(NewsNation) — After officials burned five tankers containing 115,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride over East Palestine, residents were sick and crying out for help.
In September 2023, seven months later, President Biden issued an executive order, sending FEMA executive Jim McPherson to East Palestine to assess the community’s unmet needs.
But new documents from FEMA obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show extensive coordination between FEMA, the White House, the National Security Council, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice, voicing serious concerns about health, toxins and the unmet needs of East Palestine following the train derailment.
But publicly, their message was that there was nothing to those concerns.
“It showed that FEMA knew health care was the No. 1 issue,” Lesley Pacey told NewsNation.
Pacey is an investigator with the Government Accountability Project who sued to get these documents when FEMA refused to turn them over.
“They also knew that they called this plume a really toxic plume. They knew that there would be the potential for cancer clusters,” Pacey said.
The agency noted “the occurrence of a cancer-cluster in [East Palestine] is not zero” and expressed the need for a “tripwire to identify cancer clusters.”
Pacey added, “It was only discussed internally, and it actually was discussed all the way up to the White House.
“There’s White House officials and National Security Council officials discussing the dangers of the cancer cluster potential and the health issues and discussing whether or not to release the unmet needs report to the public and to the media.”
They never released the “Unmet Needs Report” to the public or the media, and the FEMA coordinator sent here by Biden wouldn’t meet with residents.
“A lot of us emailed and called that person and never got through. Eventually, there was something said that he didn’t need our anecdotal reports,” resident Christa Graves told NewsNation.
Pacey said McPherson was “nicknamed by residents as the ghost of October, because they were expecting him to be there in October but never could get a hold of him.”
This email reveals that the FEMA coordinator was told not to engage with residents.
Residents in East Palestine say it is criminal negligence.
“We’re supposed to believe that’s not how our country runs,” Graves said. “And I’m starting to see that’s how our country is always run.”
A DHS spokesperson told NewsNation, “Emails of FEMA ignoring a potential cancer cluster breakout in East Palestine, Ohio, under the Biden administration is yet another outrageous example of the gross mismanagement and poor treatment of Americans under the prior administration.
“Add this debacle to the long list of FEMA failures under Biden, ignoring sexual assault claims in Hawaii, a complete inadequate response to Hurricane Helene in Western North Carolina, and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to house illegal aliens, including Laken Riley’s killer. This will never happen again under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem.”
