It’s been nearly 10 months since the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train and the subsequent “controlled release” and burnoff of toxic vinyl chloride changed life forever for the residents of East Palestine, Ohio. While the media, politicians, and the public have largely moved on, people living in and around East Palestine have been abandoned by Norfolk Southern, by their state and federal governments, and left to rot in the toxic fallout. We cannot forget about them.

In September of this year, Max was invited to the Harvard Law School to participate in an all-day event titled “Storytelling for Justice—East Palestine,” where he conducted a live Working People interview with Chris and Jessica Albright, two residents of East Palestine whose lives have been turned upside down by the derailment. After recording and publishing that live show, we’ve kept in touch with the Albrights as they and their family continue to do whatever they can to pick up the pieces after Norfolk Southern shattered the life they knew before Feb. 3. In this episode, we talk once again with Chris and Jessica about their lives before the derailment, and about the hell they’ve been living through ever since.

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  • Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

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Transcript

Jessica Albright:  I’m Jessica Albright.

Ellen Albright:  I’m Ellen Albright.

Chris Albright:  I’m Chris Albright. We all live in East Palestine, Ohio, where almost a year ago we had a tragic and toxic train derailment.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and as you guys may be able to tell, I am a little under the weather right now. I got myself a cold. Your boy caught a cold, so I’m going to spare you guys the full introduction, but you guys know the drill.

Please, please support us on Patreon, leave us positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and share these episodes with your friends, your family members, your coworkers, and everyone you know. Help us get these stories out there and thank you to everyone out there who is already supporting us. We love you guys. As you heard, we’ve got some friends of the show back on the show. We’ve got the great Albright family from East Palestine, Ohio, whom you guys will remember from the live show that we did. It was a live show that I had the honor of hosting at the Harvard Law School as part of their inaugural series of Systemic Justice Teach-Ins. I was there along with some other incredible folks, including Chris and Jessica.

We were there for a teach-in called Storytelling for Justice, East Palestine, and we had a full day with Professor Jon Hanson, his incredible team over there, Simone Unwalla, Haley Florsheim, Samantha Perry, Jessenia Class. Everyone over there is so great, they’re doing such cool work. It was cool to see folks in academia, in the ivory tower getting with it, having the Albright’s out, and focusing on East Palestine. And asking the questions that need to be asked, talking about what we can all do to help, and making sure that catastrophes like the Norfolk Southern train derailment that derailed so many people’s lives, including Chris and Jessica’s, and derailed an entire community on February 3 of this year [don’t happen again].

You guys know the story of the derailment; We have talked about it, we have covered it extensively on this show at The Real News Network, my segment on Breaking Points, and you’ve been no doubt reading about it all over the place for the past year, as Chris said. If you guys haven’t already, I highly recommend you go back and check out that live show that I got to do with Chris and Jessica at Harvard because I thought it was a powerful conversation. I was so honored to have that conversation with them and I was so grateful to them for being so open and vulnerable, talking so powerfully, and sharing their story so openly and truthfully with everyone there. Everyone there was so affected by it. We were talking about some heavy stuff and that heavy stuff has not gone away. I want to be very clear about that; The nightmare that began on February 3 of this year is still very much not over.

The media may have moved on, and Norfolk Southern may have gotten away without any accountability, but the nightmare for the people of East Palestine is not over and life has forever changed. Life goes on, life is still worth living, beautiful things still happen, hockey games still happen, jobs still happen, but life will never be the same. We cannot forget about them and we cannot sit back and give up on the fight to hold Norfolk Southern accountable, to hold our government accountable for what they have done, and especially for what they have not done for the people of East Palestine.

I say all that as a preamble because we’ve had so many conversations where we’ve talked about the derailment itself, we’ve talked about what caused it, we’ve talked about what could have prevented it, we’ve talked about with Chris and Jessica and many of their fellow East Palestinians, and we’ve talked about what life has been like since the derailment. But when we were sitting and talking after the live show in Harvard that Chris, Jessica, and I did back in September, we got to talking about how it would be nice to have them back on the show and do a proper Working People-style interview. Where we could talk in greater depth about them, their lives, their backstories, and all the parts about them that we didn’t get to talk about when we were talking about this tragedy that has befallen them and their family and their community. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

I wanted to have the Albright’s back on. We will talk about what’s been going on with them in East Palestine since we did that live show back in September, so don’t worry, we will talk about that in the second half of this episode. But to kick things off, I want to take a nice big step back and let’s get to know each other a little bit more here. Let’s not talk about depressing stuff for one quick second. Because you guys are such lovely people, you have such a lovely family, and there’s so much more that I want people to know about you. I’m super grateful to y’all for sitting down with me and doing this and I want to start the way that I normally do when I’m having one-on-one conversations with workers. Tell me a little bit about where you’re from. Now, if I recall correctly, one of you is from East Palestine, and the other is not.

Jessica Albright:  We both were born and raised in Pennsylvania.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Ah, that’s right. That’s right.

Jessica Albright:  I moved to East Palestine a lot sooner than he did.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s what I meant. That’s what I was misremembering. Okay, so Jess was living there a lot longer.

Jessica Albright:  Yes.

Chris Albright:  Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s what I meant, okay.

Jessica Albright:  In February, it’ll be 20 years since I’ve been here.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Sorry, I didn’t mean to blow up your spot. Okay, so tell me about that. Tell me about the winding paths that led you both to come to East Palestine.

