Ohio filed a lawsuit against railroad Norfolk Southern to make sure it pays for the cleanup and environmental damage caused by a fiery train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month, the state’s attorney general said Tuesday.

The federal lawsuit also seeks to force the company to pay for groundwater and soil monitoring in the years ahead and economic losses in the village of East Palestine and surrounding areas, said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.

“The fallout from this highly preventable accident is going to reverberate throughout Ohio for many years to come,” Yost said.

No one was hurt in the Feb. 3 derailment, but half of the roughly 5,000 residents of East Palestine had to evacuate for days when responders intentionally burned toxic chemicals in some of the derailed cars to prevent an uncontrolled explosion, leaving residents with lingering health concerns. Government officials say tests over the past month haven’t found dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or water in the area.

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw apologized before Congress last week for the impact the derailment has had on the area, but he didn’t make specific commitments to pay for long-term health and economic harm.

The railroad has promised more than $20 million so far to help the Ohio community recover while also announcing several voluntary safety upgrades.

Norfolk Southern said Tuesday in a response to the lawsuit that it was listening to concerns from the community and planning to take additional steps to deal with some of those.

The railroad is working on creating a long-term medical compensation fund, a way to provide protection for home sellers if their property loses value because of the derailment, and improving drinking water protections, it said in a statement.

The lawsuit also asks for the railroad to reimburse first responders and state agencies for the costs of dealing with the disaster.

How much money the state is seeking isn’t known yet because the response is ongoing, but Yost made it clear the cost will be enormous. “This was an epic disaster. The cleanup is going to be expense, ” he said.

Ohio officials met with Norfolk Southern representatives on Monday and talked about several possible ways to help the people in East Palestine, including enhancing the village’s water treatment operations, Yost said.

The state attorney general said he was pleased that the railroad has indicated it wants to do the right thing and that the lawsuit will make sure it keeps its promise.

Many in East Palestine remain outraged at the railroad and worried about what will become of the village.

Those fears include concerns about their long-term health, their house values and the economic future for local businesses.

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SPRINGFIELD, Ohio (AP) — Authorities in Ohio say there is no indication of any risk to public health from the derailment of a Norfolk Southern cargo train between Dayton and Columbus, the second derailment of a company train in the state in a month.

Norfolk Southern and Clark County officials say 28 of the southbound train’s 212 cars, including four empty tankers, derailed at about 4:45 p.m. Saturday in Springfield Township near a business park and the county fairgrounds. Springfield is about 46 miles (74 km) west of the state capital of Columbus.

As a precaution, residents living within 1,000 feet were asked to shelter in place and responding firefighters deployed the county hazmat team as a precaution, but officials early Sunday said there was “no indication of any injuries or risk to public health at this time.”

A crew from Norfolk Southern, the hazmat team and the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency “each independently examined the crash site and verified there was no evidence of spillage at the site,” officials said.

Officials confirmed Sunday afternoon that no hazardous materials were involved in the derailment.

Norfolk Southern general manager Kraig Barner said, however, that a couple of other cars on the train heading from Bellevue, Ohio, to Birmingham, Alabama, were carrying liquid propane, and a couple more were carrying ethanol. The rest of the train was made up of mixed freight, such as steel and finished automobiles, he said.

“A lot of the cars that were actually derailed were empty boxcars,” Barner said.

Officials said two of the four empty tanker cars that derailed had previously carried diesel exhaust fluid and the other two had residual amounts of polyacrylamide water solution, which Barner said is an additive commonly used in wastewater treatment.

County officials say environmental officials have confirmed that the derailment is not near a protected water source, meaning there is no risk to public water systems or private wells. The shelter-in-place order affected only four or five homes, officials said.

No injuries to the public or to the train’s two-person crew were reported, he said. The cause of the derailment is under investigation and the findings will be turned over to the Federal Railroad Administration, Barner said.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said late Saturday night that President Biden and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had called him “to offer help from the federal government.”

On Feb. 3, 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, in northeast Ohio near Pennsylvania, derailed and several of the train’s cars carrying hazardous materials burned.

Though no one was injured, nearby neighborhoods in both states were imperiled. The crash prompted an evacuation of about half the town’s roughly 5,000 residents, an ongoing multigovernmental emergency response and lingering worries among villagers of long-term health impacts.

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EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (AP) — Shipment of contaminated waste from the site of a fiery train derailment earlier this month in eastern Ohio near the Pennsylvania state line will resume Monday to two approved sites in Ohio, according to federal environmental authorities.

The announcement came a day after the Environmental Protection Agency ordered Norfolk Southern to “pause” shipments from the site of the Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine to allow additional oversight measures about where waste was shipped. Some liquid and solid waste had already been taken to sites in Michigan and Texas.

EPA-certified facilities able to accept some of the waste had been identified, which meant shipments could restart Monday, Region 5 administrator Debra Shore, of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Sunday.

Some of the liquid waste will be sent to a facility in Vickery, Ohio, for disposal in an underground injection well, Shore said. Norfolk Southern will also begin shipping solid waste to an incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio, and additional solid waste disposal locations were being sought, she said.

“All of this is great news for the people of East Palestine and the surrounding community, because it means cleanup can continue at a rapid pace,” she said.

