Specialized Professional Services Drew McCarty on the dangers of a potential chemical transfer from the derailment site:
 
“During a vent and burn operation, in the 30 we have done, we do not usually have sparklers coming out of the car, going up and coming back down.”
 
“With any derailment and any damaged cars, there is a list of options with compressed gas cars, that have been pool fires building pressure. The tactical option to relieve vapor pressure is vapor flaring but in this case, all the valves and fittings within the protective housing were thermally compromised from all the thermal heat fires they were experiencing since Friday. We could not vapor flare anything out of the cars. There was no access to the vapor space.”
 
“From a transfer perspective, there was some discussion about whether can we get trucks or other tank cars on the railway and build rail in and do transfers to facilitate a chemical transfer. It would require hot tapping to get to the liquid product and we were prepared to hot tap, looking to hot tap, we had welders in staging. We had a couple thousand feet of piping to go to a liquid flare pit, which is another tactic but the other challenges with transfers would have been if this stuff is off-specification due to this accident and all these fires, setting up such a transfer would have trucks that were most likely not available any time soon from anywhere around the country from a trucking standpoint and would have been a logistical challenge. Properly inhibiting the stuff would have been a field challenge. If it was already polymerizing, that’s also, it was our concern at the time with the heat they had sustained for the time it was sustained, we felt if we tried that we probably would have gummed up transfer systems and had a risk of polymerizing in mid transfer.”
 
“Hot tapping was an essential tactic to trigger a couple of different options short of a vent and burn. The one car that had built excessive pressure without relieving itself in a condition that didn’t have a heated pool fire under it for a couple of hours Saturday afternoon told us that something was still going on in that car. We looked at all the cars in a set. One car misbehaved, the other three were tracking right with it two hours earlier so we looked at those as a whole. Tactical options due to having to get people in there with those cars that we felt were rattlesnakes and critical damage potential from that dynamic wreck.”
 
“We never had a fair chance because of the risk to our safety to get in there and peel jackets off of cars and had to look for things like scores, dents, and wheel burns. We had unknown mechanical damage on all those cars that had been seriously heat-stressed throughout the weekend. This was a serious x-factor in our whole assessment. The moment the car behaved the way it did Saturday, we made an absolute safety decision for the good of the community and the good of our people that we were not going to commit people welding on those cars because there was a serious concern that at least 3 of them might have been empty.”
 
Norfolk Southern’s Robert Wood:
 
“There was a 6th high pressured liquified flammable gas car also involved in this wreck that did not sustain the same damage that the vinyl chloride cars had taken. It was protected during the vent and burn and we went with the other options. After everything, the vent and burn were completed, that car was moved and offloaded safely into trucks. When we get to vent and burn it’s because we’re out of options.”
 
“What I will say, is we learn from every incident. This incident is no exception. I don’t know that anything about this changes the decision tree. Again, when you get to the choice of vent and burn, you’re out of alternatives.”
 
After the NTSB hearing in East Palestine revealed that there may not have necessarily been the imminent threat of an explosion following the derailment, Governor Mike DeWine's Office says they were not aware of the information from Oxyvinyls provided in today's briefing regarding when the decision was made to vent and burn the cars.
 
"The information you cited in your email was not provided to the Governor's Office neither during the crisis nor prior to today," the statement from DeWine's Office said.
 
Previously, the threat of an imminent explosion had been repeatedly cited as the reason the vent and burn were necessary.
 
Dr. William Carroll, PhD, Department of Chemistry, Indiana University on the plume created from the vent and burn:
 
“The black cloud is probably polycyclic carbon, it’s soot. It’s difficult to speculate about other materials, when I say polycyclic carbon, we generally refer to it as soot. That is what mainly comes to mind for me.”
 
“In my recollection of the bits I saw, they tried to sample for phosgene and didn’t find any. But other than that, I don’t have specifics of air monitoring that was done.”
 
“In this case, as was testified to, this would probably not be an issue for soil because the vinyl chloride would evaporate. It’s a vapor at ambient temperature so it is not going to run into the ground and into the groundwater. I think there was ground sampling done that didn’t find anything.”
 
“You have carbon monoxide and possibly carbon dioxide like any combustion. Hydrogen chloride is usually a gas but because it’s hydroscopic, it will draw moisture to itself and probably form very, very small droplets of the material. One lab report that did this reported a side product of phosgene at levels of far less than either of those other two products.”
 
Paul Thomas with OxyVinyls said they believed polymerization of the vinyl chloride was not happening in the cars.
 
“On three different occasions we expressed the belief that it wasn’t occurring. We expressed we didn’t believe it was but more important here is how you know to protect your folks. If you could get a temperature, it will tell if polymerization is happening.”
 
Major General John Harris, Jr. of the Ohio National Guard on how long Governor DeWine had to deliberate on the vent and burn:
 
“Not very long. He arrived around 11 Monday morning the 6th and as you heard from the timeline the decision was required by about 12:30 because there was concern obviously about nightfall and the temperature aversion and the risk of doing the burn at night. So there was a very small window. Governor DeWine talked to the incident commander and the members of the unified command but ultimately it was the team that made the decision. It was the local leaders on the ground, the incident commander who maintained the command the entire time.”