Jessica Albright:  I came here first. I was born and raised in PA until about the age of 16, then I moved to Ohio. I was living in a nearby town called Lisbon. I lived there for eight years, I believe it was, and then we wanted to move closer to the Pennsylvania border since that’s where all my family was. I was starting a family at that point, so we settled in East Palestine because it’s right at the Pennsylvania border, but the less expensive side of the line. Housing is a lot less expensive, gas is a lot cheaper, taxes are a lot lower, so we settled here with my then nine-month-old and my ex-husband and put down roots, what was supposed to be temporary, and almost 20 years later, I’m still here.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s the thing about roots, right? They stay.

Jessica Albright:  They stay.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Growing up in PA, did you have a big family? You mentioned that you moved to be closer to your family.

Jessica Albright:  No, I have a pretty small family. I have, my mom has passed on, my dad and my sister. That’s about it. My sister and I are very, very close. My two older kids are now 20 and 18 and her kids are soon to be 20 and 17. She and her husband worked full-time and I stayed home and raised the four children for the most part.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Okay. Now I have a fun question for you though because we’re sitting here with one of your adorable children. And before we got rolling, there were some hijinks going on off-camera. I know that people are –

Jessica Albright:  Typical.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – Yeah, kids, kids are running around. It’s late at night but they don’t know that, right?

Jessica Albright:  Right.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s what I want to ask, do you see your younger self in them? Were you the loud, rambunctious, running around, or were you more quiet, reserved? What kind of kid was Jessica?

Jessica Albright:  A little bit of a mix. If we were out in public –

Chris Albright:  I don’t know about a mix.

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] Chris is like [makes buzzer sound] veto.

Jessica Albright:  You didn’t know me when I was little.

Chris Albright:  Yes, I did.

Ellen Albright:  Wait, I thought you guys went to the same school.

Jessica Albright:  Not really.

Ellen Albright:  I thought you guys went to the same school.

Jessica Albright:  No, we didn’t go to the same school.

Ellen Albright:  Oh. Then how did… Oh.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Some dots are being connected in real-time here.

Jessica Albright:  Yes, yes. She’s remembering her story.

Chris Albright:  Very, very quickly. This shouldn’t be brought up here, but –

Maximillian Alvarez:  We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.

Chris Albright:  – Okay, well then we won’t. We won’t.

Maximillian Alvarez:  We can cut that little part out.

Jessica Albright:  Anyhow, when I was really little, I was shy and reserved and clung to my mother’s leg, and that was pretty much my personality. As I hit preteen and teenage years, it depended on where I was because in school I was very shy, very quiet, and didn’t socialize very much but outside of school – My friends all went to a different school district because I lived close to a bordering school district, so all of my friends went to the neighboring school district – With them, I was much more loud and crazy and rambunctious.

Chris Albright:  She used to come to my house to party.

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] It’s like a fairytale.

Jessica Albright:  Yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right. All right, Mr. Man, I’m bringing you in here. Tell me more about that. Tell me about where you grew up.

Chris Albright:  Well, in my childhood, my parents split up when I was five. My mother grew up in a town called Beaver Falls, I grew up there, and my dad was in New Galley. So I had a very big mix of how I grew up. My dad was very loose. My dad was, do what you want to do, have fun. You’re a kid, you’re a guy, do what you want to do. My mom said you will be in this house when the street lights come on. It was a childhood that I loved because I had the best of both worlds in everything I did. At my dad’s house, I could have fun. At my mom’s house, I had to be disciplined, so it was really good. But I’ve known her since she was probably six, or seven. I don’t know.

Jessica Albright:  I don’t know. I think I was older than that.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Oh, take me back, baby. I want to hear this [laughs].

Chris Albright:  No, you don’t.

Jessica Albright:  It’s a very small town [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s so wild to think of that, that your paths could cross as little kids and then decades later you’re married and have kids and it’s like, man, that’s so wild to think.

Jessica Albright:  It is a funny story. Like he said, when he went to his dad’s on the weekends, that was in New Galley, that’s where I grew up; out in the country. How far apart would you say?

Chris Albright:  A mile, a mile and a half.

Jessica Albright:  About a mile or so apart, yeah.

Chris Albright:  It wasn’t far.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah. So I grew up in a trailer park, very low income, but we had a lot of fun. I spent a lot of time out in the woods exploring and getting dirty and being a kid because back then we didn’t have all the technology to bury our noses into. So I was out digging in the dirt and exploring the woods and doing those things and then as we got a little bit older, we explored underage options [laughs] to celebrate our weekends.

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] As one does.

Jessica Albright:  Yes, yes.

Chris Albright:  At my house.

Jessica Albright:  Drinking in a cornfield and doing all those troublemaker things that you do in a small town on the weekend.

Chris Albright:  We got reconnected.

Jessica Albright:  Well, he dated my sister back in the day when he was about 14, or 15, somewhere in that age range.

Chris Albright:  [Laughs] Yeah. I saw the eyebrows go up.

Jessica Albright:  And I dated his stepbrother [laughs].

Maximillian Alvarez:  [Laughs] It’s me and your daughter, we locked eyes. We’re like, ooh, shit [laughs].

Chris Albright:  Yes, we did.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah. So he dated my sister, and I dated his stepbrother. But again, we were in sixth grade and ninth grade because we’re four years apart. So it was a long time ago.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s a cute story, now. Yeah, that sounds like –

Chris Albright:  Don’t worry, it gets a little bit better.

Jessica Albright:  I always joke that it’s a small town and you have to recycle [all laugh] or share.

Chris Albright:  I was a furniture salesman for 21-plus years and that’s how we got reconnected.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah. We went into the store. My best friend texted me and said, I need to get a new couch, do you want to come help me pick one out? And so I did. And when we walked into the store, she said, oh, you know who that is, don’t you? And I said, no. And she said, well, that’s Chris Albright. And my first reaction was, oh, he let himself go [laughs] because he was real shaggy, had a long beard, his hair was all scraggly and grown out down to his shoulders. He did not look good.

