'I'm not going to quit': East Palestine mayor emerges from crisis with new purpose

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio – Trent Conaway couldn’t sleep. Same as the night before, and the night before that.

It was early February, days after a train derailment contaminated his village with dangerous chemicals and forced the evacuation of many of its 4,700 residents. These were Conaway’s friends and neighbors. They’d elected him mayor of East Palestine.

They were his responsibility.

The mayor’s job wasn’t supposed to be like this when he started in 2020. It paid $252 a month, a part-time gig that mostly required him to attend meetings a few times a month and cut an occasional ribbon. He had no reason to think when he took the job that it would interfere with the life he’d built here with his wife and two teenaged kids, or with his full-time job at a plant that makes materials for the steel industry.

But the derailment changed everything. It thrust him and his town into a chaotic and dangerous drama neither was prepared to face.

Lying in bed, Conaway’s mind kept racing. This night would be like the previous ones. No sleep. No rest. Only more worry.

"It was 24 hours a day,” Conaway recalled. “It was nonstop."

'We're making it work': East Palestine presses forward 6 months after derailment

A promise to stay and fight

Days later, on Feb. 15, Conaway stepped up to a microphone in the middle of the high school gym.

The place was packed, and Conaway could feel the tension. Everyone was there for a town hall meeting that was meant to provide some answers to residents worried about the safety of their air and water. How great was the danger? What was going to be done about it?

Conaway had more bad news for them. Officials from Norfolk Southern, the railroad company responsible for the derailment, were supposed to be there to answer some of those questions, but they canceled at the last minute, saying they didn’t feel safe.

As Conaway explained the situation, the crowd erupted in anger and frustration.

“I understand,” Conaway told them. “I live in the community just like you.”

In the wake of the disaster, his village needed someone to lead. But Conaway was struggling. He felt overwhelmed.

"I'm a mayor of a town of 4,700 people," he said at the time. "If you think I can fight against a railroad or fight against the EPA or fight against anyone like that, you're crazy."

East Palestine: Residents face long road ahead

At the town hall, Conaway was chided for not returning calls, for not having the answers his constituents wanted. He was criticized over the decision to conduct a controlled burn of chemicals in the derailed train cars. He was treated like any other politician or government official in a village that didn’t trust them.

Conaway pleaded for help, and for patience. And he made a promise.

"I'm not leaving," he said.

'He's doing all he can for us'

It seemed to Conaway that East Palestine had become a destination for politicians and celebrities.

Big names such as Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, former President Donald Trump, and environmental activist Erin Brockovich all came to East Palestine during the same week.

Investigators from Washington and the Environmental Protection Agency were everywhere, examining railroad tracks, collecting soil samples, counting dead fish in streams.

Conaway had never seen anything like it. Nothing he’d done in his life had prepared him for it.

A native of Negley, Ohio, Conaway moved a few miles north to East Palestine 20 years ago. For 17 years he was a foreman at a limestone mine in nearby Petersburg until he wanted to pursue other options, mainly a career that wasn't underground.

He landed the plant manager job last December. Things went well at first, but the derailment put him in a bind. He now was doing two full-time jobs and worried he wasn’t doing either as well as he should.

He decided his town needed him more than his employer, so he and his bosses agreed to part ways.

"It just didn't work out," he said. "At first they were very gracious about what happened. Then it just wasn't a good fit for me. I wasn't a good fit for them."

Around the same time, both of Conaway's in-laws died. He’d received death threats and worried about his family’s safety. And national pundits and politicians had turned East Palestine’s tragedy into a promotional opportunity, making it a referendum on Trump or President Joe Biden.

'It's all a bunch of whodunit': East Palestine caught in politics of Ohio train derailment

Conaway didn’t help matters when he appeared on Fox News on Feb. 20 and criticized Biden for visiting Ukraine before East Palestine.

“That was the biggest slap in the face,” he said on the broadcast. “That tells you right now he doesn’t care about us.”

Conaway, a Republican, later said he didn’t intend for the comment to make the train derailment more political. He was frustrated, he said. “I’m just the mayor,” he said. “If it would have been a Republican, Democrat, anyone in office, I would have said the same thing.”

Not long after, Conaway reached a boiling point.

At a meeting, the soft-spoken mayor recalled screaming at someone during a stressful moment. He apologized immediately but thought to himself, "This isn't me."

He realized he needed to change his approach to the job, for the sake of his family and his town. He needed to focus on solving the problems he could solve, on helping the people in his community find a way back to something resembling normal life.

If he didn’t do it, Conaway decided, no one else would. He was the mayor, after all.

This may not have been the job he expected, but it was the job he had.

As days went on, residents began to recognize his work. They watched him demand, day after day, that East Palestine receive fair compensation for the disaster. They watched him work with the EPA and others to answer their questions. And they watched him advocate for the village in TV interviews and with visiting politicians.

"He's the only person I trust right now," resident Sidney Smith said in April.

"He's doing all he can for us," said another resident, Jessica Helpy.

Conaway found his footing. As he recovered from the initial shock and the sleepless nights, East Palestine began to recover, too.

He still needs another job to pay the bills, but Conaway is satisfied for now serving as the village’s full-time mayor. Back in February, he dreaded getting out of bed to do that job. Now, he expects to run for re-election.

"I have to finish what I started," the mayor said. "I signed up for it, I'm not going to quit. That's how I was raised."

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: East Palestine mayor finds purpose in remediation role