A Case Study of the East Palestine, Ohio Train Derailment Disaster for Upper-Level Undergraduate Analytical Chemistry Courses

The East Palestine, Ohio train disaster of February 2023 resulted from the derailment of dozens of train cars which leaked toxic chemicals, caught fire, and threatened the area with an explosion as a result of the possibility of polymerization of vinyl chloride. To mitigate the possibility of explosion, vinyl chloride was vented and burned from five train cars, resulting in a cloud of black smoke that could be seen and smelled for miles. An interrupted case study assignment based on the initial environmental and health concerns and data collected from air, water, and soil in the days following the disaster has been designed and implemented in an instrumental analysis laboratory course. While case studies are used frequently in business, medicine, and law, fewer case studies are found in the literature in the field of chemistry. Student work and survey data have been collected and analyzed, and findings suggest that this case study is effective at developing students’ problem-solving and critical thinking skills as well as fostering their ability to communicate scientific findings to nonscientists. Topics such as sampling, limit of detection, and instrumental methods are emphasized in the assignment. Student feedback suggests that the assignment allows students to better understand how analytical chemistry can be used in the real world, and students are highly responsive to the use of a real-world example for understanding analytical chemistry.