> We also have seen some evidence that animals nearby are dropping dead and humans feeling sick.
This is precisely the kind of decontextualized data that leads to inaccurate conclusions. Without data on normal animal die-off rates, there's no reason to believe finding dead animals is unusual in this part of town.
And of course people feel sick; they've been told they were exposed to a scary chemical. It's going to be very hard to separate psychosomatic effect from physiological effect.
(The dead fish are probably directly causal. Swimming in hydrochloric acid will do that. But they can also directly sample the water to figure out if the HCL levels are dangerous for human consumption or contact, and I've seen no reporting to suggest that is the case; fish are way more sensitive to water quality than humans).
> The correct thing to do is not dismiss concerns, but to put in place measures to stop corner-cutting
No argument there. Independent of this specific accident, we know there's a pattern of accident rate increase that indicates a culture of lax safety standsrds (and I completely believe the rail workers who have told us they are heavily incentivized to cut those corners). That should stop.
> and provide guidance to residents of East Palestine that isn't just "don't worry about it".
Unfortunately, that is the only guidance in the absence of other data. Otherwise, proving "everything is fine" is proving a negative. Is the question "is their risk higher than last month?" Yes. "How much higher?" Pretty much not very much if they didn't get sick by now. "What should we do?" They're doing it in the form of burning off the carcinogen and checking low-lying areas for any escaped volatiles.
What else is there? For an average citizen, they may as well go pray to whatever god they believe in; it's as useful a preventative as anything else they could do.