EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Residents of East Palestine, Ohio, found out on Thursday that President Donald Trump is giving the village $10 million for a Norfolk Southern train derailment that upended the town’s way of life three years ago. It was welcome news on an unseasonably warm and sunny February day.
Trump announced that his administration would provide the funds through the Economic Development Administration. The president said that it was part of an effort to continue aid and recovery to an area devastated by the Feb. 3, 2023, train derailment and subsequent controlled burn in which five tankers released 116,000 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride into the soil and water. Thousands of people were forced to evacuate the area along the Ohio-Pennsylvania state line. Some were evacuated for weeks. Some never returned.
Trump also said that the administration is conducting a long-term health study for area residents. News of the study was first announced two weeks ago by the National Institute of Health, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which had opened the East Palestine Train Derailment Health Research Program Office in town to assess long-term health outcomes stemming from the disaster.
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The new office opened on Feb. 3. It will be a five-year, $10 million research initiative funded by NIH. Research experts will work directly with community members to enroll residents in federally supported health research for monitoring. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said, “Everyone affected by this environmental disaster deserves access to independent, gold-standard science that puts their well-being first.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Mayor Trent Conway said that the announcement was the result of a joint effort that included Vice President JD Vance, both of Ohio’s U.S. senators, Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, and, of course, Trump himself.
“We’ve been talking with the administration, and we’ve always been concerned about the people’s health, and Vice President Vance was our champion for that money,” Conway said. “But we really also needed some economic development in town. The cleanup is done. We need to move past, and we need to have growth, and we want our town to prosper,” he added.
Conway said that the money which Trump gave the village is separate from the $10 million from the NIH, and it is designed to help the businesses that are currently here, and also to bring new ventures into town.
“The money will not only be used in the business district; there’s some projects we’re going to do with different things — water and line replacement there. There’s a couple water line replacements, there’s some demolitions of buildings. There’s various projects that we want to do that help the town that try to make it a better place to live, and that’s what we’re going to focus on with this money.”
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Conway first met Trump in February 2023, when the then-former president showed up with an 18-wheel tractor filled with bottled water. Both men walked through the contaminated areas together. Villagers had lined up in the icy rain along Main Street as the motorcade sirened into town less than a month after the 38-car Norfolk Southern train had dumped poisonous toxins into their lives. Vance, then the senator from Ohio, had visited multiple times. Then-senator Sherrod Brown and Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) also visited. President Joe Biden wouldn’t come to the devastated area for another year.
Trump, walking around in galoshes and an overcoat and speaking to the villagers and first responders, told them that day he would never forget them. This became an inflection point for Trump’s return to the presidency.
Conway said that the funds that Trump announced show that he lived up to his promises. The mayor said that both men have remained in constant contact since his visit three years ago, including when Trump asked him to give a speech at the Republican National Convention in July 2024, shortly after he was nearly assassinated in Butler, Pennsylvania.
“That was an incredible thing to do as a mayor of a town of 4,700 people, to get asked to talk on a nationwide stage,” Conway said.
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East Palestine will always have a special place in his heart, the mayor said, noting that their plight is just one example of what his highest priority has always been: the American people.
“Trump has been the champion of the little guy. I think that is something that is often missed,” Conway said.