Freedom Industries and Teensy-Weensy Justice For Southern West Virginia

Justice has come to the people of southern West Virginia. Freedom Industries, which poisoned the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginia residents, has had a fine leveled against it by the federal government for the improper storage and infrastructure violations that caused the toxic spill.

            So—after spilling thousands of gallons of  4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol into the Elk River and poisoning the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, sickening many of them, inconveniencing most of them by forcing them to buy bottled water, adversely affecting business for bars, restaurants, and other establishments, and forcing the closing of dozens of schools—how much was the fine?

            $11,000.

            That’s right, Freedom Industries, after poisoning the drinking water of 300,000 individuals, paid out $11,000 dollars. That comes out to about three and a half cents per person.

            As I said, Justice has come to the people of southern West Virginia, only it is a very small and teensy-weensy amount of justice.

The glass is half full. It's just a teensy-weensy little glass.

From Ken Ward Writing in the Charleston Gazette: Hearing Provides Few Answers on Water Safety

Hearing provides few answers on water safety  - News - The Charleston Gazette - West Virginia News and Sports -

Ken Ward covered yesterday’s Congressional hearing on the toxic spill that poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians last month. The link above takes you to his story. A month after the spill, no one, not a single official, would say that the water is now safe to drink.

I Wouldn't Drink That Water and Other Frank Words From Senator Rockefeller

Some honest words from retiring Senator Rockefeller

Part of me is thinking that this is a day late and a dollar short, but at the same time it’s one of the most amazingly honest assessments to come out of a political leader from West Virginia. As Joe Manchin does his best to deflect and distract from Rachel Maddow’s questions about the poor state of affairs in West Virginia, the Mountain State’s other senator, Jay Rockefeller, who is retiring from the Senate after 20 years in office, has been saying some very honest things about the state of affairs in West Virginia.

            I blogged about Rockefeller yesterday and the honest words he had to say during a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s water subcommittee. Well, West Virginia’s senior senator is continuing his frank talk about the state in which he made his political career since the early seventies. The water that was poisoned for 300,000 residents a month ago has been declared safe by the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection and the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, but Rockefeller is having none of it. The former governor of West Virginia, citing the state’s history of “lack of regulatory control” said, “And even if some expert group told me it was safe I don’t think I’d believe it. They can say it’s not hazardous or this or that, but it doesn’t mean anything.” Rockefeller made his statement to WCHS, an ABC affiliated television station that broadcasts to Charleston and Huntington, West Virginia. Rockefeller continued his remarks:

 It just gets into the degree of control that corporations have over people. They dominate in West Virginia’s life. Governors get elected—and I was a governor once—and they appoint people to regulatory jobs who helped them in campaigns. What does that tell you?

Indeed, Senator Rockefeller, what does that tell you? I applaud and very much appreciate your present honesty. We need more of it, what you said yesterday and today. This broadcast should be played and replayed throughout West Virginia—as well as the rest of the United States, for corporate control of the way we think goes beyond the borders of the Mountain State—until the folks whose tap water was poisoned by Freedom Industries wake up to the fact that untainted drinking water is not optional and should never be at risk from an unregulated storage tank; until the folks whose wells have dried up or otherwise been fouled by mountaintop mining realize that precious resources have been unfairly stripped from their lives; and until all those whose lives have been unduly plagued by cancers, kidney stones, learning disabilities, and other diseases see that their health and their lives have been sacrificed for the profits of outside corporations.

            And yet my applause is muted. I know you mean well, Senator Rockefeller. But I do not think that the chemical spill in the Elk River last month was your personal wake up call, your moment of clarity on a Road to Damascus. You’ve known the score in West Virginia for decades. You knew how King Coal controlled the state when you were governor in the seventies. Back then you played along. Perhaps it can be said that the grip of the coal industry is so tight on the politics and the mindset of West Virginia that no politician who does not toe the line for King Coal will make it into office. So perhaps politically you were caught between an anthracite rock and a bituminous hard place. If you didn’t play along with the powerful people who own the mines and the minerals under the land of West Virginia, you would have never sat in the governor’s office and never become a senator to my home state.

            You played along. But wasn’t there somehow—as the mines grew larger and larger, as more and more miners lost their jobs to the huge draglines, as the valleys filled with debris from the mountaintop removal operations, as hundreds of miles of West Virginia’s streams were buried forever—that you could have said, “Enough” to the mining companies. Wasn’t there a time to tell them that they had scored their hundreds of millions of dollars and that it was time to treat the land and people of your state with the respect due them?

So What Do They Do With That Chemical When They're Not Spilling It In Rivers?

So, I guess as no big surprise, we’re finding out that a second chemical was spilled from the Freedom Industries tank along the Elk River in West Virginia. And the great consolation to southern West Virginians, whether they were sickened by their water or not, is that it appears that the second chemical, a mixture of polyglycol ethers known as PPH, is no more toxic than the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol that was spilled into the Elk River earlier this month. I'm sure that's a big relief for those folks!

