During a Tuesday interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded to critics saying he has neglected the train derailment disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, by claiming that he “dealt with a lot of disasters” during his time as Mayor of South Bend, Indiana.
Notably, Buttigieg was notorious for his failure to handle crises during his time as mayor. In fact, South Bend was said to have the ”worst pothole situation in the state” during Buttigieg’s time as mayor, according to a 2019 report from the South Bend Tribune.
Buttigieg made the comments during an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.
“The Mayor of East Palestine has said and it took nearly two weeks for the White House to contact them and there were shouts of ‘where is Pete Buttigieg?’ at a town hall meeting last week. What’s your response to that? When are you going to go to East Palestine?” Stephanopoulos asked.
“Well, I am planning to go and our folks were on the ground from the first hours. I do want to stress that the NTSB needs to be able to do its work independently,” Buttigieg said. “But when I go the focus is going to be on action. Look, I was mayor of my hometown for eight years. We dealt with a lot of disasters, natural and human.”
“And one of the things I noticed very quickly is that there are two kinds of people who show up when you have that kind of disaster experience, people who are there because they have a specific job to do and are there to get something done, and people who are there to look good and have their picture taken,” Buttigieg added. “When I go it will be about action on rail safety like the actions that we are calling on Congress to help us with, that we’re calling on industry to take, and that we are undertaking ourselves as a department to help make sure these kinds of things don’t happen in the future.”
