”
“Over the course of the response, EPA has collected over 115 million air monitoring data points and over 28,000 air samples. Since the evacuation was lifted, no sustained chemicals of concern have been found in the air. EPA’s air sampling data is available to the public on EPA’s web page.”
EPA Response Coordinator Mark Durno has also said he believes the agency had enough sensors on the ground to effectively monitor the air and water as the derailed cars burned.
Kroutil is unconvinced.
“We should [have been] collecting data on [February] the 4th, the 5th, the 6th, multiple flights on the 7th,” he told NewsNation. “We should be there at least two weeks to monitor the situation.”
Instead, Kroutil recalled, “we only were deployed for two missions on Feb. 7. By that time, the plumes were out, the fire was out. It was after the vent-and-burn, so that was not the time to actually use this particular aircraft.
“The aircraft only collected data, eight minutes worth of data with the targets.”
Typically, according to Kroutil, ASPECT gathers 100 minutes worth of data during flight.
What’s more, Kroutil said, ASPECT program manager Paige Delgado ordered the plane’s operator to shut down the chemical sensors when it flew over the creeks in East Palestine — even though officials were concerned about toxins seeping into those waterways and potentially fouling drinking water supplies downstream on the Ohio River.
Kroutil added his satellite link to the plane’s instruments confirmed those sensors were turned off.
“I’ve done 180 different responses,” he told NewsNation. “I’ve never heard the program manager tell us to turn the sensor off when collecting data.”
Delgado didn’t immediately respond to an email sent to her by the AP Monday with questions about her actions.
The EPA’s official report on the two East Palestine ASPECT flights does describe pictures the plane took over Little Beaver Creek after a problem with its aerial camera was fixed, but it doesn’t mention Sulphur Run, which flows right next to the derailment site, or the bigger Leslie Run creek that flows through town.
“We could tell the data provided from the ASPECT plane’s two East Palestine flights on February 7 was incomplete and irregular. We had no confidence in the data. We could not trust it,” Kroutil told the AP.
When officials realized the problems with the mission, they asked Kroutil’s employer, Kalman & Company, to draft plans for the flight and backdate them so they would look good if they turned up in a public records request, Kroutil said.
EPA managers also allegedly changed their report to declare the vent-and-burn successful because the plane found so few chemicals when it eventually did fly.
Kroutil also alleged that he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get more details about the East Palestine response, but was threatened with the loss of his job “within 24 hours” if he didn’t rescind it.
Instead, he resigned and the Government Accountability Project has provided him with legal assistance.
More than 177,000 tons of soil and over 67 million gallons of wastewater have been hauled away as part of an ongoing cleanup that has cost railroad operator Norfolk Southern more than $1 billion.
President Biden traveled to East Palestine for the first time back in February — more than a year after the initial toxic spill.
By contrast, former President Donald Trump stopped by the town fewer than three weeks after the derailment, ordered McDonald’s for first responders and community members, and handed out “Trump water.”
Despite the EPA’s assurances that East Palestine and its nearby water sources are safe, numerous residents have complained of respiratory problems and unexplained rashes.
With Post wires
