Just an update to let folks know how the water situation is going here. We are beginning "the flush" in stages and it isn't going that well. The flush is starting in the downtown area and sections are allowed to start when their zone is called, sort of like your table called at the wedding. About 1/3 of the customers have water right now. Some of the water coming out of the lines is blue and green, some is muddy, some smells of the chemical MCHM (like a minty licorice) and some smells OK. People are told to call in the problems so they can try and track down the causes. Some people are not having problems. People are being told to run about 1000 gallons through their systems. The flush has stalled a bit- some areas were told to start and then it was called off.
The leak may have started a bit earlier than reported- some neighbors reported smelling the chemical on and off since December. But the big problem definitely started after the big freeze from the week before. For more details, follow me below the orange squiggle.
Restaurants are beginning to open up. There is a a requirement to have the health inspectors go to every business and make sure things are safe- as well as to inspect all schools. They are recruiting local inspectors from the area to speed things up, but it is definitely slowing things down in opening schools and restaurants. Chain restaurants seem to be opening sooner. There is a local campaign for folks to go out to eat at local restaurants and give the servers bigger tips to help them get through the times with no income.
People still aren't trusting the water to drink, however. Local news reporting indicates that people will prefer to drink bottled water for some time. And truthfully, no one knows how much of this chemical is safe to drink.
West Virginia American Water officials say the odor in the water may linger, but the chemical levels in the areas are where the ban is lifted are below the health-risk level. State officials have said the safe level is below 1 part per million, and cited the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for that number. But CDC officials referred questions about how they arrived at that number to West Virginia American Water.
So, circular reasoning. One thing I did learn is that when they wash the coal with this stuff it is at much small concentrations and they reuse the stuff over and over. It is supposedly evaporated away and the sludge doesn't usually smell like licorice. This in anecdotal, but explains a lot.
Charleston and Huntington Newspapers and television news have been doing a good job reporting on the causes of the leak and the responses. There was a revealing storytoday on the blow by blow of the early discovery of the leak by Ken Ward, who writes the influential Coal Tattoo Blog for the Charleston Daily Mail/Gazette newspapers. To paraphrase, when the DEP (Depaertment of Environmental Protection) came to the plant in response to complaints from local folks on Thursday morning. When they got there, the president, Dennis P. Farrel had no idea what was going on. Eventually they found a 400 square foot pool (20 by 20 ft) of clear liquid outside tank 396 flowing along the containment wall (which was leaky). At first they didn't realize the MCHM was getting in the water because of the ice, and then they looked more closely and saw it was. The guys running the plant had no idea what was going on. The DEP had to tell them to file the problem.
One thing to keep in mind is that the guys who own the company bought it about 2 weeks ago and aren't chemists. They made most of their money in the restaurant business. They apparently saw it as a storage tank with input and output, not as a potentially risky endeavor. They were informed of the leaky secondary retaining wall as part of the due diligence of the sale and had escrowed about 1 million to make repairs. But the weather interfered with doing this immediately (and it isn't clear they had initiated the repair process in the few weeks they were in charge of the company).
So the plume is moving down river and is due to hit Cincinnati soon- they have turned off their intake. It entered my water system yesterday. Here is a linkto the map of the plume.
My colleagues say you can smell this chemical even at fairly dilute amounts- <0.1 ppm (ppm is a mg/liter). My colleague who lives near the river had to move out to a family's home because of the smell- it was very strong. She thought of bringing some in to the lab to test but decided she couldn't contaminate her experiments. We are going to see if we can get a hold of some of it to do some toxicology tests on. Students report it was awful- people fighting over the last frozen meal in the grocery and basically sitting around smelling chemicals all day. My colleague reported a lot of people banding together- driving to neighbors, running errands for the elderly. Lots of people just decamped to family members homes or hotels in areas with water. My colleagues say no one is very concerned about the wildlife yet (although they are!). I will keep folks posted as they begin monitoring the effects.
Everyone I have spoken with LOVED the Jon Stewart's Coal Miner's Daughter episode last night.
Hilarity that if this had been terrorism, folks might have been more concerned, but if it is industry, so what? And its Kanawha (Can Aaawww) County, but otherwise we were all facebooking the link to each other. So we can laugh.
So what are the politicians doing? Issuing supportive statements about cooperating with authorities and making sure not to criticize coal. There is an article about the various calls to "action" but most focus on chemicals, not coal.
The best response came from Rockefeller, who isn't running for reelection. He issued a statement to the press a statement
calling the lack of inspection of Freedom Industries, the company where the chemical leaked, unacceptable and disturbing."I often hear complaints that regulations are too costly or that industries should be allowed to regulate themselves," he wrote. "Clearly this approach has failed hundreds of thousands of West Virginians."
Rockefeller has, in the days since the spill, pushed for more involvement from federal agencies. Two days after the leak he requested that the federal Chemical Safety Board investigate the leak. A team from the CSB arrived on the site on Monday.
He also asked CDC to look at testing the long term health problems from the spill today.
Not sure how much difference that will make since the CSB has been to the state several times and keeps issuing reports telling the state to deal with safety issues of the chemical industry. Only Shelley Moore Capito has said CSB recommendations should be followed, but she has to do something since folks remember that the same day of the leak, she was in the House voting to pass laws to reduce EPA regulation of Superfund sites, chemical spills and emergency response to chemical spills. Bad timing, Shelley. Sadly, my congressman Rahall also voted for this. He is in a seamy pre-election campaign and can't be seen to support the EPA in any way. Bad timing there too.
Manchin is calling for legislation to pass Congress to have the CDC test chemicals.
Manchin plans to reintroduce a stalled version of the Toxic Substances Control Act, which would require the EPA to review all 84,000 existing chemicals in its inventory and label them as "high" or "low" priority based on potential health and environmental risks. The EPA would then have to conduct further research on high-priority chemicals. It would also require the EPA to screen new chemicals entering the market.
When the bipartisan bill was written in May, Manchin was given credit for brokering a deal between the two parties.
"We don't have any oversight on so many products that have come on the market in the last 30 years which we call toxic," Manchin said Tuesday. "I just basically said, 'My God, you've got thousands and thousands of products that have come on line that are totally, you know, unevaluated.' We don't know where we stand with this and we use them every day."
The stalled version of the bill includes no enforceable deadlines and no minimum requirements for chemicals screened per year.
So a step in the right direction, but an unfunded mandate. CDC is still being cut by the sequester.
Possibly biggest laugh in the office was about the inappropriate Facebook posts of the girlfriend on one Freedom Industries executives girl friend (and the ex-wife of another executive). Turns out, her "job" is being a social media consultant for local companies. I seriously thought that was sarcasm, but apparently it is true. Imagine 4 professionals in an office, all of whom had read the inappropriate Facebook post (so you know it is out there a lot!) laughing hysterically at this lady being a social media expert.
So my cat Wingnut will be drinking the water I saved from the weekend, and I am having red wine. Because resveratrol!
And I will end with Wingding as a kitten with a sock monkey. Because the kitties need love too.
Wingnut as a kitten with sockmonkey