The Ohio governor’s office said Saturday night that five of the 20 truckloads (approximately 280 tons) of hazardous solid waste had been returned to East Palestine after 15 truckloads were disposed of at a Michigan hazardous waste treatment and disposal facility. Shore said material shipped out to sites in other states, but later returned to East Palestine, would now be shipped to the two Ohio sites.

All of the rail cars except for the 11 cars held by the National Transportation Safety Board have been removed from the site, which will allow excavation of additional contaminated soil and installation of monitoring wells to check for groundwater contamination, said Anne Vogel, director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

No one was injured when 38 Norfolk Southern cars derailed in a fiery, mangled mess on the outskirts of town, but as fears grew about a potential explosion due to hazardous chemicals in five of the rail cars, officials evacuated the area. They later opted to release and burn toxic vinyl chloride from the tanker cars, sending flames and black smoke billowing into the sky again.

Federal and state officials have repeatedly said it’s safe for evacuated residents to return to the area and that air testing in the town and inside hundreds of homes hasn’t detected any concerning levels of contaminants. The state says the local municipal drinking water system is safe, and bottled water is available for those with private wells. Despite those assurances, many residents have expressed a sense of mistrust or have lingering questions about what they have been exposed to and how it will impact the future of their families and communities.

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COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Ohio, the state that launched the national movement to offer millions of dollars in incentives to boost vaccination rates, planned to conclude its program Wednesday — still unable to crack the 50% vaccination threshold.

The state’s not alone in mixed results for prize giving.

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s May 12 announcement of the incentive program had the desired effect, leading to a 43% boost in state vaccination numbers over the previous week. But numbers of vaccinations have dropped since then.

“Clearly the impact went down after that second week,” DeWine acknowledged Wednesday.

Multiple other states followed Ohio’s lead, including Louisiana, Maryland, and New York state, with the impact on vaccinations hard to pin down.

Under New Mexico’s “Vax 2 the Max” sweepstakes program, vaccinated residents could win prizes from a pool totaling $10 million. The rewards include a $5 million grand prize that will be drawn later this summer. The sweepstakes kept the vaccination rate from declining further but the initial boost was small. According to the governor’s office, the seven-day average of new vaccination registrations was 1,437 per day during the first week of the contest — just 85 more per day than the previous week.

California awarded $116.5 million in prizes — the country’s largest pot of vaccine prize money — and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said they increased vaccinations at a time when more was needed to get people to overcome reservations or inertia.

From the time the incentives were announced May 27 until the June 15 finale, Newsom said California was one of the few states to see a week-over-week increase in the rate of vaccinations, including a 22% increase in the week prior to awarding of the grand prizes.

The Sacramento Bee noted that the increase was skewed because the previous week included three lower vaccination days over the Memorial Day weekend, and found most of the increase was from second doses of the Pfizer vaccine three weeks after 12- to 15-year-olds became eligible on May 13.

In West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican, hoped to use a series of prize giveaways to inject new life into a vaccine drive that drastically slowed down after a strong early start.

When he announced the drawings last month, Justice had projected that more than two-thirds of eligible residents ages 12 and over would be vaccinated by the time he removed a mask mandate on Sunday. But the state fell short of that goal — 61.5% had received at least one dose by Sunday’s first drawing.

In late May, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced that Oregonians who are 18 or older and have received at least a first dose of COVID-19 vaccine will automatically be entered to win $1 million or one of 36 $10,000 prizes — with one winner in each county. Oregonians, ages 12 to 17, have a chance to win one of five $100,000 scholarships. The drawing is set to take place on June 28.

The Oregonian reported in early June that the seven-day average of adults receiving their first shots had actually decreased from about 9,000 the day before Brown, a Democrat, announced the lottery to 6,700 nearly two weeks later.

This month, Brown announced additional prizes including travel packages to destinations around Oregon and more than 1,500 gift cards, worth $100, that were being distributed at vaccine sites during the weekend of June 12 – an incentive that officials said brought a noticeable increase of people to sites.

In Colorado, vaccinations have slowed since its lottery was rolled out by Democratic Gov. Jared Polis last month, with about 589,000 fewer doses given out in the month since Polis’ announcement, compared to the same amount of time a month before the contest began.

The state is offering five residents the chance to win $1 million each in weekly lottery drawings from June 4 until July 7.

In Ohio, about 5.5 million people have received at least one shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as of Wednesday, or about 47% of the population. About 5 million people, or 43% of the population, have completed the process.

While the incentive’s success was short-lived, it got Ohioans who were either straddling the line or those who had not plans to get the vaccine to get vaccinated, Ohio’s governor said.

As evidence, Jonathan Carlyle of Toledo, an Amazon deliveryman who won the second $1 million prize on June 2, and said the next day: “When y’all announced the Vax-a-Million, as soon as I heard that, I was like ‘Yes, I need to go do this now.’”

DeWine continues to urge Ohioans to get vaccines, saying the end of state social distancing requirements, the return to in-person school classes in the fall, and the multiplying of virus variants remain a concern. Last week, DeWine held a news conference at Thomas Worthington High School in suburban Columbus along with students and coaches urging middle and high school children who play sports to get vaccinated.

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Associated Press writers Farnoush Amiri in Columbus, Ohio, Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico; Sara Cline in Salem, Oregon; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; Patty Nieberg in Denver; and Don Thompson in Sacramento contributed to this report. Amiri, Cline and Nieberg are corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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