JOHN YANG: Earlier this year a train derailment in East Palestine Ohio spilled toxic chemicals on the ground and into the air.

Eight months later people -- there people there are still waiting for answers about the long term health and environmental consequences.

What happened in Ohio isn't uncommon.

On average, there's a chemical incident in this country every two days.

We went to North Carolina for a look at how one city is trying to move forward after a chemical disaster.

So the plan was literally just across the way here.

SABRINA WEBSTER, Winston-Salem Resident: Yes.

JOHN YANG: Sabrina Webster was born and raised in this Winston Salem neighborhood.

SABRINA WEBSTER: Growing up in Pinegrow.

You had your grandparents, your aunties, your cousins, your family and friends.

JOHN YANG: A tight knit community where she felt safe and secure.

But that all changed one night in early 2022.

What was that night like?

What do you remember?

SABRINA WEBSTER: I got a call from my daughter.

And she said Mom, you're going to have to take a detour, she said, is a fire on Indiana Avenue.

I could smell the smoke as I got closer.

And when I had to take a detour, that's when I saw it was the weaver fertilizer plant.

You can see the blaze, and you can see the fireman up on a high ladder.

Just spraying water down.

JOHN YANG: The fire at the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant was fueled by what was stored inside 600 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical commonly used in fertilizer that can accelerate fires and even explode at high temperatures.

SABRINA WEBSTER: I'll stop my policeman.

And he told me I couldn't go no further.

And I don't miss it.

Well, I need to come home and check on my daughter and check on my pet.

He radio ahead and I could hear his sergeant telling him tell her to get her items and move out.

Leave as soon as possible.

JOHN YANG: At home, Webster grab what she could, close family portraits per dog GB and fled.

SABRINA WEBSTER: It couldn't even come through there.

JOHN YANG: Webster then called her cousin Vanda Thomas who lives nearby.

VANDA THOMAS, Winston-Salem Resident: I grabbed my pocket book.

My child, my fiancee, and we get in the car without pajamas on.

And we left.

JOHN YANG: No one died in Winston-Salem that night, but other communities haven't been so lucky.

In 2013, a fertilizer plant explosion level the farming community of western North Central Texas.

MAN: At first, we just saw a little bit of smoke.

Next thing I know shrapnel was falling down everywhere burning all of us and we just got out and ran.

JOHN YANG: The blast left 15 people dead, 12 of them first responders and as many as 200 others injured.

Since 2021, there have been 614 accidents in the United States involving chemicals.

And between 2016 and 2020, 133 chemical accidents required more than 64,000 people to be evacuated from their homes and at least 85,000 to shelter in place.

MAYA NYE, Federal Policy Director, Coming Clean: Chemical disasters occur about once every other day in the United States.

And so this is this is a massive problem.

JOHN YANG: Maya Nye is the federal policy director at Coming Clean, a nonprofit group that advocates for greater safety in the chemical industry.

She says the Environmental Protection Agency's risk management program regulates facilities that use these dangerous chemicals.

MAYA NYE: It's really intended to prevent chemical disasters.

And it also requires the facilities develop plans for how they're going to respond to an emergency when a disaster occurs.

And to look at what is you know, what is the worst possible case scenario that can happen should, you know, all of the chemicals at our plant and At least at one time there was a huge explosion.

JOHN YANG: Last year the EPA proposed changes to the program which covers about 12,000 U.S. locations.

While the chemical industry largely supports the current EPA risk management program, they worry that some of the proposed changes go too far.

Kimberly Wise White as head of Regulatory Affairs at the American Chemistry Council.

KIMBERLY WISE WHITE, American Chemistry Council: So they need to be very targeted on where there are accidents where those accidents are driving risks, and identifying those areas and really focusing enhancements in the RNP program in that area.

JOHN YANG: But nice as the revisions don't go far enough.

WOMAN: They have around 140 chemicals that are on this list that they implemented back in the 90s.

And it hasn't really been updated since.

JOHN YANG: Currently, the program covers more than 250 substances that the EPA says pose a significant hazard.

Not on the list, the ammonium nitrate that was stored at the Winston Weaver plant.

The same substance used in the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing the deadliest homegrown terror attack in U.S. history.

According to a North Carolina regulators report, the ammonium nitrate at the weaver plant was improperly stored.

Water was allowed to seep into the wooden bins holding the chemical which could trigger an explosion.

The report also revealed the leaky roof might have contributed to an electrical short and potential fire.

In a statement to PBS News Weekend, the EPA said preventing chemical releases is a shared responsibility and the prime responsibility is on the owners and operators handling chemicals.

The Winston Weaver Company didn't respond to a request for comment.

Five lawsuits have been filed against Winston Weaver alleging negligence, saying they failed to follow industry safety protocols.

But Nye says any regulatory gaps are putting communities in danger, especially populations that are already vulnerable.

MAYA NYE: Communities around chemical facilities are predominantly black, Latino, and low income communities.

And oftentimes these communities have the least resources to respond to, and to be able to recover from disasters after they happen.

JOHN YANG: This vacant lot is all that's left of the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant, at least all that's visible.

Residents of this neighborhood worry what hazardous chemicals may have been left behind in the soil and in the water.

DR. CALLIE BROWN, Wake Forest University School of Medicine: So that's going to tell us about the sedimentation in the water -- JOHN YANG: Dr. Kelly Brown is an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

CALLIE BROWN: And the immediate aftermath of the fire there were community meetings that were held in that neighborhood.

They wanted this to be studied and I didn't want to be forgotten.

JOHN YANG: She's leading a five-year study looking at the long term health effects from the Weaver plant fire.

What sorts of medical events would you expect to see, after an incident like this?

CALLIE BROWN: In the first year, we're going to be looking at things like emergency department visits hospitalizations, and there we do think maybe respiratory illnesses.

In the longer term we don't really have any hypotheses for what we're going to find.

So we're looking at lots of different types of diagnoses, things like diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer, dementia, it's a wide variety of things that that could be associated with living in this neighborhood around the plant.

JOHN YANG: Brown's team will look for lingering contamination in soil, water and air samples in a two mile radius of the plant site.

It sounds like part of the goal of this is to empower people in the community.

CALLIE BROWN: Absolutely.

They had very clear questions and things that they wanted us to look at their good questions and important questions.

And so we're able to use the data and the resources that we have to get that data back to the community.

SABRINA WEBSTER: It was an explosion.

I wouldn't be sitting here with you today.

A whole lot of families in this neighborhood generations would have been wiped off the face of this earth.

JOHN YANG: For Sabrina Webster and Vanda Thomas, the chemical fire could have gotten much worse.

But it's hard for them not to worry about what's in the air they breathe in in the soil in which they once grew vegetables.

VANDA THOMAS: They'll peppers, our grow onions, just right here in this little patch.

JOHN YANG: And she hopes her community will be one of the last to live in fear of the next disaster.