In the wake of the train derailment that caused a huge environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, Michael Barasch, a top lawyer for issues related to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, is warning the public not to trust the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA is insisting that the air is safe.
Barasch led the charge to inform hundreds of thousands of people that they were entitled to compensation for the health problems they’d experienced as a result of breathing in poisonous dust from the World Trade Center after the attacks. He says he still has clients who are “are dying every single day from 9/11 toxic dust.”
He’s now warning the community in and around East Palestine to “stay away and don’t believe the EPA.”
Related: Norfolk Southern CEO Promises East Palestine Will Be ‘Made Whole’ After Derailment
Barasch noted that in 2001, the EPA similarly assured people the air was safe after the 9/11 terror attacks. He argued that “21 years ago, the government at least had a reason: they wanted to reopen Wall Street.”
“They should have just been honest with people then and said, ‘Look, if you don’t have to be downtown in your office, stay away until the fires go out,’” he told Breitbart News. “And that’s what they should have done here.”
“Otherwise we’re going to see in another twenty years exactly what I’m seeing now — with people developing illnesses and dying from post-9/11 toxic air — only on a lower scale,” he said.
Barasch wonders, “How can anybody with any kind of assurance say the air is safe?” given the amounts of toxic chemicals that were burnt into the air or have ended up contaminating local water sources.
“They’ve lost their credibility,” he added, noting that the issues with the EPA transcend politics because “it was the Bush EPA that said the air was safe to breathe 21 years ago, [whereas] now it’s the Biden EPA.”
The Obama EPA also had a number of scandals, most notably the Gold King Mine spill in Colorado, which the EPA caused.
Barasch suggests that the EPA “should be independent of everybody — even though the president does appoint the administrator.”
“It should be something like the CDC that people really trust, and I’m afraid that I have lost confidence when they say things like ‘the air is safe,’” he added.
I’m not sure who still trusts the CDC, frankly, so I think the lesson here is that no government agency can be trusted.
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