Chris Albright:  I still don’t, but –

Maximillian Alvarez:  Nah, my man, you clean up nice. What are you talking about? [All laugh] But yeah, I can imagine if you were going full wizard vibes, that might not –

Jessica Albright:  Yeah, it wasn’t a good look.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – Attract the ladies.

Jessica Albright:  It was not a good look.

Chris Albright:  – But here we are.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Here you are. One more question on the small-town thing though. I’m curious, as someone who grew up in Orange County, Southern California is very much the opposite of a small town. And Orange County in itself, I’ve talked about this many times, it’s a very diverse place. It’s not only what the rich people on the coast are doing, like the TV shows. It’s a racially diverse, class diverse, geographically diverse place that also has so many cool different little cities and areas. So a lot is going on in Orange County that they don’t get credit for.

But the point is that the entire surround that I grew up in is like an endless city. It’s an endless grid from the ocean to the mountains, so again, not a small town. But my brothers and I, were into horror and scary stories and I feel like most of the scary stories we would tell took place where you guys grew up.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah, probably.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I know we’re getting into the Christmas season but I can’t help myself as a Halloween person. When you were out in the woods, did you guys have specific legends or scary stories –

Chris Albright:  Oh, God, yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – Or parts of town that were –

Chris Albright:  Oh, my God, yes.

Jessica Albright:  We have a local, what’d you call him? No-Face?

Chris Albright:  Oh, Charlie No-Face?

Jessica Albright:  Yeah.

Chris Albright:  Have you ever heard about Charlie No-Face?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Charlie No-Face? No.

Jessica Albright:  He’s a nationally known story. He’s from our town.

Chris Albright:  He was right down the road. My dad hung out with Charlie No-Face.

Jessica Albright:  He was a real person. There was a whole story or backstory for him.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Okay. So for the uninitiated listeners, obviously I know who Charlie No-Face is, but for the cavemen listening to this who don’t, talk to us about that.

Chris Albright:  My dad used to tell me stories about Charlie No-Face. He used to tell me a whole bunch of stories about Charlie No-Face. There’s a road not far from here – Well, I could walk to it – It was Koppel-New Galilee Road, and Charlie No-Face used to walk that road. And a lot of people used to be mean to him. My dad used to stop and offer him beers. He got burned in an –

Ellen Albright:  Electrical?

Chris Albright:  – It was an electrical but I’m trying to think of what was –

Ellen Albright:  Those poles out there?

Chris Albright:  – And she knows.

Jessica Albright:  She knows more than I do.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, apparently I’m way behind on the legend of Charlie No-Face.

Chris Albright:  He got burned on an electrical pole. Something happened. I could look it up, you could look it up, anybody could look it up.

Ellen Albright:  I could look it up.

Chris Albright:  But his whole face got burned. And because of that, he would not walk or be seen in public at that time. But he’d walk late at night. People would stop, some people were mean, and some people weren’t. Like I said, I know my dad used to stop and offer him a beer, give him a ride, stuff like that. But yeah, there’s –

Maximillian Alvarez:  I can imagine a legend building and all the hearsay and stuff like that. That’s a real novel-type situation because of your –

Chris Albright:  – They’ve done movies on him and documentaries and things like that. But yeah, he’s definitely a real person.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – Wow, that’s wild. It shows that if someone doesn’t know and has maybe heard the scary stories… If you see anyone walking at night, you’re going to get freaked out. But there’s always more behind it. So that’s fascinating.

Chris Albright:  You see him walking at night, it’s a whole different thing because –

Jessica Albright:  He looked a little different.

Chris Albright:  – A little different. He looked a lot different. Yeah.

Ellen Albright:  Yeah, he got electrocuted by an electrical pole.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, that’s wild. And now that I’m in Baltimore, I get to hear about some of those regional legends and urban legends and real stories like this as well. In Los Angeles, in SoCal, we had – This is probably not appropriate –We had a lot of serial killers to tend with, stuff like that.

Chris Albright:  Yeah. We have people who got burned up, you got serial killers.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yes. So there we go. Okay. I had to ask, because again, I’m like, I always love imagining what it would be like for me and my brothers growing up in a setting that was so different from what we grew up with. Since we were always telling scary stories and trying to creep each other out, I can picture us over there, camping out, trying to spook each other, and bringing up all these scary stories of Charlie No-Face and others. The Mothman and what have you.

Chris Albright:  Oh, I love that movie.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Right? I love that movie.

Ellen Albright:  What about the Candyman? The Candyman?

Maximillian Alvarez:  The Candyman’s creepy, too, baby. That one’s in Chicago. I used to live there. Anyway. I don’t want to get us too afield because I can talk about –

Chris Albright:  Let’s get back on track.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – Kryptons and scary stories.

Okay, so then you guys reconnected. Tell me about what happened there. Tell me about building a life together in East Palestine. What do you guys do for a living? We talked about that a little bit in the live show, but we didn’t get to go deep into it. So let’s go deep into it.

Chris Albright:  Well, me, I’m a gas pipe liner. I go out, I dig the gas line up, I find the gas line, I do a lot of things.

Ellen Albright:  I eat the gas line. [Max laughs]

Jessica Albright:  I can’t with you.

Chris Albright:  Go to bed.

Ellen Albright:  [Laughs] No.

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is live. This is live Working People, listeners. You guys are getting a behind-the-scenes look.

