Vance, Zeldin demand investigation of Biden EPA’s East Palestine train derailment response

what actually happened to that community after the cameras left? JD Vance was there in the immediate aftermath in his old life as senator, standing in the wreckage while the Biden EPA insisted the water was fine and the air was fine and everyone should just go back to normal. Now he's vice president, and he and Lee Zeldin are asking the EPA's own inspector general to look at whether that reassurance was built on anything real.

That's not a small ask. This wasn't a controversy over messaging or optics. Norfolk Southern's train was hauling vinyl chloride and four other hazardous compounds when it derailed, and the response included a deliberate "controlled burn" that sent a black plume over the town, followed by federal officials telling residents their well water was safe within days. People who live there have been reporting rashes, respiratory issues, and dead pets ever since, while property values cratered and nobody in Columbus or Washington seemed in a hurry to explain why the testing was declared conclusive so fast.

An investigation isn't a verdict. It's just someone finally checking whether the certainty that got handed to East Palestine residents matched the science behind it, or whether it was mostly a political need to move on from a bad news cycle. If the answer is that the EPA got it right, fine, that closes the book. But if corners were cut to make a chemical disaster disappear from the headlines faster, the people who breathed that air deserve to know it, not three years and one administration later.