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The calls to the Lisbon office of the three Columbiana County daily newspapers came from all of the country once the East Palestine train derailment took center stage on the national news.
In one moment, you'd pick up the receiver and hear the concerned voice from a railman out in Nebraska wanting to explain precision scheduled railroading to whomever would listen.
In an another instance, you'd be on the phone with Nashville NPR entertaining a request to get someone who lives in East Palestine to go on at 5 a.m. for a morning show interview.
One call in particular, though, really hit me like a ton of bricks.
The accent was unmistakeable.
"Yes, I'm calling about the train derailment in East Palestine, you're near there right?", the voice said.
The man was a retired New York City Fire Department fire marshal who I believe was living in Manhattan and watching the events unfold on television.
His level of concern was of a personal matter. He said that in 1975 one of his first duties as a firefighter was to respond to the New York Telephone Company switching center where the building that contained the offices for connecting local telephone calls caught on fire. It ended up disrupting service for 175K customers and was the worst single service disaster by any Bell operating company in the 20th century.
The building housed tons of cable and much of it was sheathed in PVC. The burning cables emitted several dangerous chemicals including vinyl chloride -- the same chemical compound that raised alarms in East Palestine.
The caller said that none of the people he responded with that day got hurt, but some 15 to 20 years later it became apparent that several of his cohorts began developing cancer and eventually died. Polyvinyl chloride exposure was later determined to have caused the cancer in some of the first responders that day.
The former fire marshal's main concern was with the area departments that responded to the East Palestine accident on Feb. 3, 2023. He wanted to make it clear that they protect and prepare themselves for possible future difficulties because some of his friends never saw it coming.
Doing the math in my head about when he might have possibly have been active, I asked if he responded to the World Trade Center.
Oh, he did all right, but I did not get the answer I was expecting at first.
"Oh, yes, I was at the 1993 World Train Center bombing," the caller said.
I clarified that I meant Sept. 11, 2001.
He paused for a bit and the brashness of his accent got a little softer. He said he was off on disability that day and if he had been active he likely would have perished like many of the people he worked with.
He didn't give many details beyond that but that conversation underlined the immense weight of having the eyes of the world glued to what is happening here in Columbiana County, Ohio.
This was a man, after all, who was working for the New York City Fire Department through two of the worst acts of terrorism in the United States' history and he was worried about us.