Former President Donald Trump will travel to East Palestine, Ohio, next week to tour the damage of the Norfolk Southern trail derailment and clean-up efforts, Fox News reported.
“A source familiar confirms to Fox News that former President Trump will visit East Palestine, OH, on Wednesday to tour the damage of the Norfolk Southern derailment and cleanup efforts,” Fox News’s Garrett Tenney tweeted.
A source familiar confirms to Fox News that former President Trump will visit East Palestine, OH on Wednesday to tour the damage of the Norfolk Southern derailment and cleanup efforts.
— Garrett Tenney (@Garrett_FoxNews) February 17, 2023
Trump’s visit comes amid clean-up efforts as the community deals with the aftermath of a train derailment earlier in the month that released toxic chemicals.
Roughly 50 train cars were involved in the February 3 derailment. Ohio officials also performed a “controlled release” of five derailed train cars holding vinyl chloride days after the derailment.
However, recent data shows that the train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania “spewed more harmful pollutants into the air, surface soils and water table than originally reported,” as Breitbart News reported:
A list of the cars involved in the derailment and the products they were carrying since released by Norfolk Southern reveals several more toxic chemicals than first made apparent following the crash, ABC News reports.
Among the substances were ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene also in the rail cars that were derailed, the NBC News list shows.
Contact with ethylhexyl acrylate, a carcinogen, can cause burning and irritation of the skin and eyes, and inhalation can irritate the nose and throat, causing shortness of breath and coughing, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Interestingly, President Joe Biden has not yet traveled to the area, and his White House on Friday declined to say whether he has plans to visit East Palestine. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that Biden’s schedule is packed with an upcoming trip to Poland to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Ukraine war.
Biden’s Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg, also has not visited the derailment site. Instead, Buttigieg issued a late statement that said he continues “to be concerned” about the derailment’s impacts on families in the area.
Notably, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) denied an aid request from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), prompting all 17 members of Ohio’s congressional delegation to write letters demanding an answer as to why the governor’s aid request was denied.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., confirmed the former president’s upcoming visit and said, “If our ‘leaders’ are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void.”
Breaking News: Trump will visit East Palestine, Ohio next week.
If our “leaders” are too afraid to actually lead real leaders will step up and fill the void.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 18, 2023
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
