East Palestine Residents React To Biden’s Refusal To Visit
While anti-Israel leftists are demanding that President Joe Biden prioritize aid to Palestine, residents in East Palestine — the small Ohio town devastated by a train derailment earlier this year — are still waiting for a visit from the commander in chief.
Nearly 11 months after a Norfolk Southern train ran off its track and dumped about 1.6 million pounds of toxic waste on the ground, many locals are still dealing with the physical, mental and economic toll.
Dr. Rick Tsai has spent the months since the derailment chronicling its impact and is now mounting a congressional campaign in response to what he insists has been a dereliction of duty, particularly at the federal level.
Despite assurances that the chemicals would be removed from the ground and water, Tsai said that his own testing revealed nearly twice as much benzene and almost five times more methylcyclohexane than the limit.
“If I can send a 7-year-old into that creek with a stick and he can find that, how can the [Environmental Protection Agency], with their millions of dollars, not poke around and find chemicals in Leslie Run?” Tsai asked. “It astounds me and it angers me that we’re being lied to, and I don’t know why.”
He echoed the complaints of many others in the community, concluding: “We’ve been forgotten. We’ve been abandoned. President Biden hasn’t even supplied one bottle of water. My wife and I supplied thousands, tens of thousands of dollars, straight to the residents for water and relief.”
Meanwhile, Biden is spending the final week of the year on yet another vacation, this time visiting the U.S. Virgin Islands.
His behavior is seen as an insult to East Palestine residents like Jessica Conard, who told The New York Times earlier this year that she feels as if the concerns of her family and her neighbors are insignificant to the Biden administration.
Krissy Ferguson took that sentiment to the next level, suggesting that the area’s GOP-leaning politics could be the reason the White House has essentially ignored the disaster.
“I believe that it is political for him,” she said. “I believe that if we were in a blue area, he would have come — and that hurts.”
