EAST PALESTINE, OHIO — It started with a joke, though the message behind the evening was anything but.
“My name is Erin Brockovich, not Julia Roberts,” quipped the environmental advocate who Roberts played in the 2000 film bearing her name Friday night in an auditorium here — the site of a dramatic Norfolk Southern train derailment Feb. 3.
“I feel your angst and I feel your frustration. And I want to share something with you: You are not alone.”
“You own this narrative — not an agency that wasn’t here, and certainly not Norfolk [Southern],” Brockovich added. “You know how you feel. … You know if you’re sick. You know if you smell something. You know if the water’s a funny color.”
Brockovich became an environmental activist after fighting Pacific Gas & Electric Co. over contaminated drinking water in Hinkley, Calif., in the 1990s.
On Friday, she became the latest big name to descend upon this quaint village of 4,700 residents near Ohio’s border with Pennsylvania, just days after a visit from former President Donald Trump.
A total of 38 Norfolk Southern cars derailed from a 150-car train; dozen of those cars caught on fire in East Palestine, Ohio earlier this month.
At least 10 of those rail cars were carrying dangerous chemicals like vinyl chloride.
The multibillion dollar rail giant followed the train wreck with a planned burn — a form of detonation — on five of the cars with hazardous chemicals, sending ominous plumes of dark smoke into the sky.
Residents within a mile of the planned burn were evacuated. They returned after a few days to a cause celeb, with media from throughout the Tri-State Area descending on the tiny hamlet.
Hundreds of residents packed the two-hour “East Palestine Justice” event Friday night, at one point standing in a line to enter East Palestine High School that snaked around TV cameras and down West Grant Street. One man carried a sign saying “We want justice, NOT drinking water!”
The event Friday was billed as an “educational seminar” organized in part by a law firm from Akron, Ohio
But Brockovich stole the show, commanding the stage throughout technical glitches as she spoke in sweeping terms about the Feb. 3 train derailment.
“You have questions, you have issues (but) you’re going to be told not to worry — and that’s rubbish,” Brockovich said. “Superman’s not coming. No one is coming … to magically fix what’s happened to you.”
The answer? Apparently, lawyers.
Attorney Mikal Watts presented a 160-slide PowerPoint deck to the East Palestine crowd, and, in his own words, his job was “to tell you the information as it is.”
Watts discussed hazardous chemicals like vinyl chloride that went up in smoke during Norfolk Southern’s controlled burn of the train cars. He noted train derailments worldwide, which number an estimated 3,397, wracking up $378 million in damages, in recent years, he said.
Last year, Norfolk-Southern had 770 train car derailments involving hazardous materials, Watts claimed. That’s up from 79 similar accidents in 2012, a dramatic spike, he said.
Representatives from Norfolk Southern did not speak at Friday’s event.
Watts discussed, and showed still photos from, a surveillance video shot 17 miles down the railroad tracks in Salem, Ohio, which appeared to show the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine was already on fire.
He also strongly — and repeatedly — advised East Palestine residents to screen their blood and urine “for all of these chemicals.”
Those tests — which he said are available within 50 miles of East Palestine — would form the baseline of a legal argument about contaminants released by the derailment and planned burn, he said.
The law firms behind the “East Palestine Justice” event are planning additional events Thursday, March 2 in Ohio and Southwestern Pennsylvania, Watts said.
Editor’s note: There were 150 rail cars being pulled by three locomotives, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. An early version of the story misstated the number of rail cars.
