West Virginia has begun partially lifting its ban on tap water five days after a chemical spill in the Elk River. More than 300,000 residents have been unable to use their water for drinking, cooking or bathing since Thursday, when the company Freedom Industries leaked up to 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol (crude MCHM), an agent used in coal extraction, into the water supply. Scores of schools and businesses have been closed, including in the state capital, Charleston. The ban has been lifted in four zones so far, but is still in effect for a vast majority of residents. Dozens of people have been hospitalized since the spill, with symptoms including nausea, vomiting, dizziness, diarrhea, rashes and reddened skin. We get reaction from Erin Brockovich, the renowned environmentalist, consumer advocate and legal researcher. While a single mother of three working as a legal assistant, she helped win the biggest class action lawsuit in American history, holding the California power company Pacific Gas & Electric Company for polluting a city’s water supply. Her story was told in the Oscar-winning film “Erin Brockovich.” Today, Brockovich and her team are investigating the spill in West Virginia. On Monday evening, she held a town hall meeting in Charleston to discuss the spill with local residents. “They’re banding together stronger than I’ve ever seen before,” Brockovich says of West Virginians self-organizing in the spill’s aftermath.
Erin Brockovich talking:
We were glad we got the town hall together on extremely short notice, because we weren’t even sure if we’d have a facility here. And for the folks that came out, you know, I actually heard numerous stories that were disturbing at many levels, but they were mostly very calm. They were frustrated. They really felt a sense that they couldn’t get through to anybody to give them further explanations, and they had many, many questions that were excellent, that needed answering.
I think a couple of things that really startled me were photos that people had taken as the water had come on, the color. There was great concern from people whose water had already come on, the smell. They said that it was pretty overpowering. Nobody told them about that. They were having to open windows, put up fans, just to get the odor out. There was concerns of people who work with homeless groups that had not been getting bottled water, and they were asking questions about—they had been bathing in it because no one sent them bottled water. They had burns on their face. There were people who were showering at the time that still have like some open sores on their heads, who did drink the water before the shutdown that still have some open wounds in their throat.
So I think that, you know, as in every single case I’m involved in, there’s just a great deal of information down on the ground with folks that we really don’t know about, we really don’t talk much about. And after, you know, everything’s said and done and everyone goes home, they’re still left with a whole host of problems that they find it difficult to get help with.
we talked about that last night, and, yes, I do. You know, I’ve zigzagged across the United States since that film came out 20-some years ago, and we run into situations like this every single day, just not to the magnitude of a municipality being impacted and 300,000 people being rendered with no water. And one thing is organization. I think—I don’t think, I see communities just feel helpless. They don’t know how to get through to their local legislators. If they do, you know, they get passed from one person to another. They can’t get through. When there’s a crisis, we all know it’s very difficult to get through. You can wait and wait and wait. And they just feel like there’s nothing they can do.
But we have observed, in this new world of social technology, they’re actually very quite savvy on how they’re going to exchange information, where they’re going to learn information. There was people last night in the group that have already started their own Facebook pages. They’re connecting with other Facebook people now. They’re able to see what’s going on. They can reach out more to their community, even if they’re not in the community right at the moment. And they’re helping themselves, and they’re gathering information from one who did hear or got through to an agency, and this is what they told them, and they post that. So, they’re banding together stronger than I’ve ever seen it before. And I think that’s something that’s very helpful to them to stay informed, because when we have information, that’s empowering to us, because we’re able to better have control over our situation and what happens to us.
So that is one thing that I observed again last night that in Hinkley was the same way, but it was a smaller group. You know, it was the 634 staying together that really made a difference. And when you get thousands upon thousands, it’s difficult for them to stay together. But they are doing it through social media. They will text each other. They will read something get on Facebook. And it helps them not to have to go through that frustration of “Why is nobody getting back to me?”
President of Freedom Industries, Gary Southern “Look, guys, it has been an extremely long day. I’m having a hard—trouble talking at the moment. I would appreciate it if we could wrap this thing up.”
