Alisyn Camerota:

With me in the studio now is CNN chief climate correspondent, Bill Weir, and Jayne Conroy. She's an attorney who is now representing hundreds of residents in that community in a class action lawsuit against Norfolk Southern Railroad. Great to have you both. Jayne, let me start with you.

Jayne Conroy:

Sure.

Alisyn Camerota:

So you're representing hundreds of people now in this community. Do they share similar stories? What do they want out of this class action lawsuit?

Jayne Conroy:

I don't even know that they're thinking so much about the class action lawsuit right now, but I think they're thinking about the things that Nate said. What about their kids? What about the water? What's happening to their lives? What about their livelihoods, their homes that they own?

Alisyn Camerota:

Where are they living?

Jayne Conroy:

Everywhere. Hotels, Airbnbs, family members that are putting them up places. And some people we know are back in their homes because they have livestock or crops that they have to deal with. So it's a mixed bag. But there's a lot of fear and there's a lot of concern. And there's always that question of, how are we going to hold Norfolk Southern accountable? But that's not helping right now. That's not helping Nate today.

Alisyn Camerota:

Is there anything that can help him today?

Jayne Conroy:

Maybe. I think there could be some efforts that could be taken to try to help assist with housing and those types of things. But the railroad didn't even show up at the meeting, so it's a little hard to have those conversations.

Alisyn Camerota:

What do you think about that? So there was a town hall meeting tonight. The residents were going to be able to voice their concerns. And then Norfolk Southern said that their employees were getting too many threats.

Jayne Conroy:

I don't know anything about the threats. But I don't think it's slowing down trains running on tracks near East Palestine. So Norfolk Southern's worried about some things, but not its business.

Alisyn Camerota:

Bill, let me play for you a little bit more sound from this town hall tonight and the frustration of the residents there.

Speaker 3:

Everybody satisfied with my answer?

Crowd:

No.

Speaker 5:

Why are people getting sick if there's nothing in the air or in the water? Why [inaudible 00:02:18].

Speaker 6:

Stop taking the railroad's money.

Speaker 7:

If I call the number on your card, sir, with all due respect, you still won't be able to answer the question I just asked for all of us.

Speaker 8:

I have concerns with dead fish, the smell of the water. I'm not a scientist but I do have common sense.

Speaker 9:

Where's Norfolk Southern?

Alisyn Camerota0:

Why can't we get answers from them?

Alisyn Camerota:

Well, I mean, you hear it there. Why are people getting sick if there's nothing in the air or water?

Bill Weir:

If you think those folks are mad now, wait until they have the time to actually look into the history of Norfolk Southern and really the railroad industry in the last decade in this country. That train that derailed was almost two miles long as a result of an era right now of downsizing staff, laying off 30% of workers and making the trains 30% longer. And they're operated with brakes that were first invented in the Civil War, 1867, air brakes that break from the front to the back so it can take two minutes before the back car knows to slow down. And so it becomes this slinky from hell that slams into the cars that have already stopped.

Of course, we have a better mousetrap in the 21st century. It's called electronic controlled pneumatic brakes. They basically stop every car at once, immediately, much more efficient. And in 2014, the Obama administration wanted to make them mandatory on cars that had explosives in it, after a bunch of derailments and one just like this in New Jersey that let off this gas. And the industry and Norfolk Southern fought it, even though they had put some on their trains and were screaming about the benefits. They said, if we put these on their trains, those trains should be exempt from all other inspections because they're so safe. But they thought it was too expensive to invest in that.

Alisyn Camerota:

Do you know if these folks have gotten a response from Norfolk Southern yet? Have they replied?

Bill Weir:

I haven't heard. I haven't heard anything.

Alisyn Camerota:

Anything Jayne?

Jayne Conroy:

No. I haven't heard anything.

Alisyn Camerota:

Norfolk Southern, I read, has set up I think, a $1 million fund for the community. How will that go over, Jayne? Will that be enough to help the folks like Nate that we just heard from?

Jayne Conroy:

No, it's probably not going to pay for all of the properties and the livelihoods and medical monitoring for all of these individuals. What I do hope is that they're not expecting that even if they do give that small assistant to a resident, that they don't make them sign away all their rights to future recovery. That's always a worry that we have. So cash like that could really help, but not if it has strings attached.

Alisyn Camerota:

And you were telling me also that just the amount of response that had to show up in terms of the fire department, the fire trucks, that alone could eat up so much of that $1 million.

Jayne Conroy:

I was stunned to learn. I was talking to city officials over the last few days and 90 fire departments were needed to come on scene. Not a big surprise, with the size of this fire, to work on the fire for days and days. We've now learned that all of that fire equipment as well as the firefighters' radios and the police department's radios, they need to be replaced because of the contaminants that were on the scene and the fire trucks and the other type of equipment, if they can be salvaged, need to be cleaned at enormous expense. So you take a town like East Palestine or any of the other locations with fire departments, first of all, their equipment isn't even available if something were to catch on fire tomorrow.

Alisyn Camerota:

Oh my gosh.

Jayne Conroy:

So the problem, the more we learn, the more it just keeps growing and growing.

Alisyn Camerota:

And Bill, this train of hazardous materials that the governor said he didn't know contained hazardous materials, how many of these trains are chugging through all of our neighborhoods at any given moment?

Bill Weir:

Lots of them all the time, everywhere. You can reroute a truck full of hazardous material around a population center, but trains are limited on their track choices. And now the economics of it, it's all about efficiency. They fought the lobbying group's designation, that this particular kind of train carrying this is extra hazardous, extra explosive. They willed it down the number of train cars you have to have carrying this in order to classify because that would slow things down. And this is money. They're making money. This company made 13 billion, just shy of $13 billion in profits last year. And what's interesting, in 2004, Norfolk Southern train crash in South Carolina spilled chlorine, killed nine people, but they paid a $4 million fine because they had violated the Clean Water Act and killed a bunch of fish. I don't know, there might have been a class action saw where they had to pay out to the victims of those families.

But if somebody's doing a train wreck cost benefit analysis between paying to put the brakes on the train, there's about a thousand derailments a year. I looked at the stats. 150 of those, 15% are due to bad tracks. They're either buckled, they can't take the weight or they've shifted, and the industry is laying off all of these people that would be inspecting those tracks for the profit. And to be fair, the railroad union has gotten screwed from both parties. Joe Biden and the Democrats kept them from striking to get paid healthcare recently to stop a national rail shortage. They were afraid of inflation.

Alisyn Camerota:

It's not going away.

Bill Weir:

This is not going away. And I don't know what the changes are going to be. It feels like, you can replace the word trains for guns in some ways and say the same special interests that are unifying to stop changes and common sense safety is existing here.

Alisyn Camerota:

Yeah. Well this certainly isn't going away in East Palestine. Jane, Bill, thank you very much for all the information. We will follow it every single day.

Jayne Conroy:

Please do. That's what's necessary.