Chris Albright:  The bad thing, though, is at this point, I don’t know if I have a job right now. All right, we’ll get real now. I don’t know if I have a job right now. I’m not sure because the last time we had any communication was seven, or eight months ago, something like that. I’m not sure. So I don’t know if I still have a job right now, and that’s a very bad feeling for me. For anybody who doesn’t know, I have not worked because I have a heart condition. My heart condition may or may not have been brought on by the train derailment. Nobody has been able to say one way or the other.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But what we do know is that it was not a condition affecting you before February 3.

Chris Albright:  Absolutely. Exactly. I was 100% fine before February 3. I was a very healthy, active person before that. I was all about work. I am a middle-aged man and what you do as a middle-aged man, as a father, is take care of your family. You provide for your family, you do what you’ve got to do for your family. And I have not worked since –

Jessica Albright:  April?

Chris Albright:  – The 13th. Yeah. I can’t remember the date.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, tell me about before this. You mentioned that you’d worked there for a long time and that you developed a refined and specialized set of skills and knowledge. Tell us a little more about what that work was like before all of this horrible stuff happened with the train derailment. What was it like going to work for you? Jess, what was it like having him do that work? And what was it like doing all the work that you’re doing? And you guys are also doing this while going to 10 different hockey games and running all over the place. So yeah, tell me more about the typical days and weeks for you guys, as working people, and as a family, before the train derailment.

Chris Albright:  My job, I would start at 7:00AM and I would get done when the job got done; We did not have an end time. My job was a very physical one, it was a very demanding job. Before I started doing the job I’m at now, I was a furniture salesperson. When became a gas pipeliner, I made a lot more money, I had better benefits, I had better vacations, and I had a lot of things that were a whole lot better. And I’d wake up at 4:30AM. I would go out, I would do my job and sometimes I would get home by noon and sometimes I would get home by 8:00PM, or 9:00PM. That’s how my job was. But I liked my job, I really did. A whole lot [clears throat]. I did like my job.

Jessica Albright:  Are you good? [Laughs]

Chris Albright:  [Clears throat] Go ahead. You take it from here.

Jessica Albright:  Yes. My job is a lot less physically demanding. I work full-time as… My title is a Program Specialist. I’m basically a case manager. I work with high school-aged students from age 15 up to 22; kids with IEPs and special needs. They come to us instead of going to school for the day. And we do vocational training, job skills, life skills, social skills, all that stuff that they need to help them once they graduate. My shift is 7:30AM to 3:30PM at that job.

I love it. I put myself through school. Took me a very long time to get my degree but I was raising kids and doing all the things while I was working on that degree. I was a non-traditional student. I didn’t graduate with my bachelor’s degree until I was 40 years old. My mom had gotten sick. She was originally diagnosed with cancer when I was 20 but then it came back years later. And when it came back full force, I took a break from college. I decided after she passed that I was going to go back and finish for her. I did that and graduated at the ripe old age of 40.

Working with special needs kids, is a passion of mine. My oldest nephew whom I helped raise, is on the autism spectrum, and I worked for a few years as a wraparound aid doing programming in the home and schools with very young children with autism, a lot of nonverbal kids. I’ve been bitten and punched and kicked and all the things, but I minded none of it. And then after I got my degree, I followed my nephew as he got older, into his stages. And now that he’s 19, I’m working with that age group and I love it. I think that’s where I want to be and where I want to stay; helping them transition out of school and into adulthood.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, that’s incredible. I can only imagine all the different things that go into that work and how attentive you’ve got to be to each student, each person, but also trying to help them make that transition to the next stage of their lives. For folks listening to this, so many of the people that we talk to, this is such essential work that we take for granted. It’s like someone’s doing it, but it’s you. You’re one of the people doing it. Could you give us a little bit of a snapshot into what that looks like to help students at that age get ready for the next step? What problems are they coming to you with or questions that you’re being asked to help them solve on a daily basis?

Jessica Albright:  It varies a lot because we have quite a range of abilities with the students that come to us. I had a student who graduated last year and is now working. When she started with us, she was very shy, very quiet, backward. We got her working one or two days a week at the local grocery store helping stock shelves and things like that. We job-coached her while she was there until she was independent and could do it on her own. Her real passion was to work in a daycare and to be a teacher’s aide so we helped her do all the online trainings that she would need. We did some job shadowing at a daycare center to make sure it was really what she wanted to do.

We would do some… What’s the word I’m looking for? Why is my brain blank? Role-playing activities, that’s what I was thinking of. We would have her read a story to us and we would sit on the floor and act like a bunch of toddlers to show her how easily she could get distracted when she’s doing those things. She graduated last summer and is now working full-time in a daycare as a teacher’s aide. She bought her first car and I’m so insanely proud of her. That’s the ultimate goal; if we can get a student to that point.

But the students who are maybe not capable of those things, we help them. We have had local businesses carve out jobs specifically for our kids. There’s a pizza place that has one of our students who utilizes a wheelchair, he can’t use the ovens and things like that. So he will weigh out the pre-portioned servings of the mozzarella sticks and things like that. He pre-portions all those things to be put in the freezer. There is a wide range of jobs that we get to help these kids learn. And we’ve had kids who’ve come in not having a clue what they want to do and by the time they leave, they decide for sure.

So yeah, it’s very, very rewarding. It’s frustrating at times, too, because we do have families who are not always on board and are super supportive and responsive. Because we work directly with the school districts, most of the ones that I work with are very easy to work with; They want what’s best for the kids. But some push back a little bit because it is a financial burden to the school district because they’re the ones that pay for the students to come to our services. So some of the districts want to boot the kids out before we think they’re ready to go. So that’s my job, is to be the liaison between the family, the school, and the student and advocate as best I can for the kids and what’s best for their future.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, that’s incredible. That is really important, unsung work. Yeah, you mentioned the two words that were jumping up and down in my head: frustrating and rewarding.

