Three Months On West Virginia Still Suffers From Troubled Waters

Three months on some West Virginians still aren't drinking the water.

Sorry to have dropped the ball on this blog for a while. There has been plenty to write about, but I’ve been tied up with a few things lately. I promise to get back to a more regular schedule with my posts here.

            The story that I’ve been following a great deal lately is the toxic spill in West Virginia’s Elk River that occurred in January of this year. Though the spill happened almost exactly three months ago, apparently there are still folks who are staying away from their tap water, and some folks are complaining that the telltale licorice smell still lingers in the water coming from their taps. The levels of the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol have dropped in the drinking water. The highest level of the chemical in water tested in a ten-home pilot project was found to be 6.1 parts per billion, much lower than the Center For Disease Control’s somewhat arbitrary threshold of 1000 parts per billion.

            It seems as though some members of the national press are keeping an eye on the water problems in the Kanawha Valley. I heard this story on Here and Now. Interviewed for the story is Rahul Gupta. The Kanawha-Charleston health director said that there may now be evidence pointing to long-standing low levels of MCHM being present in the drinking water of the Kanawha Valley. As he said, there is no research on what this chemical might do to people who are exposed to small amounts of it over long periods of time.

And the spill made the pages of the New Yorker. Evan Osnos, who years ago worked as a photojournalist in Clarksburg, West Virginia, my hometown, delves into the history of the coal companies and the grip that they have on the politics of the Mountain State. In his piece Osnos suggests that the rise of the GOP in West Virginia, a very traditional Democratic stronghold, is not a good trend. Although the anti-environmental rhetoric of the GOP and that party’s willingness to slash and burn environmental and health regulations would seem to support what he has to say, I think things are bad in my home state no matter which party occupies the state house or the governor’s mansion. The lack of regulatory control over the coal companies and the chemical industries goes back through the administrations of governors Joe Manchin and Jay Rockefeller, both Democrats.

            Democrats and Republicans both bear some of the blame for the state of affairs in West Virginia; the same can be said of the electorate that sends these politicians into office. Ultimately, however, the coal companies and the chemical industry in West Virginia are responsible for the polluted waters and sickened people. From the time Appalachian children attend grammar school, where the coal industry has developed and, with the blessing of the educational establishment, inserted into Appalachian schools’ curricula to indoctrinate students and turn them into coal industry loving adults, through the industry’s campaign against the president and environmental regulation in the guise of fighting Obama’s “war on coal,” King Coal and the chemical companies influence enough of the electorate to get coal-friendly politicians into office. Their influence is not total. Recent polling indicates that mountaintop removal remains unpopular in West Virginia. Even still, you don’t have to convince every voter, just enough to make the difference to get your preferred candidate into office. And once in office, no matter what a state senator or governor may believe personally, they are barraged with the money and lobbying of the industries that control West Virginia.

            Without footage of floodwaters or images of flattened houses, most of the national press moved on from the story of West Virginians and their water problems. But Osnos quotes West Virginia Senate Majority Leader John Unger pointing out why this toxic spill deserves the attention of the rest of the country, “Martin Luther King said that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Why should anybody care about what goes on in West Virginia? Because it’s the canary in the mineshaft. If you ignore it in West Virginia, it’s coming, it’s going to continue to build, and the issue is: Should our country have the debate about our rights to the very basic infrastructure that sustains us? Or should we continue to ignore it?”

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?

Do We Trust the Water? And Frank Words From Senator Jay Rockefeller

It seems that there is more confusion than anything else when it comes to the toxic spills in Appalachia. A month after the Freedom Industries spilled a large amount of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, a chemical that is used to “clean” coal before shipping, into the Elk River in Charleston, West Virginia, poisoning the drinking water for 300,000 residents, the word from the Center For Disease Control was that the water is now safe to drink. Yet some schools are still closed. Two schools were closed Wednesday and Thursday due to the persistence of a licorice smell coming from the schools’ water supply. One student went to the hospital after complaining of burning eyes, and a teacher was taken to the hospital after the teacher fainted.

