A billion-dollar company poisoned my home and destroyed my town

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

WKYC Channel 3:

Breaking news from Columbiana County. East Palestine is now under an urgent mandatory evacuation order after a toxic train derailment

ABC News:

State of emergency in Ohio. After a train derailment and massive fire, some of the cars were carrying hazardous chemicals.

NBC News:

Some 2000 residents, nearly half of East Palestine still under evacuation orders. Visitors told to stay away.

PBS NewsHour:

For Ashley McCullum, the fear is warranted. She lived two blocks from the derailment site.

Ashley McCullom:

When I looked out, everything looked like it was on fire. The entire entire thing looked like it was going up in smoke in flames. I’m Ashley McCollum and this is my house. It’s pretty bad inside. I had multiple chemical testing done. I don’t go in without this anymore. In the beginning I went in without a mask. I had no idea, and I would come out and have issues. One time I even had to go to the hospital. Another time I have vomited. It’s pretty bad. It’s vacant, it hasn’t been lived in. It’s kind of hard coming back to it because it’s a house that I can’t do anything with because of this.

Maximillian Alvarez:

It’s good to always be prepared, but I never thought I would be in a line of work that requires me to wear one of these. But here we are. That is I’ll ever be,

Ashley McCullom:

And then it’ll connect to each other. This is the door I went to after we heard sirens from the living room. When I looked out, everything looked like it was on fire. The entire entire thing looked like it was going up in smoke in flames.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the fire was literally right

Ashley McCullom:

And it rocked all the way over here.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What was it like after looking out of this window for so many years to then look out and see that in your backyard?

Ashley McCullom:

It’s hard to remember it because the only thing I can remember when I come here, I’m even getting goosebumps, is when I was standing like this, I turned around and my son said, mom, we have to leave. He was six at the time. A 6-year-old said, mom, we have to leave. And I got down to him and I said, we’re going to make it out. I’ll give you a bag and put your toys in it. I’ll get the dogs and pull the cars up front. And he came down. After I called my mom and got the cars up, I got the dogs in and I think it started to hit me shock because everyone was outside saying a train caught on fire. And I was like, we need to leave. We need to leave. Everyone said, no, they didn’t evacuate us yet. And I’m like, why aren’t we leaving? You can see it’s hazardous and then all of a sudden we see a guy running up, evacuate, evacuate. When I heard it on Australia’s news, I was like, this is pretty big. This is bad. We can’t go back. This is not safe anymore. And then my son started to scream in his sleep. I remember that night I didn’t get any sleep eat.

This bench was left inside during the derailment. This one was left on the porch.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jesus. It’s quite a comparison.

Ashley McCullom:

And for months we watched my lizard, my son’s lizard on our security cameras because we couldn’t come in here. I remember the day we had to watch him die on the security cameras. He’s a desert lizard. He can go a long time without food or water. He just stopped eating. And another weird thing, the mice in the house will eat all the toothpaste, but they won’t eat any of the food. None of the food is touched.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Norfolk Southern just said that as far as the cleanup is concerned, job’s done. They’re effectively done with East Palestine. What’s your response to that?

Ashley McCullom:

Okay, so one thing they haven’t focused on at all a little bit just to make an attempt to show they’re focusing on it, is our home environments. We’re mammals in this. They’re not worried about what we’re living in. You can smell it in my house. I mean you have to wear a mask in my house. You get sick that’s not clean. So we are use Palestine. That’s definitely not clean, but anything clothing, anything, like I have brand new clothes. I can’t take them. I have Christmas presents for the next year that I’m never going to be able to give to my kids because they’re left here because I never wanted to have a time where my kids didn’t have Christmas, so I always bought things the year before. So they would always see a Christmas or they would always have an Easter and then it’s all taken away.

So the struggling that I’ve tried my entire life to get away from and never have happened worse than I could ever imagine because of this, and I’m still basically homeless because of it and I have to pay for a house. I don’t want someone else to get sick. In March of 2023, I told everyone I couldn’t sell my house to someone to watch them get sick in it. I tested my house around that time and I found elevated levels of chemical. So how do I know what chemicals to test for, what ones are going to be elevated that I didn’t test for because I have the knowledge because it wasn’t out there for us until about two and a half years later, what’s really here? So I didn’t take anything. It’s my son’s room.

