EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — East Palestine High School science club members got an inside look at how soil sampling is done.
Sophomore Hayleigh Bishop said she just had to see how this worked.
“I had know idea what was going on,” she said. “I just saw them digging a hole, and I thought, ‘wow, how deep do they have to dig and all that?’”
Contractors for Norfolk Southern are conducting the tests, after 38 train cars derailed in February, releasing chemicals into the air. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing the sampling, which will be used for what’s called split testing. That’s when the samples are sent to the contractor’s lab, and the EPA’s lab, with hopes that the two tests are similar. They’ll be testing for any contaminants. Bishop didn’t know any of this until today.
“I learned that they go into different colors and that each one has a different purpose,” Bishop said. “So, some are for sunlight. Some is for all these other chemicals.”
Bonnie Sansenbaugher is the adviser for the science club. She said this is a great learning experience for the students since they get to see Norfolk Southern and the EPA work together to recover from the derailment.
“We walk up here and they see all these people coming out,” Sansenbaugher said. “And then one guy says, ‘I’m from Seattle.’ The other says, ‘I’m from Boston.’ ‘I’m from Chicago.’ There’s people from all over. There’s a guy from Honolulu who is here. My kids are like, ‘oh my gosh,this is so amazing,’ that they get to see this happening.”
She said this can create a takeaway out of a tragic situation.
“I don’t want us to be victims,” Sansenbaugher said. “I want us to be involved in this. We’re gonna take this horrible tragedy, and we’re gonna make the best of it, and we’re gonna learn as much as we can from this, and we’re gonna make it a positive learning environment for them.”
Soil samples will be taken from four different spots around the school campus. Bishop said the optics of these tests show that the proper protocols are being taken so the school can be deemed safe.
“We’re testing the safety of the soil,” Bishop said. “And that makes me feel safer. And it makes everybody in the community feel a lot safer. That we know there’s no contamination in the soil. And we can still plant stuff, we can still hang out on the dirt.”