Jessica Albright:  That’s the human service field.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s got to be a healthy mix of both, exactly.

Jessica Albright:  High stress, low pay.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That was going to be my other question. We don’t have to get too deep into this but it’s something that comes up a lot on this show when I’m talking to other educators around the country. Educators and healthcare workers are probably the two areas where I’m trying to tell people like, yo, we’ve got a real crisis here of overworking and underpaying our most essential workers, and they’re leaving the industries or they’re moving away because they can’t afford to live where they work. This is a big problem and it sounds like from what we’ve been talking about, that’s still a problem over where you are.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah. See, my degree is not in teaching, so I don’t have some of the benefits that come with being an educator. My degree is in human services. And I work for a small nonprofit. So we don’t even make teachers’ wages at this point. It’s a career of passion. Not for early retirement, that’s for certain. And for those reasons, I work a second job to help put my kids through their sports.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And you sleep when?

Jessica Albright:  In about an hour, I’ll go to bed.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Okay, good.

Jessica Albright:  Yeah. So my day is about 7:30AM to about 8:30PM.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, that’s wild. All right, Chris, you good to pick back up?

Chris Albright:  Absolutely.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Okay, so before [laughs] you got a frog in your throat, you were talking about how the work that you do could vary on a day-by-day basis. Sometimes you get out at noon, sometimes you’re there till late at night. But I remember when we did the livestream together, you guys, me, and the great Jeff Kurtz, a retired locomotive engineer. You guys listening know Jeff. We’ve had him on the show before. I’ve talked to him on The Real News before and I was so, so excited. It feels weird saying that because we were all brought together under horrific circumstances but I was still grateful for the opportunity recently to have Chris and Jessica on one of the Worker Solidarity livestreams that I do at The Real News every other Wednesday with Jeff. 

We were talking together about how these greedy, awful rail companies are screwing over their workers and also the communities in which they operate. But we haven’t been bringing those two sides together as much as we should. So if you guys haven’t already, we’re going to link to it in the show notes, but go listen to that livestream that we did; me, Chris, Jess, and Jeff. I thought it was illuminating. One of the parts that stuck with me was after Jeff was talking about the cuts that the railroad companies had been making to their staff year after year – I won’t go into it, again, you guys have heard me yell about this many times – All of that cost-cutting, all of that piling of work onto fewer workers for the sake of cutting maintenance, cutting things down to the bones so that everything goes into the pockets of executives and shareholders, that leads to people not keeping up the standards of safety and operations that they should, thus leading to avoidable catastrophes like the East Palestine derailment.

Chris was talking about that on the livestream about, in the line of work that you were doing, if you treated safety that way, you’d be dead. So I wanted to ask you if you could pick back up about what goes into that work on a day-to-day basis. What were the things that you were confronting on that job?

Chris Albright:  Yeah, absolutely. The work I did was dealing with live gas. If you make a mistake, you’re going to be dead. We would have safety meetings every day, every day. Every day we would have a meeting about what are we going to do and how are we going to do it. We have gone over 5,000 days without having an accident. The company I work for is very proactive, obviously a lot more than Norfolk Southern, because we would avoid anything that would hurt anybody in any way, shape, or form. If we ever got into a situation where we didn’t know what or how or who, we would always stop, we’d call the boss, the boss would come out and say, do it this way, do it that way, whatever it had to be to make sure that we all went home safe. 

We always went home safe. We had a huge thing about safety. Nobody got hurt and if your job didn’t get done that day because you found something that was unsafe, you didn’t do it. When Norfolk Southern had a train car that was on fire for 20 miles and it got radioed ahead and they still didn’t stop it, that’s on them. My job, like I said, we deal with live gas. Everybody I’ve ever worked with has gone home safe. They’re still living their lives and they’re still doing everything they need to do because we are safe. Safety is number one with our company.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And then you were also saying it was very physically demanding, right?

Chris Albright:  Oh, absolutely. Good God, yes. Yeah, you’re running 90-pound jackhammers. You got operators that are running backhoes, we were in the trenches picking out boulders, we were doing everything we had to do to lay a safe gas line, padding it down with sand, doing everything we had to do.

Jessica Albright:  Tell him how much one of your hoses weighed when you were running the –

Chris Albright:  Oh, God, I ran a vacuum truck. That hose that we had to sling over our shoulders was at least 250 pounds, at least, minimally.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man, that’s like throwing a linebacker over your shoulder.

Chris Albright:  So, yes. We all did it. But we always looked out for anybody and everybody who had anything to do with anything. We always made sure everybody was safe. Do you need a break? Do you need help? Anything. Which brings me back to the railroad workers because what are their safety restrictions?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Right. That’s what we were screaming about during the live show and then on the livestream. It’s so stereotypical and it’s so infuriating because it’s one of those situations where it’s like these are the things that look good on a spreadsheet to an egghead jackass sitting in some New York office. Saying, yeah, let’s cut the maintenance staff, the maintenance-of-way guys, the guys who are checking the actual rail cars, the people who are looking at the bearings, the people who are making sure that those cars are safe to be on the rails. Let’s cut them to the bone. Let’s cut the maintenance-of-way guys who are supposed to check the track and make sure that the track is safe for cars to ride on. Let’s cut them down to the bone.

Let’s make the trains longer and longer and heavier and pile them up with toxic chemicals, coal, whatever. And let’s get those trains, those three-mile-long trains down to two people on the crew. Let’s try to get it down to one. This is such a bonkers mentality to me because it’s like, yeah, we’ll keep cutting as long as we can get away with it, as long as we push our workers to kill themselves, to keep things moving. And for all intents and purposes, if it seems like the system’s working, then all these shareholders and executives are congratulating themselves.

