A lot—but not enough,
really—has been written about the chemical spill in West Virginia’s Elk River.
More than three weeks after the area around the spill started smelling like a
licorice factory and residents started showing up at local emergency rooms complaining
of ailments such as nausea, health officials in West Virginia are still urging
folks not to drink the water.
Dr.
Rahul Gupta, the director of the Kanawha-Charleston Health Department, which is
ground zero for the disaster, has said that ultimately scientists don’t know
the possible health effects of exposure to the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, the chemical that was
spilled into the Elk River on January 9th. He says that officials
have only confused folks by declaring the water safe, then changing their minds
over the matter. Scientists have also criticized the declaration made by state
and federal officials that the water was safe to drink, citing the lack of
testing of the chemical’s health effects on humans. They go on to say that the
safety standard on 1 part per million set by the Center For Disease Control is
based on faulty or incomplete data.
The
questions troublingly linger. How could such a disaster happen? How does a tank
filled with a substance that is known to kill laboratory animals and whose
health effects on humans is unknown, wind up stored along the banks of a river
that has a water processing plant just a stone’s throw from the tanks that hold
that chemical? How is it that the people of the Kanawha Valley and surrounding
area are not surrounding the state capitol building, which is not very far away
from the spill, and demanding immediate action to ensure the safety of their
water?
Soon
after the spill Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson in his column Too Much Silence Over West Virginia Chemical Spill took note that
officials in West Virginia were taking a, “OK, it’s time to move along, folks,”
attitude, noting that Senator Joe Manchin had told CNN that he was “not going
to cast guilt on anybody.” The chemical has not been properly tested for human
safety; the tank that held the MCHM had not been inspected since the early
nineties; a water processing plant that provides water to 300,000 people is
downstream from this leaking facility; and there isn’t some sort of
responsibility to be had by anybody for this disaster, Senator Manchin? And West
Virginia Representative Shelley Moore Capito still claims that the EPA is
“overreaching.” Is ensuring that folks have safe water to drink overreaching,
Ms. Capito?
Over
at Salon, Trish Kahle, in an essay titled How West Virginia Became the Dumping Ground for the Nation’s Energy Policy writes about the invisibility of the Mountain
State. Except for a few caricatures of thick-accented inbred hillbillies, we
West Virginians are pretty invisible to most other folks in the U.S. As a
native West Virginian who now lives in southern California, I can attest to the
truth of what Kahle says. On occasion, when I’ve mentioned to someone that I’m
from West Virginia, folks have confessed to me that they have never heard of
the state. Commonly, people hear “Virginia” and assume that “West” is a
modifier like the southern in southern California or the upstate of upstate New
York.
Kahle
observes that coal, which used to be stockpiled in people’s cellars to heat
their homes through the winters, is no longer seen by most Americans, although
37 percent of their electricity comes from this fossil fuel. As their heat and
lights are brought on with a flick of a switch and they no longer shovel coal
into furnaces, they no longer think of the miners who pulled the coal out of
the ground or the trains and trucks that shipped the coal to their homes. Out
of sight, out of mind.
Kahle
gives a great deal of background to West Virginia turning into the land of
industrial waste and national forgetfulness and takes a rather cogent view of
the concerted effort of business to systematically beat down the populace into
corporate compliance and the failure of state politicians to protect their
constituents. She says:
And, as with the Elk Creek
disaster, the state almost always failed to step in to protect residents from
the destructive policies of the companies. After the Buffalo Creek
disaster, for example, the state demanded $100,000,000 for disaster relief and
damages, but settled for only $1,000,000 – a settlement that reflected the
power of the companies in shaping state politics and suggested that the state
was less interested in winning justice for its citizens than it was in
maintaining a relationship with the coal industry.
The attacks perpetrated by the
companies went far beyond disasters like Buffalo Creek, extending into public
policy, workplace safety, and into people’s communities. In an effort to
cut costs, the companies expanded the use of strip mining after WWII.
They invested in uranium mines. They fought every environmental and
safety regulation put forward by lawmakers under pressure from organized
miners. The energy companies were determined to emerge victorious in the
midst of an energy crisis they had helped to manufacture.
To
do so, they attacked the people of West Virginia on every front. They
harassed and assaulted residents who tried to block strip mine operations.
They attacked workers who unionized, and then fought against a union
leadership that claimed, “if coal cannot be mined safely and burned cleanly, it
should not be mined or burned at all.” The coal industry even went so far
as to say that in lieu of sustainable energy alternatives being developed,
government resources should detonate nuclear weapons underground to increase
natural gas reserves. (When they tried that, they acted shocked that the
resulting gas was radioactive … and therefore unusable.)
The most damning and
visceral criticism of the disaster comes from Eric Waggoner, an English
professor at West Virginia Wesleyan College and a West Virginia native. His
blog post on the chemical spill on his blog Cultural Slagheap, which went viral
and was picked up by the Huffington Post, damns the usual suspects, King Coal
and its political enablers. But he winds up his rant with a very pointed finger
directed at our fellow West Virginians. He says:
To
hell with all of my fellow West Virginians who bought so deeply into the idea
of avoidable personal risk and constant sacrifice as an honorable condition
under which to live, that they turned that condition into a culture of
perverted, twisted pride and self-righteousness, to be celebrated and defended
against outsiders. To hell with that insular, xenophobic pathology.
To hell with everyone whose only take-away from every story about every
explosion, every leak, every mine collapse, is some vague and idiotic vanity in
the continued endurance of West Virginians under adverse, sometimes killing
circumstances. To hell with everyone everywhere who ever mistook
suffering for honor, and who ever taught that to their kids. There’s
nothing honorable about suffering. Nothing.
I don’t have as much
anger toward my fellow West Virginians as Waggoner feels. As someone who grew
up in West Virginia, I remember seeing people take great pathological joy in
hurting themselves. But I think that Kahle gets it right. West Virginians think
like West Virginians because of decades of abuse. Abusive relationships do not
end, however, because the abuser finds enlightenment. The abused has to take
control of the situation.
Washington
and the state house of West Virginia are not the places where hope and change
are going to happen for West Virginia. If anything has any chance of changing,
the people with the fouled water need to know that other people don’t take
pride in being beaten down. The have to realize that you are not admirable for
putting up with mountaintop removal and the ills that it brings. You are not
special for enduring poverty so as a few others can enrich themselves by mining
the coal that lies under your land and streams. Your suspicion and feelings of
false superiority to outsiders should extend to the outsiders who own the mines
and the mining companies.
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| Who is responsible, West Virginia? |
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