            Officials at Freedom Industries knew of the other leak, but only let the state of West Virginia know about the second leak two days ago, more than ten days after the spill. And they are not being forthcoming about the nature of PPH because Freedom Industries considers the nature of this compound “proprietary.”

            My guess is that if the MCHM hadn’t made the water smell like licorice—if people couldn’t smell that their water was bad—then we may not have known about this spill until many more people had been sickened.

More compounds for your drinking pleasure in West Virginia

The 4-methylcyclohexane methanol has been used by the coal industry for years, and now it’s time to connect the dots. OK, if the mining companies have been using this stuff for a long time, where do the put it once they are through with it? You got it. They throw it in the coal slurry ponds or down old mine shafts. Joe Stanley, a former miner and union president, claims that coal companies have been poisoning the waters of Appalachia for years. He says:

I watched the coal industry poison our water for years. Now they're telling us not to drink the water? We've been dumping this stuff into unlined ponds and into old mines for years. This MCHM was just one of the chemicals we were told was highly toxic but that we dumped into old mine shafts and slurry ponds, and it's been seeping into the groundwater for years. As soon as we're out of that mine it immediately fills with water. And where does it go from there? I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.

Robert Johnson and Gus Lubin who wrote this Business Insider feature on Stanley go on to say:

An Environmental Protection Agency assessment last year identified 132 cases where coal-fired power plant waste has damaged rivers, streams and lakes, and 123 where it has tainted underground water sources, according to an AP investigation by Dina Cappiello and Seth Borenstein. Nearly three quarters of the 1,727 coalmines in the U.S. have not been inspected in five years to see if they are following water pollution laws, according to the same investigation, which cites these and other alarming findings about coal pollution. (Italics mine)

Chemical Spill Leaves More Questions in West Virginia

As the chemical spill in the Elk River drifts downstream and more and more West Virginians are turning their taps back on, and as the story drifts off the front pages of the press, a few questions remain.

Safe to drink yet? No one really knows.

While we still have a fuzzy understanding of what the chemical 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol is and remain uncertain of its toxicity, the EPA is uncertain as to how much of the licorice smelling substance leaked into the river. Officials acknowledged that they don’t know how much of the substance may have leaked into the soil with the potential of seeping into the river if there aren’t proper clean up measures implemented.

            The West Virginia legislature has been quick to aide small businesses affected by the spill. HB 4175, the “West Virginia Small Business Small Business Emergency Act,” has already passed the West Virginia House of Delegates and would allow for small businesses to apply for grants and low or no-interest loans. Small businesses could also defer paying state payroll and sales taxes.

            I don’t disfavor helping small business. In this economy, a disruption of a week’s business could be a make or break situation. But the monies that would be helping these businesses would be coming from state tax dollars. In essence, with this bill, the people of West Virginia are going to be asked to compensate businesses because of an industrial accident of a poorly regulated corporation. Isn’t there a sense of robbing Peter to pay for what the corporation Paul is responsible for?

            And it’s curious that this is the first bill to come out of the West Virginia legislature after this accident. What of legislation to avoid such accidents in the first place? Wasn’t West Virginia urged to do so years ago?

            And though Senator Joe Manchin is reintroducing a bill that would provide for more stringent regulation of hazardous chemicals, West Virginia’s legislators are still voicing strong support for industry and trying their best to distance this accident from the coal industry. Remember, as they say, it is a chemical spill, not a coal industry related chemical spill.

            Finally, I found this over at Forbes. Ken Silverstein, at the business oriented publication calls for “corporate social responsibility,” saying that:

Devoted corporate citizens are endearing themselves to not just their shareholders but also to the communities where they live and conduct commerce. In turn, they are validating their brands and adding value. Conversely, cutting corners and evading responsibility diminishes their goodwill.

Well, well, well. I guess that Silverstein thinks that if we just left businesses alone, they, through their self-enlightened ways, would always do the right thing and soon we would be living in an Ayn Rand utopia of environmentally friendly corporate profits.

            I don’t dismiss what Silverstein says out of hand. There are many good people in charge of companies who want to do the right thing. But there are enough of them—and this spill gives us a good example of one—who are willing to cut corners, to disregard worker safety and health, to consider the environment as only a source for timber and minerals. This is why we need laws and regulations to make sure that they don’t hurt people or the environment.

            Most employees won’t steal from their employers, but we still have embezzlement laws to punish the no goodnics who do try to enrich themselves at their employers’ expense. Few people want to hurt other folks, but we still have laws against assault and murder to safeguard us against those who would.

It’s the same with business. Maybe we don’t need laws to keep us safe from Kumbaya Incorporated, but we should have some safeguards for the companies that aren’t so enlightened.

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.