Then February 3 happens. A Norfolk Southern train derails, and a nightmare ensues, an entire town has been turned upside down. That is what happens when all you care about is the bottom line when all you care about is increasing your shareholder dividends and stock buybacks and bonuses and all that crap. As Chris was saying, I don’t even want to say in any other industry that mentality leads to people getting killed because we’re talking about the rail industry. That mentality gets people killed in the rail industry and it puts us in situations like this where thankfully no one was killed in the crash and the blast.

But we’re talking about so many toxic chemicals that were spewed into the air, that have spewed into the water, leached into the soil, hanging on people’s walls. We’ve talked about this over and over again on each new episode. That is the cost of only caring about your bottom line and that way lies disaster. So we as people, we as workers, and we as community members need to have more of a say in how these businesses run their business because we’re the ones who have to deal with the effects of their mismanagement.

Chris Albright:  What can we do about the railroad? They have their own rules and regulations. How do we do anything about that?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Are you asking me if I have an answer?

Chris Albright:  I’m asking you. What do we do?

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is a fantastic question and this is the question that I’m always asking each railroad worker that I interview is like, what do we do? There are a couple of things; At the very base level, to anyone listening to this, as I’ve said in every single interview that we’ve done about East Palestine and the railroads, the first thing that you can do is not forget. That is the first thing you can do. And any other issue that you care about, it doesn’t have to be this one, it should be this one, but you guys know that any issue that you care about, the way that the system is set up, the way that the news cycle moves, the way that our attention spans have been conditioned in the 21st century if legislators aren’t pushed and pushed consistently to follow through on their promises to communities like East Palestine, they’re not going to do it. They’re not.

If they can get away with not doing something, that’s going to be their preference. So for everyone listening, if you want legislative action – Again, this is me, Max Alvarez, editor-in-chief of a 501(c)(3) – So I can’t tell you which legislation to support or which candidates to back, but what I can tell you is that the ones that you want are not going to get in if you don’t fight for them and if you don’t bring more people into that fight and you don’t hold electeds accountable and fight for them to represent your interests. I say that to say as we talked about with Jeff Kurtz, there was legislation proposed in the immediate aftermath of the February 3 derailment. It was seeming promising, it had bipartisan support, and it has since gotten watered down and stalled to shit because people have forgotten about it because people have stopped getting pissed off like we were in February, March, and April. 

People were railing at elected officials, they were railing at the media, and they were keeping the pressure up enough that these legislators felt like they had to put something on the table. But then, like with everything else, we started to get distracted and the pressure eased up and other priorities came about. So that’s the first line of defense, is don’t forget about it, don’t let that pressure off, and don’t let the foot off the gas. The other thing is that the railroad unions, their contracts with the carriers are up in 2025. So we are going to be entering a pivotal year next year where we could help mobilize the rank-and-file well in advance of the contract expiration date, much like the UPS teamsters were doing, much like the UAW auto workers were doing to try to generate energy among their rank-and-file, among their base. The more that it appears to the bosses that you have a mobilized, motivated group of workers ready to go to the mat, the more inclined they might be to concede at the bargaining table.

Sorry, this is a long answer to your question, but as we saw last year with what both parties of Congress, scab Joe Biden and everyone else who conspired to crush the railroad workers’ strike, the rail carriers themselves also need to believe that the public is not going to be on their side and that the public remembers what happened in East Palestine, that the public remembers what happens with the potential rail strike in 2022. So all of this contributes to emboldening workers across the 12 different rail unions to fight harder, to have more of a strategy, to have more of an effort going into 2025 that says, we’re not going to be put in the same position that we were in 2022 and 2023. Sorry, I’m sick and I’m losing my voice.

Chris Albright:  Oh, yeah, I can hear it.

Maximillian Alvarez:  There are many other ways to answer that question, but those are two that are important to emphasize. But I want to then turn it back to you guys and ask if we could talk about how things have been for you all since we were together at Harvard in September, and what people listening can do to help you and to help your community in East Palestine.

Chris Albright:  First of all, number one, don’t forget. I know that, and you spoke on it too, that the media passes over everything. We were the hot topic for a little bit, and now we’re not. We’re still here. We’re still living this –

Jessica Albright:  Nightmare?

Chris Albright:  – Yeah. I didn’t want to use that word, but yeah, it’s a nightmare. Nothing has gotten better. Nothing has gotten better in any way, shape or form. First of all, do you have anything to say about that? Because I do have something I’m going to retort with. All right. So, Max, I hate to put you under the hot seat right now, but if you were us and you’re sitting at our table and you’re dealing with everything we’ve dealt with, the heart condition, the hotel, the air, the soil, all that other stuff, but you don’t have an out. This is going to be your life. You have to stay here right now. What are you going to do? What would be your answer to this? How do you deal with this?

Maximillian Alvarez:  I don’t know, man. I would be doing what you guys are doing and I want to commend you for doing that. Because as painful as it has been, as frustrating as it has been, you have made sure and fought to make sure that your story is not forgotten and that your voices are heard. Getting in The New York Times, coming out to fricking Harvard, and sharing your story in a room full of law students with a bald Mexican dude with tattoos you’ve never met before.

Chris Albright:  Seriously, dude, what would you do if you were sitting here at this table right now?

Jessica Albright:  I don’t think anybody knows what they’d do in this situation.

Chris Albright:  I realize. I know nobody does. We’re doing the best we can, but if you were in our shoes right now – The train tracks are right there, we hear the trains running every night – We’ve dealt with a lot of different things. I’m still not back to work, I don’t know how Christmas is going to happen right now this year. Okay. You’re me; what do you do? How do you handle this? How do you deal with this?

