Charleston Gazette investigative reporter Ken Ward told NPR’s Fresh Air yesterday that he’s not drinking the water in Charleston.
“My family and I are not drinking this water,” Ward told NPR’s Dave Davies. “I know a lot of people that aren’t. When you go to the grocery stores here, you still see people buying pretty significant quantities of bottled water, filling up their carts.”
“When you go to restaurants, you heard people asking, you know, are you using bottled water or are you using tap water, and restaurants are putting out press releases and they have signs outside saying, you know, we’re using only bottled water.”
Ward quoted a letter from West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin to federal emergency officials.
“Despite the best efforts of the company and government, many people no longer view their tap water as safe and are continuing to demand bottled water to meet their potable water needs,” Tomblin wrote. “It is impossible to predict when this will change, if ever.”
Ward was asked what was known about the hazards of Crude MCHM.
“Eastman Chemical, which makes it, puts out what’s called a material safety data sheet, an MSDS,” Ward said. “It’s something that’s required under the Occupational Safety and Health Act. It’s supposed to be kept onsite for workers to look at. It’s supposed to be filed with emergency responders and local environmental authorities. It’s supposed to, you know, list the properties of the chemical, its flash point, and it’s – you know, what’s the toxicity of it.”
“And the problem with this particular substance, if you read the MSDS for it, where it lists, you know, toxicological effects, you know, is it a carcinogen? No data. Does it cause developmental problems? No data. Most of the basic health effects that you would want to know about, there’s no data available, is what’s listed on the MSDS for this material.”
Davies asked Ward about the one part per million standard that was set by the Centers for Disease Control.
Ward took issue with the use of the word “standard.”
“I don’t know that the one part per million number was really a standard,” Ward said. “And I think that the Centers for Disease Control, if it were speaking very carefully, would want to say, well, that’s not really a standard because, you know, there’s not a water quality standard under the Clean Water Act for this material. There’s not a maximum contaminant level under the Safe Drinking Water Act for this material.”
“There aren’t any regulatory standards. There’s not a limit for how much of this can be put into the water. The one part per million number was something that was devised kind of on the fly by the Centers for Disease Control, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the CDC and the” ATSDR, you know, the kind of alphabet-soup agencies that deal with these sorts of things.”
And the first that we heard of this one part per million number was the Friday, the day after the incident, in a very late afternoon press conference with the governor. General James Hoyer, the head of our National Guard, mentioned this one part per million number kind of in passing. And the context was they were being asked, well, you know, what’s being done about this, and they were talking about how long they thought it would take for the water company to flush out the plant and flush out all its distribution lines and get things clear so people could flush out their homes.”
“And he said, well, you know, we’re not going to start that process until the level reaches less than one part per million because the CDC has told us that was safe. So I started asking, where did that number come from, because it’s not on the MSDS sheet, it’s not on any government list. Where did this come from?”
“And we had just a heck of a time getting anybody to really explain it to us. At one point I was basically told, well, you know, we’re not really going to explain that. It’s too complicated, and you might not really understand it. You know, even if you did understand it, your readers might not understand it. And so we don’t want to confuse people by trying to actually explain it to them.”
Ward was asked about when the chemical leak was discovered at the Freedom Industries facility in Charleston.
“What we know at this point about how it was discovered is that early that morning, on January 9, which was a Thursday, around 8:00, 8:15 in the morning, some people who live in that part of town called in both to the Metro 911, the county emergency operation center, and to the state Department of Environmental Protection, complaints of an odor, that they smelled some sort of a strong licorice odor in the air,” Ward said.
“And the Department of Environmental Protection sent a couple of air quality inspectors out, and they kind of went around and sniffed themselves, and apparently it had some previous experience with this particular substance, and we learned later with this particular site. So they kind of had an idea where they thought the odor was going to.”
“So they, these two DEP inspectors went to this – air quality inspectors went to the site, and when they first went there, they were told by company officials, no, we’re not having any problems, you know, what are you talking about? They asked to tour the site. The inspectors went out and they noticed that there was a problem at one of the tanks.”
“They described to me a 400-square-foot, three to four-inch-deep pool of this chemical that had leaked out of a hole in the tank, and a four-foot-wide stream of this stuff that was pouring across the containment area to kind of the right angle where the wall and the floor of this containment dike would meet. And it was kind of disappearing into that joint, which apparently had some cracks and it was disappearing into that joint and going down the riverbank into the river. Interestingly enough, the inspectors didn’t initially know that it was going into the river because we had had a very cold stretch that week, and much of the Elk River was frozen over, so you couldn’t immediately see that it was in the river.”
“The problem that arises from that is that the Freedom Industries had a permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection, a stormwater permit, a permit to govern runoff from its facility. And one of the requirements of that permit was that they immediately report any spills. And the Department of Environmental Protection says they didn’t report the spill to the state and that the fact that they didn’t report it immediately delayed some efforts at containing the spill and certainly affected the size of it and made the situation worse than it necessarily had to be.”