The things I even made, I made him, this took me a weekend to do all classic comics, what he liked. You can’t replace stuff like this. I don’t see any way that it’s any different than what it was when they were here, other than the dust not going up in the air. We haven’t seen any other testing. There should still be air monitoring going, I don’t see why they’re not even doing that to put on a charade. They’re just done with it. They don’t care. All the court stuff’s going on and they’re going to figure it out there. Until then, we sit here and rot.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What do you still need? What are your needs right now?

Ashley McCullom:

It’s hard because it’s complicated. I don’t want someone to get sick here, so I would still have to pay on that house. If I go somewhere, if I get assistance, I have that house. I can’t move on until this is fixed. I mean, people are still here. They can’t move on until it’s fixed. I mean, I could use everyday items that most people could, but I mean we need people to get together and listen. Go to their local charity events, talk to the people in these areas, reach out to ’em on Facebook, see what other people’s needs are. I mean, talking to people is the best thing that we can do right now. Other than getting everyone out,

Maximillian Alvarez:

How would you describe to people like what this town has lost since the derailment?

Ashley McCullom:

Basically it’s life. I could sit on this porch and see people go by all the time. There’s barely anyone. Some days during the week you don’t see plates from Ohio. You see more plates from different areas watching the derailment, so it looks busy. There’s no life in this town. People are worried to wave at each other. It shouldn’t be like that. I was a couponer. If someone needed something, they’d come to my house. All those down there. If someone’s house caught on fire, they’d get ahold of me, show me the article, and I’d give ’em a month worth of stuff and I tell ’em to come back to make sure that they were able to have the things they needed. That’s why I liked the community because we helped each other when we needed it and there was no big event to cause a divide. We just helped people and I think we lost sight of that in this. We should just help people. It’s even crazy to think I’m seeing stuff brand new that I never used. Like man, I could really use the brush, but do I really want to have cancer or do I want to have problems from using it?

Maximillian Alvarez:

Are people still getting sick?

Ashley McCullom:

Absolutely. I don’t even know if they know how to treat the cancers, honestly. Because some of these cancers that I’m hearing are really rare. And when we go in and tell them some of our symptoms we’re having, it’s almost like, okay, I was just waiting to hear when it would happen kind of thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So the cancers are starting to come?

Ashley McCullom:

Oh, absolutely. They were shortly after. I don’t think people were realizing the first thing should have been women having administration issues. Their flow is heavier. Something is really going on with your hormones. You’re not balanced. First indication people bleeding out of their nose, bleeding out of their ears. Something is seriously wrong.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What can folks watching this do to help you and folks in East Palestine and the surrounding area and what can they learn from East Palestine about how to prepare themselves if and when this happens to them?

Ashley McCullom:

I mean, what I’m going to do from here on out, I’m going to have houses tested that I go into. So I have a baseline in case something happens. And I don’t know if that’s out of trauma or PTSD, just planning, but I’m going to want my house tested in case another trained rails in case a tanker, wrecks in front of my house, get my soil tested. At least I’ll know that. And what I’m exposing myself to and what I’m willing to expose myself to. I think people should pay attention to what laws there are for buying a home. What tests have been done before in their homes. I mean, the government should be doing this. They should be regulating it. They should be testing towns. They should be doing it Normally. I didn’t listen to the news, none of that. I went out and enjoyed my life. I thought, I’m in a small town, nothing’s going to bother me. You hear the trains in the background didn’t really focus on it too much. But the night that I was sitting on my couch, that’s whenever my normal small town life change in an instant. The second one I was sitting there, got up, that’s when normal was over. That’ll happen to anyone. It is happening to everyone, and they just don’t know it. We have new derailments, new water, contaminations, coal mines. There are just so many different things going on. It is happening.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. A plant in Louisiana just blew up.

Ashley McCullom:

Yeah, it is happening right now. Some people here don’t feel the effects. That might be something in their genome. They might never have issues. We don’t know. But people in other areas might not even know they’re in a disaster or Superfund. Most people don’t know to look when you buy a house, is that area Superfund. So they might have a disaster going on right now and they don’t know it. And it could be better if people do something or acknowledge it because I’m living in it every day. No matter what, anyone that moves out of this town is going to relive it in some way, shape, or form, wherever they go.