With a "Trickle" of Drinking Water, Questions Remain in Elk River Chemical Spill

OK, so the latest word is that, after four days, most of the residents in southern West Virginia are still without water due to the chemical spill in the Elk River. There is a “trickle” of water to some residents and business, but most folks are still high and very dry from this industrial disaster. In the meantime there are a few things that have been pointed out.

            Pointed out by the Huffington Post is the immense oversight made by the Sunday morning talking heads shows, the ones with George Stephanopoulos, David Gregory, and other well-dressed and well-spoken folks. Apparently, one of the greatest disasters to affect health and the environment since the BP oil spill received zero airtime during these political talk shows.

 

Amount David Gregory and George Stephanopoulos and the other talking heads  mentioned the chemical spill that deprived 300,000 West Virginians of their drinking water

More than 300,000 people without drinking water is a big story. And there are implications for the rest of the country. Are there other chemical storage places for chemicals that could potentially foul the water in other states? What responsibility doe the state have? What responsibilities are to be born by the federal government in such a matter? It seems that Cokie Roberts could have something to say about this.

            Maybe it’s just that this happened in West Virginia. Mountaintop removal has seriously altered much of the landscape and affected the lives of tens of thousands, yet the news coverage of this crisis has remained slim over the decades.

            Aljazeera reminds us that there is a long history of coal operations polluting the wells and streams of the Mountain State. Wilson Dizard, the author of “Coal mining’s long legacy of water pollution in West Virginia” in Aljazeera America, tells us that the coal industry has been fouling streams and wells for years and years. In his story Vivian Stockman of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition says that for years and years the coal companies have been pumping chemical-laden wastewater directly into the ground. Once there, it can spread to other parts of the water table and poison wells.  “All this waste is going underground for years, and then one day people start noticing their well water turning sometimes orange, sometimes black. The water stinks,” says Stockman. “For more than a century, the coal industry has had pretty much free rein to do whatever it wants.”

            And once again some of the best coverage of the incident and its ramifications has been done by Ken Ward of the Charleston Gazette. As he points out in his Coal Tattoo blog, governor Ray Tomblin and the coal companies are trying to distance the coal industry from the incident by insisting that the spill is a “chemical company incident” and not a “coal company incident.”

            Ward also points out that the West Virginia took no steps to create a program that would have prevented chemical accidents like this spill, even after a team of federal experts urged the state to do so after an industrial explosion and fire killed two workers in Institute, West Virginia in 2008. And what is that stuff that poured into the river anyway? It seems that no one is certain.