Ward was asked about the role of the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
“Three years ago this month, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board first made that recommendation,” Ward said. “The Chemical Safety Board has been to West Virginia quite a few times, and they came here in 2008 after an explosion at a Bayer CropScience chemical plant in Institute, West Virginia, which is 15 miles or so to the west and located right next to a historically black college.”
“And there was – there had been a series of terrible chemical accidents at that facility, and this one in 2008 was an explosion that killed two workers. It came very close to damaging a tank that contained methyl isocyanate, MIC, which is the chemical that was involved in 1984 in a terrible disaster at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India.”
“The Chemical Safety Board came in and investigated that and found a lot of problems at the plant and found a dearth of regulation of that sort of a plant, and one of the things the Chemical Safety Board said was that our state, the Department of Health and Human Resources, which is run by the governor, should work with Kanawha, Charleston Health Department to create a new chemical accident prevention program through which government inspectors would more frequently go into these plants, would ensure that they were being operated safely. And the Chemical Safety Board came back again after a series of accidents at a DuPont chemical plant in Bell, West Virginia, which is to the east of Charleston, kind of the other end of the Kanawha Valley, a series of accidents there in January of 2010, ended up with one worker being killed.”
“And the Chemical Safety Board repeated its recommendation after that incident.”
And what has the state done?
“The state has really done absolutely nothing to implement that recommendation,” Ward said. “Kanawha County officials have encouraged the state to work with them. The trouble is that the state is the entity which has the authority under West Virginia law to be able to do this. So the state would have to work with the county to do this, and the state has just basically ignored the recommendation.”
“In the last several weeks, since this chemical spill, whenever I’ve asked anybody from the state were you going to go back and look at that Chemical Safety Board recommendation, they frankly, they look at me like I’m from Mars.”
Ward said that “the industry officials didn’t like the Chemical Safety Board recommendations.”
”They insisted there’s enough regulation already and that agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration do enough already,” Ward said. “And I think there seems to be this idea that industry pushes, and that some lawmakers push, that somehow these agencies like EPA and OSHA are these jackbooted thugs that are kicking down the gates of manufacturing facilities and stomping out jobs, when in fact a lot of these facilities will go for years and years without ever seeing an OSHA inspector coming in and checking on the workplace conditions, without ever seeing an EPA inspector who’s looking at their environmental conditions.”
“You know, the notion that these places are just terribly over-regulated is widely exaggerated.”
Ward said that the culture of deregulation in the state is partly to blame for the spill.
“You know, West Virginia political leaders are very big on pounding on the table and talking about the Obama administration’s war on coal, and how burdensome government regulation is. Now we need to get government off our backs. And you know, the thing about that is, is it permeates down into these agencies – like the Department of Environmental Protection,” Ward said. “You know, Senator Manchin, who used to be our governor, said a few years ago after the Upper Big Branch coal mine disaster, which killed 29 workers, when information started coming out that that mine was just a mess, Senator Manchin said, well, if that mine was such a mess, why didn’t MSHA, the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, shut it down?”
“And really, the problem with that line of thinking is that if prior to that April 5, 2010 explosion a regulatory agency had shut down a coal mine, my guess is that Senator Manchin would have been pounding his fist on the table complaining that the Obama administration was costing our state jobs. So this hyper-rhetoric against public health and safety regulations really plays an important part in this. And what the environmental community here says is, is until we change that way of thinking, and till politicians stop talking as if they are putting jobs ahead of public safety, then we’re not really going to protect the public.”
Ward said that the fallout from the chemical spill could change the political landscape in West Virginia.
“What people in Charleston – my neighbors and I dealt with for a few days – is what people in coalfield communities here deal with everyday – not knowing if their water is clean, dealing with black water running out of their faucet, or their well going dry, or what have you,” Ward said. “Those are things that people in Boone County and Raleigh County and Mingo County, McDowell County, they live with all of the time. That’s not to say everybody there lives with them, but lots of places there, in those communities, people live with those problems. Well, this chemical spill has visited those problems upon a different group of people. Charleston is the state capital, we have a lot of big law firms, we have a lot of lobbying firms, we have a lot of PR firms, and a lot of white-collar people who make their livings off of doing work for the coal industry – be it PR, be it lawyering, be it lobbying, saw what those folks in the coal fields have to deal with. And if you follow some of these, if you look at these folks on social media or you run into them at the grocery store, they’re all very concerned now because it’s not somebody else’s kids, it’s their kids. And you know, it’s possible that this will be an eye-opening thing for a lot of people, that they’ll come to understand that all of this talk about balance between the environment and jobs, that the scales are pretty tilted in one direction sometimes. And you know, that might be something that could change the politics here.”