JD Vance

But when a major train disaster happens, who picks up the tab?

It's the local residents and it's the American taxpayer.

And that's something that fundamentally has to change.

I don't know the number of gallons, but it was a lot.

And I hate to say the answer to your question, how much can they clean up?

The answer is, I don't know.

And I actually, this is one of my biggest frustrations, probably my single biggest frustration over my time in the Senate is when this happened, a bunch of the residents came to me

It's actually very sweet and even kind of patriotic, but certainly self-sacrificing where they said, look, no one knows what the effect of this shit is going to be 15 years down the road.

Right.

Because we weren't worried about, OK, a guy drinks the water in East Palestine and drops dead.

The water levels did not have toxins at that level.

But the question was, what happens when you're imbibing the stuff, breathing it in, drinking it at low at trace levels for 10, 15 years?

Like, do you have weird diseases down the road?

Hopefully not.

Right.

I pray every day that hopefully not.

But you can only study that in the moment.

And so we actually, working with a public health epidemiologist in North Carolina and some in Ohio, we actually came up with a plan.

Like, here's what you would need to do.

You'd collect samples in the first six months to a year after the disaster.