That is the president of Freedom Industries, Gary Southern, being confronted by a local reporter in Charleston, West Virginia, as he’s drinking bottled water. It sounds a little reminiscent of the former BP CEO, Tony Hayward, in 2010 after the Gulf oil spill, as he drew attention to his own suffering. “We’re sorry for the massive disruption it’s caused to their lives. And, you know, we’re—there’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do. You know, I’d like my life back.” He wanted his life back.
The main one is this laissez-faire attitude that has set in on safety, and across the board. I mean, we could talk about the Tennessee Valley Authority breach we were involved in, the situation with Texas Brine and the sinkhole. You brought up BP. You know, now we have this situation in West Virginia. And these are ones of large magnitude that we really get to take a scope and look at. And sometimes it’s frustrating because I’m not sure we learn anything. And I think we’re at a real critical point where we’re going to have to begin to change how we do business and how we operate these facilities, because they’re everywhere. And so, it is definitely something that we have seen before, their—a great deal of arrogance, not wanting to answer, especially a direct point, that “Were you overseeing? Why is it you didn’t know?” Well, you didn’t know because nobody was tending the farm, if you will. So, there is this almost mentality that we have seen—we’ve seen it with PG&E—that, you know, “I don’t know. We’re untouchable. I’m not going to give you any answers. I really don’t have to.” So, we have seen this type of mentality consistently in most of the work that we’ve done.
Mike Elk talking:
No inspections at this plant since 1991, but the company did report this chemical to regulators earlier this year.
we’re seeing the same problems we saw in West, Texas. You had half-a-dozen regulators with potential oversight of this plant, but as the Department of Environmental Protection’s chief told Ken Ward of The Charleston Gazette, who, by the way, has been doing incredible, almost Pulitzer-quality reporting on this—as he told Ken Ward, “You know, this one just fell through the cracks.” And that’s what we heard after the West, Texas, disaster: “It fell through the cracks.”
Basically, some regulators knew about a groundwater permit they had at this plant. But this plant, they didn’t—you know, they didn’t have a sense of how many chemicals. The water authority had no idea what was there. They had never communicated about it in the past. And this is a major problem, because the Chemical Safety Board, which is a federal agency tasked with making recommendations on how to improve safety at chemical plants, three years ago, in 2009, recommended that the Kanawha Valley, which is where this plant is located, better coordinate among different agencies how to respond to these kind of disasters.
And there was no plan in place. The local emergency responders didn’t know about the chemicals. The water plant didn’t know about the chemicals. So there was no plan in place, and there was no communication between the different regulators about this. And this is the problem we see over and over again. There’s a lack of money going into regulation, and of the regulators that do exist, they don’t talk. And so, things fall through the cracks, like the Department of Environmental Protection said yesterday.
the Department of Environmental Protections issued two complaints against Freedom Industries: one, for the failure to report the leak as soon as it occurred; two, for the failure to have any kind of prevention plan in place. They had a contamination wall there that could have prevented this water—you know, these chemicals from going into the water. But the contamination wall was so full of holes and cracks that the head of the DEP in West Virginia said he would be concerned if that foundation—if that was the foundation of his house. That’s how bad the quality of the concrete was. So, already we’ve seen two charges filed against Freedom Industries. They had no plan in place.
And I think there’s going to be a big criminal investigation going on there. The person heading it up is the U.S. attorney called Booth Goodwin. And Booth Goodwin is the U.S. attorney who has gotten several former Massey Energy officials convicted on very creative charges about obstruction of justice and conspiracy. And Booth Goodwin has already announced that he’s going to open a big criminal investigation. He’s got people on the ground. So it’s going to be interesting to see what happens.
