Debbie Steeb, a 3rd generation East Palestine resident, sorts through personal items as she prepares to move out of her family home on Saturday, April 1, 2023, in East Palestine, Ohio. Ms. Steeb was looking for her will and tax documents.
Debbie Steeb thinks about a new life often. She talks about seeing her son more, attending her grandchild’s baseball and basketball games, living in a stable home again.
The 70-year-old native of the small, discreet eastern Ohio town points to a picture of 7-year-old Aiden posted on the refrigerator of the home she hasn’t lived in for months. Smiling in his Little League uniform, it’s hard to tell the boy is actually in remission from pediatric cancer. Ms. Steeb looks at another photo posted next to it, adding, “And then this is my husband, who passed away.”
She pauses, peers out the window and says, ”Oh, there you go.”
The familiar grumble of a truck, imprinted with “EPA” in large lettering, whizzes by her once quiet, dead-end street. It’s a street cleaner, she says, cleaning up chemicals on the road. “I think they do it two or three times a day.”
In the few times she has returned home since the Feb. 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train — a train that carried a load of chemicals that would seep into both the sediment and the life of this community — there seems to be no end to the trucks, and the occasional blares of a train horn, to remind Ms. Steeb of why the life she desires isn’t in reach.
A sign sits on a bridge that is over water and is in the process of being treated after a derailment on March 31, 2023, in East Palestine.
Debbie Steeb stands on her family’s home porch in East Palestine, on March 31, 2023. Debbie currently lives in a camper hours away from East Palestine for safety reasons. The family’s home has housed five generations of Steeb since the 1920s.
Debbie Steeb holds a photo of her in the center as the Majorette in her family home in East Palestine which she plans to sell.
The Steeb’s grave sits in the East Palestine grave yard, on March 31, 2023. Debbie plans to be buried with her dug Lucy ashes and next to her late husband Fred.
