‘We’ve been abandoned:’ East Palestine man running for Congress

(NewsNation) — Nearly one year after a train derailed in East Palestine, leading officials to burn five tankers of vinyl chloride, creeks in the area are still loaded with chemicals, despite cleanup efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency.

For ten months, a chiropractor in East Palestine, Dr. Rick Tsai, has made it his mission to document it all — and now, he’s running for Congress, to fix what he says is a spineless D.C.

One thing Tsai wants voters in Ohio to know is that he cares about people.

The company, Norfolk Southern, whose train was the one that derailed has ignored East Palestine, and so have the local, state and federal governments, Tsai told NewsNation. The corruption that Tsai says he’s seen from the government is just a “microcosm” of what’s happening in the nation now, he added.

“I have a lot to lose. I’ve done pretty well in life, but I fought all those entities the entire way, and I will fight whatever’s going on in your town,” Tsai said. “I am your man.”

Tsai tested the water and sediment in East Palestine creeks after the derailment. Lab results showed almost double the report limit on the chemical benzene and nearly 5 times the report limit for another chemical called methylcyclohexane.

This prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to pivot and do more testing and cleanup.

“If I can send a seven-year-old into that creek with a stick and he can find that, how can the EPA, with their millions of dollars, not poke around and find chemicals in Leslie Run?” he asked, referencing the main creek in East Palestine. “It astounds me and it angers me that we’re being lied to, and I don’t know why.”

Though the derailment itself happened last February, nothing has changed in the last 10 months, Tsai said. On Christmas morning, Tsai said he took a picture of “some of the worst contamination he’s seen.”

“We’ve been forgotten. We’ve been abandoned,” Tsai said. “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.”

This all is what helped influence Tsai’s decision to run as a Republican for Rep. Bill Johnson’s seat. Johnson is stepping down next year to become the president of Youngstown State University.

“When the EPA says something, and you uncovered just the opposite in the environment, and then they have to admit ‘oh, yes, that is the case,’ and they do a complete 180 — once you find the evidence that they’re not possibly telling all the entire story — it makes you wonder, what else is wrong in government?” Tsai asked.

Tsai, a first-generation American whose father fled communist China for the United States, is a black belt in martial arts and a former competitive bodybuilder.

“I’m going to win this,” Tsai said. “I’m going to win this for Ohio.”