But unless there’s serious jail time, unless there’s serious consequences, I think this is just going to be another tragedy that’s forgotten about. Kate Sheppard of The Huffington Post had a great article yesterday where—about interviews with different West Virginia Democrats, and a lot of West Virginia Democrats are kind of tepid about calling for new regulations in the wake of this, just like we saw in West, Texas, where Obama spoke at the memorial of the workers that died in West, Texas, and didn’t even mention the word “lack of regulations.” obviously this is an uphill climb.
The West, Texas, disaster happened last April. And what happened, it was a major explosion that killed 15 people. A similar situation, there weren’t the proper safety measures in place at the plant. The plant didn’t register with the proper authorities. Just a history of violations at this plant and lack of inspections. And so, what happened is that there were about six or seven different regulators going to the West, Texas, plant for different information, but they weren’t communicating.
So, Obama formed a chemical safety task force to look at how you could change communications and regulations between agencies. That task force is meeting today in Washington, D.C., for an open comment hearing, and they’re coming up with ways. But the work has been too slow. It’s been nearly 10 months, and yet we’re still repeating the same mistakes of West, Texas. And in this case, 300,000 people were put at potential risk and could still very much be at risk from these chemicals. We don’t know what these chemicals cause. We don’t know the long-term effects. We don’t know the effects that they might have on cancer 30 years from now.
they’ve been tougher on coal, they’ve been tougher on these other things, but when it comes to the issue of workplace safety, they haven’t been really proactive on it. I mean, it’s like any other issue of workers’ rights: This administration could really care less about saying anything about it in public. And we haven’t seen the president address in a major way what is a big crisis.
Now, the question is, will this change it? I think it’s quite scary that 300,000 people couldn’t get water. Could you imagine being in that town and having to be a reporter, like, you know, a lot of the reporters that are there, and having no water and working night and day? I can’t imagine that as a reporter. That’s scary. That’s terrifying. And maybe it’ll lead to some change, but, you know, like Robert Byrd said, following each workplace safety disaster, typically people cry, they get upset about it, and once the outrage is gone, nothing happens.
Erin Brockovich talking:
it’s a disaster of a very large magnitude. And turning a municipal system back on is not an easy process. It will be step by step, and there will be problems, and we may see the worst of this yet. We started to see some of that last night from people at the meeting—the color of the water, even after they’re flushing, the color of the water, the smell of the water, people saying that they are experiencing, you know, whether it be headaches or burning eyes or burning throats. And this is always a concern for people, because we don’t know what we’re drinking. And they don’t trust the fact that there’s this one PPM set for this chemical, a chemical we really don’t know a whole lot about. And we’ve set these MCLs based on a 40-year-old healthy white male. We do not take into consideration that that level may clearly not be safe for an elderly person, somebody recovering from chemotherapy or with a weakened immune system, and certainly young children.
So people that we’ve talked to around town, we’ve visited with in the hospitals, last night at the meeting, they don’t trust this. And that’s a big concern for them. And that’s the key word, that there is this lack of trust. And this is why we get so many people coming to us. And I just don’t know that we see the bigger picture. This is happening, not necessarily to this scale, but in every single state in the United States, sometimes community after community within the same state.
people. They do know. And they do dream of a safe place to live. I think that we have disconnected and really forgotten what’s important. And they’re learning here in West Virginia. That is water, and the scarcity of it, the pollution of it, the laissez-faire that we are getting about protecting it, and their health. And they’re forgetting that they have a voice, too. It is those people in Hinkley, along with all of our help, that made the difference, because they no longer were afraid to speak up about what was important to them and use their voice and stand up, become proactive, say and do something, and push for change and push for a better world, not just for them, but for those that they leave behind. And that is the continual message, even 20 years later. And I think the time has really come where we need to re-address what our priorities are, the importance of our health, the value of our family, and just how precious water is, because without it, it’s not a game changer, it’s a game ender, for all of us.
– source democracynow.org
Erin Brockovich, renowned environmentalist, consumer advocate and legal researcher. Today, Brockovich and her team are investigating the major chemical spill in the Elk River, West Virginia.
Mike Elk, labor reporter for In These Times magazine.