Chemical Leak From Rail Yard Near Cincinnati Prompts Evacuations

A train car in Whitewater Township, Ohio, was discovered to be leaking styrene, which is used to make plastic and fiberglass and is highly flammable.

Residents of several communities outside Cincinnati were ordered to leave or seal off their homes on Tuesday after officials warned that a train car in the area was leaking a dangerous chemical that could cause an explosion.

Emergency officials in Hamilton County, Ohio, said that residents had begun reporting an odor in the air a little before 1 p.m. on Tuesday. Firefighters, a local hazardous materials team and other emergency responders determined that the smell was coming from a rail yard in the Whitewater Township area west of Cincinnati, where a train car was leaking styrene. The chemical is used to make plastic and fiberglass, is highly flammable and is dangerous when inhaled.

“I tasted and smelled it,” said Marcus Greer, who lives in the small community of Hooven, not far from the rail yard. “It was burning my throat and eyes.”

Mr. Greer said he had immediately been accosted by the “burnt metal taste” in the air when he stepped outside his brick home on Tuesday afternoon.

The leak unleashed an odor that was detectable across the region. Several miles away, across the border in Bright, Ind., Eileen Kailholz said she had noticed a “weird” smell when she went outside to tend to her bird feeders, unlike anything she had ever smelled before.

At first, officials urged residents near the Ohio rail yard, at the intersection of U.S. Route 50 and State Route 128, to go inside immediately and close their windows and doors.

Not long after, they ordered anyone within a half-mile radius of the site to evacuate, because the styrene could cause an explosion if it heated up. Officials with the nearby Three Rivers School District said schools would be closed through Wednesday, according to the district’s website.

Mike Siefke, chief of the Little Miami Joint Fire and Rescue District, said during a news conference on Tuesday evening that firefighters and other emergency crews were spraying water on the leak to keep the styrene cool, a mitigation tactic that experts told him was working. There had been no reports of injuries, he said.

Nevertheless, Mr. Siefke said, roads nearby will be closed indefinitely, and he added that he didn’t know how long the cleanup would take.

“It will be a long event,” he said.

Late on Tuesday, an executive with the company that owns the train with the styrene car said the leak had stopped and that officials believed the danger of an explosion had passed. “It is not leaking now,” Brian Stussie, vice president of operations at Genessee and Wyoming, a railroad operator.

Mr. Siefke said that officials were working to address the emergency before investigating what had caused the leak. At the moment, he said, “we’re not sure how this happened.”

As night fell on the communities clinging to the banks of the Great Miami River, streets were deserted. Some residents who fled, including Mr. Greer, waited for police escorts to get back to their homes for medications and to feed pets.

Looming over the scene was the memory of the train derailment and release of toxic chemicals last year in East Palestine, Ohio, about 300 miles away. The derailment ignited a fire that blanketed the town in smoke and prompted evacuations.

It also left residents with a lasting sense of unease over the air they were breathing, and the soil under their feet. There were no deaths, but the ordeal “changed East Palestine forever,” the village’s fire chief later told federal investigators.

So far, the scale of the emergency in Whitewater Township appeared to be significantly smaller than the one in East Palestine.

But residents worried about the potential for long-term contamination. And in Hooven, a community of fewer than 500 residents, according to census data, where the median income is about $46,000, residents weren’t hopeful that they would get enough help.

“We are Hooven, Ohio,” said Mr. Greer, a fourth-generation resident. “They will ignore us.”

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