EAST PALESTINE — The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) pushed back Monday on a report by CNN over the weekend that cast doubt on the effectiveness of equipment used to test the air in East Palestine homes following last year’s Norfolk Southern train derailment.

According to the CNN report, “the hand-held devices used for the screening couldn’t detect one of the main chemicals spilled from the train — butyl acrylate — at levels that could irritate the eyes, nose, throat and lungs.”

On Monday, EPA on-scene coordinator Mark Durno and Region 5 Administrator Debra Shore both maintained the equipment used was sufficient.

“The question was were the hand-held devices adequate for detecting low levels of volatile organic compounds, specifically butyl acrylate, and to answer that question directly is yes,” Durno said.

The ability of the hand-held photoionization detectors (PIDs) used by Norfolk Southern’s contractor CTEH to detect the presence of the chemical at threshold levels indoors was first questioned last summer. In March, more than 700 home re-entry indoor air screenings were conducted by Norfolk Southern third-party contractors, with oversight from the EPA, with no elevated levels of chemicals of concern reported.

However, the reliability of those tests was scrutinized after the EPA in a draft statement dated March 10 and obtained by the media through a public records request in June stated that the PIDs “were not sensitive enough to measure the n-butyl acrylate at the public health air screening threshold set for the chemical.” The PID could detect levels at 160 parts per billion (ppb) and not the exposure threshold of 20 ppb.

The agency later released a redacted version of the draft statement that did not mention the inability of PIDs to detect threshold levels. Butyl acrylate has been a chemical of concern since the derailment that resulted in the spill of 30,000 gallons of the chemical when the No. 50 car was heavily damaged in the crash, losing its entire contents.

Despite the EPA’s own draft statement, Durno explained on Monday that although the devices could not detect butyl acrylate at very low levels, the unmistakable sweet smell of the chemical was only present in a few homes. In other words, most homes passed the smell test.

“The photoionization detectors, and we addressed this back in March, could not see the lowest long-term health levels for butyl acrylate, but the key with butyl acrylate is that you can smell it at levels much, much below the levels of health impact. And in a few homes, we did see butyl acrylate present, but the odors were so bad you couldn’t stand to be inside those homes for even a short time. You could only be in there for a few minutes, and Norfolk Southern took responsibility to relocate those residents who had those issues. We are confident in the sampling that was done early on. No, it was not the best equipment, but it was adequate equipment for the objectives we were trying to obtain.”

Shore said the extensive outdoor air monitoring performed throughout the village did not indicate dangerous levels of any chemical following the derailment. That monitoring included the Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer (TAGA) bus, a self-contained mobile laboratory capable of real-time monitoring of outdoor air.

“We had a very sophisticated and very robust array of air testing and monitoring equipment throughout the response. We have less of that now because the contaminated soil is all gone and the testing around the evacuation site shows no elevated levels and all the operators of the heavy equipment on the site had air monitoring equipment inside their cabs, so even on the site there are no high detections,” Shore explained. “Early on, we had the TAGA bus to detect trace atmospheric gas roaming around through the community and we stopped using that because it had so many non-detects over weeks at a time. We had (air-monitoring) on site when we were cleaning out the culverts, and again they’re not detecting anything.”

Durno said both “air sampling and analytical work was done” and while the PIDs could not detect butyl acrylate below health levels, other equipment could.

“What we had was canister tests. We call them summa canisters, those big silver canisters we had hanging on street posts and things like that and we looked for all volatile organics — not just those few the TAGA bus was looking for, but the whole spectrum,” Durno said. “We also asked them to test for what we call ‘tentatively identified compounds’ that tells us if there were any other compounds that might have been present that we wouldn’t have expected to see. We did see some detections, but at very low levels very early in the response, but we never exceeded those community-based health standards that were given to us by public health agencies.”