Now you have more of a platform than we do. We’ve spoken, we’ve done a lot of different things, but what do you do? How do you handle this? How do you deal with it? What do you tell your kids? What do you do for your life? How? Do you want to get down to the nitty-gritty and the real of everything? This is the real. What are we going to do?

Jessica Albright:  Well, Norfolk Southern claims that they’re going to make things right [Chris laughs] but they’re not doing what needs to be done immediately. They put people up in hotels, which was great for the time being, but now they’ve given notice that everybody who’s been relocated has a certain amount of time to return home since they’ve finished the digging and the remediation stuff. They’re still working but the big digging has ceased. Anything beyond relocation expenses, they’re not going to admit that property was destroyed. They’re not going to replace any of that stuff. Now, that’s a later litigation.

They’re not going to help us financially with the fact that he’s been out of work since April and his unemployment has run out and we’re now down to less than half of our normal income to continue to pay our bills. They’re not going to help us pay those bills because that’s admitting that their toxins caused his heart failure. They’re not going to admit that. So we are left to struggle to figure out how to pay the bills, how to keep Christmas happening, how to keep the girls active, and how to do their regular daily lives.

Chris Albright:  So what do you do? How do you do it?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, here’s the sobering answer that’s on all of our tongues, is that the answer to what can I do in that situation is nothing. Because that is the situation –

Chris Albright:  Exactly.

Maximillian Alvarez:  – That you’ve been left with. You’ve had your lives upended, you have tracks that are a stone’s throw from where you are sitting right now. So for everyone listening, there’s no avoiding that. That massive death plume that we all witnessed back in February, was like 10 feet from their house. I’m exaggerating, but that was right behind their house and they’re living there. After an event like that, how are you going to sell your house? How are people going to pick up their lives and move somewhere else? This is what drives me nuts when idiots on YouTube are like, why do you move? Motherfucker, have you ever tried to uproot?

Pardon my French, but people can’t do that and they especially can’t do that when we’re talking to living proof of a family that can’t go back to work because of the effects of this derailment and is stuck where they are. Not only because of the roots that they have there, but because people had a life that had been stolen from them by Norfolk Southern, and that has been forever changed by Norfolk Southern and by the government agencies that are supposed to help people like Chris and Jessica. So all of that has left you with effectively nowhere to go.

You also have politicians who are not listening to you, as we’ve discussed, and media that will only pay so much attention until the news cycle moves on, and the need for clicks gets driven to some other story. So I’m trying to divert Chris’s question to everyone listening, what can a person do in that situation? It’s a very similar question to what working people at exploitative dead-end jobs that they need because they’ve got a family, they’ve got to pay the bills, and this is the only place they could get hired. I’m not directly equating the two, but I have a point. I talk to workers like that who know that they deserve better, know that they want better, know that their boss is screwing them over and even breaking the law but also know that they will get fired if they speak up about it and since they don’t have a union, since they’re not organized or what have you, there’s all that pressure to stay quiet while everyone rips us off.

And in that case, when that worker asked me, what can I do, it was a similar answer. It’s because of the way the law is structured in this country and how much power is in the hands of the bosses. An individual worker in that situation can’t do much. But as we stress every week on this show, what we can do is what we can do together. What we can do is what we can do as a group, as a herd, not as lone animals wandering the wilderness. So none of us are going to be able to change this on our own, it’s going to take an actual group effort to not let all of this awfulness lie on the shoulders of people like Chris and Jessica who are being given no way out.

So what are we going to do to help? That’s the real question. What are we listening to this going to do to make sure that the people who screwed Chris and Jessica and their family over, that screwed East Palestine and the surrounding areas over, what are we going to do to make sure that they are held accountable and that this does not happen again? I am not asking that rhetorically, I am asking you listening to this now, what are you and what are we going to do? I hope that what you’re hearing from Chris and Jessica is impressing upon you the urgency of us coming to an answer there because we can’t let them languish in limbo.

Chris Albright:  And the bad thing is we are. We are. You can reach out to everybody on your podcast, you can reach out to everybody on The Real News Network, and I hope you guys hear this. This is real residents of East Palestine talking. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to handle this. We don’t know what our next step is. We don’t know how to do anything about anything right now. And that’s the bad thing about this is we don’t know. How do we handle this? What do we do? We don’t know anything about this. We have an attorney but that’s going to be down the road somewhere. What do we do right now? 

[Background noise] 

Jesus, that was one of our dogs coming down the steps.

Jessica Albright:  Chasing the cat.

Maximillian Alvarez:  That’s better. I was worried for a second it was one of your kids, so that’s still better.

Jessica Albright:  The dog tormenting the cat.

Chris Albright:  But what is our answer? Where do we go? We are still in complete darkness right now. Like I said, I pose to you, Max, what would you do if you were sitting here at this table? But I will pose that to everybody on this podcast. Anybody who’s listening, what do you do? We’re getting no help from anybody. I’ve been out without work since April right now, and I don’t know how Christmas is going to happen. I don’t know how anything’s going to happen. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us after Christmas. I don’t know what’s going to happen down the road. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know how to deal with it. Do you have kids, Max?

Maximillian Alvarez:  I have a foster daughter.

Chris Albright:  Okay. Do you know how much weight is on your shoulders for Christmas to make sure it happens and do all that stuff?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Mm-hmm.

