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New details revealed for first responder training center in East Palestine

By MORGAN AHART 6 min read

EAST PALESTINE -- New details of a state-of-the-art first responder training center to be built in East Palestine were unveiled during a press conference at the fire department Thursday.

The project is the product of an ongoing collaboration between the state of Ohio, the village of East Palestine, Youngstown State University (YSU) and Norfolk Southern that was first announced in November 2025 when Norfolk Southern committed $20 million for the design, construction and operation of the YSU RAPID Center.

Norfolk Southern Chief Safety Officer John Fleps revealed a rendering of the facility and announced that in addition to its initial monetary commitment Norfolk Southern would be donating "four full-sized service freight cars" for use in specialized rail-safety and rail related emergency training at the facility.

The conference also featured remarks from U.S. Sen. Jon Husted, Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine, Lt. Gov. Jim Tressel, YSU President Bill Johnson, East Palestine Village Manager Antonio Guy-Diaz, and YSU Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs Jennifer Adams.

"In the unlikely event that an emergency like this occurs, our goal is that it's not your first time. We are truly invested in the preparation that you need. Safety is a core value at Norfolk Southern. It's at the center of everything that we do, and that includes ensuring that first responders have what they need," Fleps said. "Training, resources, contacts, relationships, and in order to move that forward demands our commitment and it demands sharing the institutional knowledge we have and supporting the mission along the way."

In addition to training related to rail infrastructure the facility will also have specialized training environments to facilitate hands-on emergency response training for hazardous material incidents, search and rescue, vehicle and house fires, and confined space and agricultural rescues. The training center will serve both current first responders and students studying for careers in fire science, public safety, and emergency response, and its curriculum will operate through YSU's academic structure.

All the speakers Thursday stressed that the training center would serve not only East Palestine by communities throughout the Mahoning Valley, Ohio and the nation at large, a fact which DeWine noted would serve as an economic boon to the village and surrounding communities as people traveling to the training center patronize local businesses.

"A lot of people are going to be coming into the community for a day, two days, a month, who knows how long, and those individuals are going to need to eat places. They're going to need to stay places. It's going to be good for business," DeWine said.

DeWine said he was delighted to be back in East Palestine and that the community has "a very bright future ahead of it." He also championed the response of local first responders to the derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train in the village on Feb. 3, 2023, whom he said "did a phenomenal job" and "remain heroes."

DeWine said that it was his discussions with those first responders during the derailment and the weeks and months which followed that inspired him and Husted, who was then serving as lieutenant governor, to present Norfolk Southern with the idea for a training center that would ensure first responders had access to the specialized knowledge needed to respond to any rail-related emergencies and "fill a major gap" in the training resources available in 2023.

"If you took a map of Ohio and superimposed railroad tracks all over the state, one thing would become abundantly clear when you looked at it. If there is a derailment in Ohio, the odds are it is going to be in a rural area, and the odds are that the people who respond are going to be a volunteer fire department. That reality, I think, has sunk in as we have looked at what happened here in East Palestine," DeWine said.

DeWine said that as the conversation evolved "it became clear that Youngstown State really should be involved." He said that YSU's involvement "gives the whole operation credibility and really expands the number of people who will be able to utilize it."

He was joined in emphasizing the importance of YSU's participation by Husted, who said that the university was "taking a leadership role" in the project's development and would continue to do so in the training center's continuing operation and sustainability.

Husted also emphasized the importance of the collaboration and unity of East Palestine's leaders and the community as a whole throughout the project. He said that unity reflected the same collaboration and unity in the immediate aftermath of the derailment.

"I was amazed at how well everybody here did. When you went to bed the night before you never expected this, you didn't deserve this, you didn't ask for this. It was a tragedy that was thrust upon you, and you stepped up, you did a wonderful job…In a time [when] they were experiencing tough things, this community came together, and despite a lot of people trying to create turmoil, you stood strong," Husted said.

Husted said that the creation of the training center "is a meaningful step in the right direction of preparing this community and communities across the country to make sure that something like this doesn't happen again and if it does that people will be prepared." However, he also stressed that it "still [was] not enough" and that he intended to continue fighting to pass the railway safety act, which he said "will set a federal standard to make sure that the safety equipment that is necessary in place on our rail system to decrease the likelihood of something like this happening again and ensure that crews are properly trained."

Johnson thanked DeWine for selecting YSU to be the training center's academic partner and said that the university was determined that after training there first responders "will have every arrow possible in their quiver to respond to and face these emergencies." He said that when YSU was asked to oversee the training center's academic structure and shepherd the design and construction that they knew they wanted to create something that would be state-of-the-art, robust, and adaptable to prepare first responders for any situation.

Adams said that the role of YSU is to educate people about "not just what happened, but why it happened, what we can learn from it, and how the knowledge can make us better prepared in the future." She said that while East Palestine "went through something no community ever wants to experience," the training center project "can help teach others how to be better prepared, better coordinated and more resilient."

"We knew we didn't just want to put up another burn tower with a 'Y' on it and call it a day. That was going to serve no purpose. We've got lots of burn towers throughout the region. We've got other kinds of training facilities. What we needed was something with a futuristic view. Something that could prepare people for disasters that nobody had ever predicted or imagined could come before," Johnson said.

Starting at /week.