Staying Safe

The East Palestine Derailment's First Victims Had Four Legs

When a train full of toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, the animals sickened and died before the warnings caught up. Here's what happened to the town's pets, and what researchers have learned since.

By Dr. Amara Solis, Veterinary Editor

February 23, 2023 · 6 min read

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On February 3, a Norfolk Southern train hauling 20 cars of hazardous chemicals came off the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio. Roughly 1,500 people living within a mile of the wreck cleared out. Five days later, officials told them the air and water were safe and sent them home. What happened next is the part that should have set off alarms sooner: the town’s animals started getting sick, and some of them started dying.

Pets are smaller than us, they breathe faster than us, and they spend their whole day with their noses an inch off the ground. That combination makes them the first to absorb whatever is drifting through a contaminated town, and the first to show it. In East Palestine, the family dog and the barn cat were the early warning system nobody was listening to.

“A dog or cat will often show the effects of a toxic exposure days before the people in the same house do, simply because of how much air they move and how close they live to the ground,” says Dr. Amara Solis. “When pets in one area start getting sick all at once, that is a signal worth taking seriously, not dismissing.”

Animals were sickening across the county

Teresa McGuire, who runs the Columbiana County Humane Society, told Ohio’s The Herald-Star that her phone would not stop ringing. Her office began keeping a running list of local pets that had fallen ill or died in the days after the crash, and she called the timing suspect: healthy animals do not usually sicken in clusters for no reason.

Several of those pets tested positive for vinyl chloride poisoning. That chemical, a known carcinogen, was among the substances released from the derailed cars, and officials later burned off more of it in a controlled release that pushed a fresh plume over the area. McGuire described one small dog, living less than a mile from the evacuation line, whose back legs went limp after that burn and never fully recovered. A veterinarian confirmed the animal had been poisoned. Reports of sick pets came in from as far as seven miles beyond the zone.

Then came the bills nobody could pay

Andrea Belden noticed something wrong with one of her two cats soon after she evacuated. Leo was breathing hard and fast, his heart racing. When he had not improved by the next day, she took him to the vet, where tests pointed to possible chemical pneumonitis and sharply elevated liver enzymes, effects her vet said were consistent with vinyl chloride exposure, which can hit the lungs, heart, and liver. The treatment estimate came back between $15,000 and $18,000. Norfolk Southern declined to help at the time and advised her to file a property-damage claim instead. Leo did not make it, and Belden was left owing $9,678.23 for the care he received before he was put to sleep.

That was the cruelty of it for a lot of families. Many had already drained their savings on hotels and food while they were displaced. A blue-collar town that had just been forced out of its own homes was now staring at four- and five-figure vet bills for animals it could not save.

The pets left behind

When the evacuation order came, people had minutes, not hours, to decide what to do with their animals. Some dropped dogs and cats at a nearby shelter, which filled fast and loud. Erica Rice, a state humane agent with the Columbiana County Humane Society, described a packed, noisy building full of dogs used to quiet family homes and clearly stressed by the chaos. Not everyone could even get that far. Some families had no choice but to leave pets behind inside the contaminated zone.

Diane Less, who founded the rescue Angels for Animals, said her group took in roughly 12 to 15 cats from evacuating residents and spayed or neutered the ones who needed it before returning them home. As the immediate crisis eased, her attention turned to the free-roaming cats still living in a town where toxins lingered in the soil and water. She urged anyone who could to leave out bottled water and shelter for them.

Why this is an interspecies crisis

The damage did not stop at household pets. More than 3,500 fish died in local waterways, and livestock were killed or hauled out of state, which ripples straight back into the food that both animals and people eat. Aviva Vincent, a professor at Syracuse University’s Falk College, put it plainly in a report: we are not ready for disasters that hit humans and animals together. Real readiness, she argued, means emergency shelters that can take pets and livestock, transport for large animals, clean water reserves for when the tap is poisoned, and funding set aside before the next derailment, not after. Environmental justice, she wrote, is an interspecies issue.

That is the lesson East Palestine keeps teaching. The animals were not a footnote to the human tragedy. They were the part of it that showed up first.

What’s new since this was written

In the years since the derailment, the money and the science have both caught up. Norfolk Southern reached a $600 million class-action settlement with residents that received final court approval in September 2024, and in early 2025 the company agreed to a separate settlement with the community that funds health monitoring, long-term environmental testing, and a civil penalty.

The most striking follow-up, though, came from the dogs. Researchers from UMass Chan Medical School, the Broad Institute, and Oregon State University recruited local dog owners and collected samples from 75 pets living everywhere from beside the crash site to a hundred miles away. On a second round of sampling in the summer of 2024, they found that dogs closest to the derailment carried a different chemical fingerprint than dogs farther away, and a different one than they themselves had carried a year earlier. Scientists still do not know what those exposures mean for the animals’ long-term health. But three years on, it is once again the pets giving us the clearest read on what the town absorbed.