Chris Albright:  Okay. I don’t know if I’m going to make it happen right now. Jess is working right now, but I’m not and, as a man, I don’t know how I’m going to deal with things and I don’t know where to go. I know Norfolk isn’t going to do a goddamn thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:  What I do know is that we’re not going to forget about you guys and that you do have friends. I’ve heard people and I’ve talked to people and I’ve read the messages of people who’ve reached out and said, man, that interview you did with the folks from East Palestine touched me. Even if it’s a little two-line thing. Thanks for doing that. That meant a lot, or, I connected with that. So it’s tough because even I, as the host, put all these interviews out there year after year after year, and you only get to hear from a tiny fraction of people. You never really get to know how many people it’s impacting.

But I do know that we put this out there, and if we follow this up with a call to people, people will answer that call as they did when I talked to coal miners in deep, red, rural Alabama, who just like you were saying, how are we going to provide Christmas for our families? When they were on strike for two years at Warrior Met Coal, it was the union, it was the women’s auxiliary, it was the community that came together and they made a solidarity Santa thing that they did. We can do that. Let’s fucking do it. I’m saying it right here on the podcast to everyone listening, you better watch this space because we’ve got to make sure Santa comes out to East Palestine. But again, we also have to make sure that we don’t forget about East Palestine. I can’t say that enough times.

Chris Albright:  Well, the bad thing is I’m not reaching out for that. I’m not reaching out for donations. I’m not reaching out for charity.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah, well, too bad. I’m giving it to you, baby, because I want to give it to y’all. So you’ve got to get over that right now. But I get what you’re saying. I do, man. I do. This is why I’m insisting on saying that, whether you like it or not, we’re going to lovingly help.

Chris Albright:  All right. Well, let me ask you this, though. What about the other families in town that have been affected?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Exactly.

Chris Albright:  There’s a whole lot of people that have been affected by this. It’s not just us.

Jessica Albright:  We have neighbors a few doors down who own a small business right by the train tracks and they’ve not gotten assistance for their business so they’re affected doubly by living right here and their business being right here. They’ll continue to park their muddy trucks in their parking lot. And they have unfortunately said at the end of this year, they’re closing their doors and they’re not sure if it’s going to reopen. And they had sunk a ton of money into remodeling,

Chris Albright:  And they’re good people, too.

Jessica Albright:  A beautiful little venue, selling wine. They sell honey products. They didn’t have their beehive this year because of the derailment. So their business and their home have completely been affected. And from what I know, they’re not getting a whole lot of help. There’s tons of other families. I could go on and on.

Chris Albright:  Like I said, we’re affected. We are definitely affected, but we’re not the only ones. By no means are we the only ones. There’s a whole town right now.

Jessica Albright:  And some people will tell you that they’ve not been negatively affected. There are arguments all over social media. There are people in town who will tell you to clean your house, suck it up, and move on with your life. Well, I cleaned my house. I scrubbed the walls or scrubbed the ceiling with hospital-grade disinfectant. We moved back home but I can’t do anything about the heart condition that he got back in February. Until that gets remedied we’re –

Chris Albright:  What do I do?

Jessica Albright:  – We’re screwed.

Chris Albright:  Yeah. What do I do?

Jessica Albright:  We tried to move on. We tried to clean the house, get our kids back in school, and try to normalize things, but it’s really hard to do when the breadwinner in the family is down to zero. We’re on less than half of what we were living on previously.

Chris Albright:  I told you before, the job I did, yes, it’s very physical. Yes, it’s this, it’s that. But my job paid well and it gave great benefits as far as insurance and vacations and things like that. I’m sitting at home every day right now and that [pause] freaking kills me. I was looking to see if there are any kids. I was going to drop the other word. But it kills me. I don’t like this. I’m a worker, I want to work, that’s what I do. I’m a worker. I have not been at work since April, and it’s driving me nuts.

It’s nice because I can get my daughter on the bus every day, pick her up, and do things like that. I have time to do things around the house but I want to go to work and I can’t. I can’t right now. None of my doctors have been able to say that the train derailment caused this but they’ve also not been able to say that it didn’t cause it, and that’s the hard thing.

Jessica Albright:  His cardiologist said there’s a very strong likelihood – And he was quoted in The New York Times article, putting that on record – Saying that he would be hard-pressed to say there was not a correlation.

Chris Albright:  So again, how do you handle what we’re dealing with? How does anybody handle this? What do you do? Where do you go? We have no idea where to go for anything. The EPA, besides the fact that they came here after The New York Times was published, they came here and said, oh, we’re here. What are you going to do? We don’t know anything right now and that’s one of the hardest things right now is we don’t know. It’s been almost a year, but we don’t know anything.

Jessica Albright:  My question for Norfolk is, going back to their safety regulations, they’re investing a whole lot of money now in building this facility to train first responders, which is great. First responders deserve all the training that they should have. They should know how to properly respond to –

Chris Albright:  They didn’t then. But I know what you’re saying. Yeah, they’re trying to train them for it. Sorry.

Jessica Albright:  – Anyhow, they’re investing money in the training center to train first responders on how to respond to a derailment. Well, how about let’s back that up and invest it in not derailing in the first place?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Yeah. Maybe have fewer derailments.

Jessica Albright:  How about that?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Why don’t we start there?

Jessica Albright:  Then the other thing is they were bragging and one of their most recent news things about this new drive-through that scans the train as it goes through and looks for repairs that are needed and alerts people to it. Guess what? We were alerted to the bearing on this thing. But if you don’t respond to the alerts and act on them, all this money that you’re investing in identifying dangerous stuff… I don’t understand. You’ll identify it, but you don’t act on it. So why are you investing all this money to say that you invested all this money, but you’re not investing it in the right places and it needs to go back to the workers to repair the things that need to be repaired?

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
Follow: @maximillian_alv