Paying for East Palestine's cleanup did not settle why the tank cars were burned.

EPA announced a settlement valued at over $310 million with Norfolk Southern in May 2024 addressing harms from the East Palestine derailment. The following month, the NTSB said the subsequent vent-and-burn operation was unnecessary and described problems with information provided to decision-makers. The connection is not a new allegation: it is the distinction between paying for a disaster's consequences and establishing whether a particular emergency decision was justified. Settlement totals alone cannot measure whether decision-making failures were corrected.