The New Yorker:

More than a year after a train derailment and chemical fire in Ohio that made international news, residents contend with lingering sickness, uncertainty, and, for some, a desire to just move on.

By E. Tammy Kim

In late January, Jami Wallace and her husband, Chris, took a road trip to Washington, D.C., on business. These days, the couple has so little time alone that they thought of the drive—four and a half hours from their home, in eastern Ohio—as a date. They smoked cigarettes and hummed along to “Try That in a Small Town,” Jason Aldean’s country anthem. “He was saying, We country folk will fight back. We’re, like, This is our theme song,” Wallace told me.

When they arrived in D.C., they had to show the hotel valet how to turn their car, a battered Ford Fusion, on and off with a pair of pliers—the key had broken in the ignition a month before. (“I should have just got out like nothing was wrong and smiled and handed him the pliers,” Wallace said.) The next day, they joined a group of activists for a meeting with the Council on Environmental Quality, an advisory body at the White House. It was yet another chance for Wallace to explain what was happening in her community: the illnesses, the noxious chemicals. On the way back home, the car broke down, stranding her and Chris at a gas station in Maryland. Her stepfather, who also lives in Ohio, drove overnight to get them.

Wallace caught a couple of hours of sleep, then made her way to a political rally at the First Church of Christ, a sand-colored triangle with a decorative white steeple, in East Palestine (pronounced “pal-uh-steen”), Ohio. The audience was big for a sunny weekday afternoon in a town of fewer than five thousand people. Wallace took a seat in the front row. Rick Tsai, a local chiropractor, was running a long-shot campaign to represent Ohio’s Sixth District in Congress. He stepped up to a wooden lectern and rambled through a list that combined maga principles with an eco-protective streak rather specific to East Palestine: safer chemical transport, free health care for residents and first responders, and federal relocation funds.

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