I heard sirens for what had to be close to an hour. They just kept coming up and down my road. Now I live in a relatively small town. I say relatively because I'm also near Amish country and those towns are wicked small. However we are a railway hub so it's not like it's the middle of nowhere. Anyway, the amount of emergency sirens I was hearing this night concerned me. I sent out a text to my brother who lived further down the road where they were headed and he had no clue either. Some time goes by and I eventually head to bed.

When I woke up the next morning it was on the local news. Several freight cars carrying hundreds of thousands of pounds of toxic vinyl chloride derailed less than 2 miles from me and were burning. Train derailments are pretty common and I saw the aftermath of one when I was younger only a few miles from my house. Knowing this I wasn't too heavily concerned. We didn't learn much that first day or the next really. On the third day our Governor told us we had to evacuate as they were going to detonate the derailed cars full of toxic chemicals and do a controlled burn. The older members of my family wanted to hear none of this. However when the police went door to door none of us really had a choice. My family own plenty of farm land within the county and we raise various livestock but primarily cattle, goats, and pheasants. It was very difficult for us to leave these animals but we did our best to make them comfortable in our prolonged absence. We drove about 20 miles out to our cousins and planned to send one person each day back home to check on the animals and head right back.

The next two days we saw videos of the burn and we were able to drive close enough to see the smoke plumes. It really wasn't hard you could see it for miles. Now before during and after the whole controlled burning we really didn't hear or know anything at all about what was going on. Nobody was telling us what was specifically being burnt aside from the vinyl chloride (we now know it was various other poisonous chemicals). My family are big Fox news people and they just weren't covering it so they had no idea what was going on. It became plainly clear that it wasn't just Fox not covering this story, it was virtually every other news platform in the United States. 250,000 lbs of toxic chemical was being burnt in my backyard and it really didn't make much news at all. People seemed to be more concerned with the Chinese weather balloons at the time.

The lack of information started to cause a stir in members of my family. Primarily my brother who owns plenty of livestock of his own. We started hearing from friends and neighbors that their dogs were getting sick. Within 24 hours of the burning, one of our friends had lost 7 of his hens about 3 miles from the derailment. For the first two days my brother volunteered to go home and see to the animals. Both days he came back and said everything was fine but the smell was horrible and his eyes and throat were burning.

On the second day after the controlled burn started it began to die down. My brother and I went back to the farm to check on things but the road leading to our property was blocked off. We turned around and decided to cut through our neighbors farm whom we weren't on really good terms with but considering the circumstances we figured they wouldn't mind. Our neighbors own quite a lot of land. They've owned cattle in our town for about as long as anyone as lived there. It was a long loop around their fields to our place and we weren't really familiar with the land so we ended up getting lost. Farmland has lots of irrigation and our town is in a wetland so traversing through farmland can be tricky (especially when it isn't yours lol). We eventually found our way back to where one of our towns creeks runs and used that to get us back on track. We got to a steepish incline in one of the fields and as we got to the top we could see down below into gulley where the creek ran. Off to the side we saw some of our neighbors grazing cattle hanging out. We saw two walking together, a few others eating and 15-20 cattle laying in the grass. If I had been driving I would have simply kept going but my brother being the superior farm hand he is noticed something wrong. He pointed out to one of the groups of cows laying out in the grass. Within the group there was one struggling. It kept lifting up it's head and struggling as if it was stuck. We hopped out of the truck and went down to take a look.

As we walked closer to the cattle it became abundantly clear that none of them were moving. Not asleep, not breathing, just dead. We tried to tend to the struggle cow but it was gasping for air and was in pretty bad shape. Looking around it looked as if the cows had just dropped dead. Nothing had been eating away at their bodies. There were barely any flies and many of the bodies were still warm. The strangest thing of all was with 4 of the dead cows. I'm not a doctor and I've never seen it happen before but I'm fairly certain all 4 of these cows had prolapsed anuses. I don't know what else causes organs to come out of a cows asshole but I'm pretty sure that's what we saw.

We eventually called our neighbors who had also driven away from town and weren't planning on coming back until the Governor said it was okay. After hearing this they of course came to see the cows. After we called them we were pretty worried about our livestock so we hurried back to the truck and got to the farm. All of our livestock is kept inside for the majority of winter so we didn't need to go searching for any stray sheep. We went up and down our stalls checking our cows then our goats and they all seemed perfectly happy. We were glad to see everyone made it out okay but our next feathered friend worried us. Our family has raised pheasants for hunting for a very long time. Some of our pheasants are free range however this practice is extremely difficult so we raise most of them in open pens. We keep the pens a bit further down the road (0.5 miles closer to the controlled burn). We started walking through the woods leading to the pens and it didn't take long before we started finding dead birdies. It's not uncommon to see pheasant walking around our property. We've named plenty of older ones and some become like pets. Others remain feral it's quite random with pheasants, at least in my experience. One by one we started seeing them in the woods. We counted 5 before we reached the pens. Within the pens it was pretty grim. Lot's of dead birds and quite a few dead vermin as well surrounding the pen.

It was sad to see our birds in that kind of state. As weird as it sounds, pheasants mean a lot to me. After disposing of our lost friends we left the farm and went back to relative safety. About two days later the Governor announced it was perfectly fine to head back home. We waited a few extra days but I drove back to my house last night because the governor said it was okay. I've had a strange taste in my mouth ever since I woke up this morning. Earlier today I went down to the creek and counted at least 50 minnows turned up dead. There's also this strange purplish film on the top of the water but it must just be my contact prescription being out of date because the Governor says the water is safe. My dog started throwing up a few hours ago but I'm sure he's fine. I'll take him to the vet tomorrow and pick up some ibuprofen on the way home to help with this damn headache that just wont go away.

If you live down wind of East Palestine Ohio or Pittsburgh PA or down stream of the Ohio River or it's tributaries I'd warn you to please monitor your water consumption and don't go outside unless you have to. Then again, the Governor said it was safe so perhaps we should simply listen to his advice instead.