            It’s kind of the same story in North Carolina. An international group of water advocates testing the water of the Dan River, which received between 50,000 and 82,000 tons of coal ash residue from a retired Duke Energy power plant, said the river showed, “extremely high levels of arsenic, chromium, iron, lead and other toxic metals typically found in coal ash,” while Duke Energy claims that tests by the company and North Carolina officials indicated no adverse effect on the water supply from the river.

            I guest I know whom I would trust in this case.

            I don’t quite know what to think of this story from Politico about Jay Rockefeller, who served as West Virginia’s governor from 1977 through 1985 and has served as the Mountain State’s senator for the past 20 years (now retiring).

Frank words from Senator Rockefeller: Now that he's retiring, can he voice what he really thinks? photo AP

At a hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s water subcommittee Rockefeller had some unexpectedly frank words concerning the spill in the Elk River and Appalachia in general. He lamented the characteristic fatalism that runs through the deepest parts of the Appalachian Mountains that perversely has people delighting in the hardships foisted on them by outside business interests. And he paired this fatalism with what he called an “Appalachian myth,” which is “the idea that somehow God has it in his plan to make sure that industry is going to make life safe for them.”

            These words seem contradictory fatalism paired with a sense of blessedness, that the Good Lord somehow considered the folks of Appalachia special and His providence will work things out for these hardworking yet unlucky people. Having spent his entire adult life representing West Virginia, Rockefeller will tell you that these seemingly contradictory traits are two sides of the same twisted psychological coin that he rightly identifies with the remnants of the Scotch-Irish who had been the original white settlers throughout West Virginia.”

            Rockefeller again hits the nail on the head when he goes on to say that this mythology, that “somehow God has it in his plan to make sure that industry is going to make life safe for them,” is not true. He goes on to say:

Industry does everything they can and gets away with it almost all the time, whether it’s the coal industry, not the subject of this hearing, or water or whatever. They will cut corners, and they will get away with it. The world is as it is; we accept the world as it is. And the point is you don’t accept the world as it is, but as it should be, and you make it in that posture. I’m just—I’m here angry, upset, shocked, embarrassed that this would happen to 300,000 absolutely wonderful people, who, you know, work in coal mines and that stuff, but they’re depending on the fruit of the land, wherever it may be, for survival. They’re making it, but barely.

The fatalism of West Virginia, and indeed much of Appalachia, spread through the hillsides and hollers of that region long before Jay Rockefeller entered that state as a Vista volunteer in the 1960s. As senator, as governor, he has been powerless to change that. And yet, it is still disheartening to hear Rockefeller confess that his many years representing my home state have not been years of good stewardship and he was unable to ameliorate the lives of his constituents despite their fatalistic view of their world.

Manchin, Rockefeller, and Boxer Introduce the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act

I have my fingers crossed on this one. In the wake of the chemical spill in West Virginia's Elk River that left 300,000 without drinking water, Senators Joe Manchin, Jay Rockefeller, and Barbara Boxer introduced the Chemical Safety and Drinking Water Protection Act, which would, once enacted provide for the following:

1. Require regular state inspections of above-ground chemical storage facilities.
2. Require industry to develop state-approved emergency response plans that meet at least minimum guidelines.
3. Allow states to recoup costs incurred from responding to emergencies.
4. Ensure that drinking water systems have the tools and information to respond to emergencies.

This is a good move on the part of West Virginia’s senators and my senator here in California. I’m pretty certain that the GOP controlled House will delay, water down, or kill this legislation—I can hear their usual canards already: “overregulation,” “jobs killing,” “jobs or the environment,” “war on coal,” and a few others—before president Obama can sign it into law. But it is still a development that gives me hope for West Virginia and West Virginians.

Safe drinking water is a right.

Senator Joe Manchin Wants to Tie the Hands of the EPA by Reintroducing the EPA Fair Play Act

Earlier this week the U.S. District Court of Appeals handed West Virginia and the environment a victory when they ruled that the EPA could withdraw a previously approved Clean Water Act permit for the Spruce Mine No. 1, a permit for the largest such mine operation to be performed in West Virginia.

