Toledo Residents’ Lives Upended by Brent Industries Explosion

Maximillian Alvarez: Today we are in Toledo, Ohio, [and] I am really grateful to be joined today by a panel of guests who are all residents.

Mike Balonek: My name is Mike Balonek. I am a local filmmaker and advocate for Sacrifice Zones. I’ve worked with Max in the past, and [I’ve] worked on the East Palestine train derailment for the last three years.

Councilwoman Brittany Jones: Hi everyone. I am Dr. Brittany Jones, councilwoman at large, and I have been following these types of explosions and environmental hazards for quite some time. I’m very involved with trying to save our environment, but also with the health and the lives of our residents.

Sarah Locker: My name is Sarah Locker. I live five doors down from the Brent Industries explosion. I’m here today to represent my fellow neighbors, my community, and the great city of Toledo, Ohio to make more people aware. It doesn’t [just] happen in East Palestine. It happens everywhere — in a small little town like ours, in a small little neighborhood like ours. Our voices need to be heard and our questions need answers.

Kris Ramsdell: And last but not least, I’m Kris Ramsdell. I live right around the corner from Brent Industries, and I just want to call awareness so things like this don’t become the norm where a greedy business owner sacrifices not only his employees’ lives, but then also creates a disaster in a neighboring community in which their business operates in.

Maximillian Alvarez: Can we please just start by going around the table to talk about the explosions at Brent Industries and the nightmarish 24 hours that followed? Walk us through what happened and how you experienced it all as it was unfolding.

Sarah Locker: Well, I had just gotten home from work early that morning. I had just started to fall asleep. We have a train rail right behind us, so when the explosion happened, it was one of two things in my mind — either somebody hit a transformer or something happened on the train tracks behind us. It jolted our entire household awake. When the first explosion hit, it shook our house. The second explosion hit almost immediately after, and that was when my husband flew out of bed and out the front doors and my 19-year-old followed behind, and my 16-year-old and our nine-year-old little girl were absolutely terrified. They didn’t know what was going on. My husband ran down the street, phone in hand. I was trying to call 911. You couldn’t get through. The mushroom cloud of smoke and flames that you could see, the smell, it was traumatizing. And then to realize what had happened and finally see emergency crews showing up. The mounds of people that gathered in our front yard [were] in tears, crying. I think we spent a better part of that day comforting neighbors. Unfortunately, two lives were lost innocently for no reason at all, and we [don’t] have answers.

Councilwoman Brittany Jones: First and foremost, I definitely want to give thanks to fire and rescue and all of the first responders. There were about a hundred that were out there, if not more, and especially the residents around that were trying to do whatever they could to give comfort. Some of my colleagues the next day held a press conference, and they came back [talking about] the smell, just the illness that they were feeling afterwards. They were only out there for, I don’t know, maybe 20, 30 minutes, and they were already experiencing symptoms of migraines, nausea, and chest burning.

So, it was very traumatic, and this was coming off of the back-to-back incidents that we also had. We had a fire at OmniSource, and then there was a tanker on the east side that had overturned that had hazardous materials. So, there were three incidents within maybe three weeks of this caliber.

Mike Balonek: I actually found out about this from some of my friends in East Palestine. They were messaging me, asking me if I was okay. Luckily, I don’t live in the immediate vicinity. However, just from some of the research that I’ve done on the weather patterns, how long this thing burned for, there’s a good part of the city that could have been affected by this. My initial reaction was,“This looks serious. This looks like something that I’ve seen many times before.” And as the day progressed, I kept following it. Within a few hours, the EPA came out and said that everything was safe, which I’ve heard this story before, and I know Max, you have as well over and over and over, unfortunately.

So, that was alarm bell number one, and I decided that I really need to start talking to some folks. [I] met Kris almost within the first 24 hours and just started talking about what was going on. [I] went down there myself for the press conference that Councilwoman Dr. Jones had mentioned, and I could taste it, I could feel it, all of the same things that I experienced in East Palestine. For me, immediately, I knew this was something that was concerning. 

Maximillian Alvarez: There’s a system here that is contributing to endangering frontline workers and fenceline communities all over the country, whether you’re in a city, [or] rural area. If you think you’re in a ​“blue state” or ​“red state,” this crap is coming for all of us. I wanted to ask if y’all could tell us what we know about the two workers who lost their lives in this explosion. What do we know about them, and what is being done for their families?

Kris Ramsdell: Well, I will just say this. The explosion happened on the 18^th. We didn’t hear anything from the company in regards to their employees until the 27^th, [when] they released a public statement. In the public statement, they said something to the effect of they’ve been in contact with the families that [were] affected. I don’t know if I believe that or not, but we’re talking several days that elapsed that these poor people worked for this company probably living paycheck to paycheck while this company is making millions of dollars off the back of these people, and they don’t even have the decency to come out and make a statement saying that they’d mourn the loss of their employees. 

One of the victims’ names was Mary Allen, and the other victim, I don’t know his first name. [His] last name was Garcia Perez, I believe. 

I regret [that] I didn’t know her. She just sounded like an all around great person. And I don’t mean to sound mean or unprofessional, but it pisses me off to no end that her life got sacrificed because of someone’s greediness because that’s what this boils down to is corporate greed.

Sarah Locker: I have to agree with you, Kris. I’m upset at the fact that a woman that dedicated almost 14 years of her life to such a horrible, money hungry company and then not to speak out after so many days. What about Mr. Garcia? I haven’t heard anything about him. And what does that say? If people that have lived around here don’t know anything about the people that lost their lives so close to their homes, and with us being such a close-knit community. We’re worried about our neighbors, our community members.

Maximillian Alvarez: So, I wanted to ask, for folks who don’t live in Toledo, if y’all could keep painting a picture for us about this area and the issues that Toledo has had. 

Mike Balonek: I mean, just to paint a picture of Toledo for folks who aren’t familiar, Toledo’s a heavily industrial city. We’re the home of Jeep. We have a very long history of industry in Toledo with many similar kinds of disasters. There’s a lot of legacy chemicals and stuff that are already in the ground that have been affecting people’s health for probably the better part of a century at this point. So, this isn’t anything new for Toledo, but there’s a lot of history of this. However, this is becoming a pattern as Councilwoman Dr. Jones mentioned. 

I feel very lucky that as a city, we do have leaders that are keen to this. I think that members of the city council have been asking some really tough questions of city leadership, of the EPA, hopefully that they can get answers to eventually. 

Maximillian Alvarez: I wanted to finish by asking in what ways have the explosions at Brent Industries been similar and different from what happened in East Palestine?

Mike Balonek: I will say right off the bat, this isn’t as bad. What happened in East Palestine was on a scale nearly unimaginable. People have called it the Chernobyl of chemical disasters, and I think that’s accurate. However, what happened here is still absolutely devastating. Brent Industries is basically straddled by two pretty sizable neighborhoods. Basically, just doing a little on the back of a napkin kind of math, I figure there could be potentially 20,000 people that were affected by this just based on the direction that the plume went initially.

Maximillian Alvarez: Alright, gang. Well, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I sincerely want to thank all of our guests from Toledo, Ohio — councilwoman Dr. Brittany Jones, Mike Balonek, a local filmmaker and sacrifice zone advocate, and Sarah Locker and Kris Ramsdell, who both live right next to the Brent Industries facility where the deadly explosions happened on August 18^th. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring about this. We do all of this work for you, but we cannot do it without you. 

This episode of the Working People Podcast was originally published on September 23.