            In an unsurprising political move, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin reintroduced the EPA Fair Play Act, Senate Bill 272. The summary of the bill reads thus:

EPA Fair Play Act - Amends the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (commonly known as the Clean Water Act) to remove the authority of the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to prohibit the specification of any defined area as a disposal site for discharges of materials into waters of the United States, or to restrict the use of any defined area for specification as a disposal site, once the Secretary of the Army has issued a permit for dredged or fill material.

To understand what is going on here, a little background on mountaintop removal is needed. Under the Clean Water Act, the Army Corps of Engineers is granted the authority to issue permits allowing for the discharge of pollutants or the placement of dredge and fill material into our nation’s waterways. Permits under section 404 of the Clean Water Act—intended to be used to allow the use of fill or dredge for the construction of levees, bridges, or other structures in or around water—are generally easier to get than 402 permits, which control the discharge of pollutants into lakes and streams. A court ruling that goes back over a decade established that the Corps can allow mountaintop removal operations to fill in valleys and streams with their waste material under 404 permits, as though these valleys and streams were somehow construction sites instead of dumping grounds.

            The ruling this week stated that the Administrator of the EPA has the authority “to deny or restrict the use of any defined area for specification (including the withdrawal of specification) as a disposal site “whenever he determines” the discharge will have an “unacceptable adverse effect” on identified environmental resources.” That is, the EPA, even though the Army Corps of Engineers has granted a 404 permit, can still determine that a valley fill would pollute or otherwise harm the environment and revoke the permit.

            So the EPA Fair Play Act would tie the hands of the EPA. No matter how bad a valley fill or other disposal of overburden might be, once the Corps issued a 404 permit, the EPA could do nothing to protect our rivers and streams.

            It is unsurprising that Joe Manchin, a strong supporter of the mining industry, would reintroduce this measure. West Virginia’s other Senator, Jay Rockefeller, supports the bill. He has at times stood his ground against King Coal, but in more recent years has grown friendlier to the industry. I imagine that this bill could get a lot of support in Congress, passing the Senate and House. We can hope that it receives a veto from president Obama.

Senator Jay Rockefeller to Retire From Senate: This Is Not a Good Thing

West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller announced today that he will not be seeking a sixth term in the Senate, giving the usual line of spending more time with his family as the reason for his retirement from public office.

Rockefeller has, for the most part, been very supportive of the coal mining industry. In 2010 he introduced legislation that would have placed a two-year moratorium on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. And he has taken no serious legislative action to restrict or slow down mountaintop removal.

            He has nonetheless been good at supporting miners. He says that the Senate achievement of which he is most proud is the measure he sponsored in 1992 that was aimed at preserving retirement benefits for miners and their widows and children.

            Despite his support for coal, the industry and its supporters are now accusing Rockefeller of abandoning them. Rockefeller supports his fellow Democrat, President Obama, who has made efforts to roll back some of the most egregious rule-making left over from the George W. Bush administration that gave coal companies almost carte blanche to tear down mountains, fill in valleys, and pollute the streams of Appalachia.

            It’s hard for me to feel bad about the retirement of a Senator who has supported mountaintop removal and scuttled action on global warming, but with Rockefeller’s retirement, the prospects for the mountains of Appalachia, as well as the health of the planet, may have worsened. Shelly Moore Capito, who currently represents West Virginia’s second congressional district, has vowed to run for Rockefeller’s seat. In a state that has swung from being solidly Democratic to being a GOP stronghold, her success in gaining this Senate seat is most assured. (Indeed, the politics of the state have shifted so far to the right that Rockefeller may have lost to Capito if he has chosen to run for a sixth term.)

Capito co-sponsored the “Stop the War on Coal Act,” that would, among other things, loosen rules for the storage of coal ash and gut aspects of the Clean Water Act. It’s a wish list for the coal industry. She has also authored legislation that would hamstring the EPA’s ability to do its job.

Rockefeller has been no environmental champion, but at least he hasn’t worked to worsen the situation in West Virginia and the rest of Appalachia. With his retirement, it looks like that’s exactly what we will get.