A chemical spill from a coal facility has left 300,000 West Virginians with no drinking water since Thursday. Tomasky, who grew up in the area, reports:
My friend Rob Byers, the executive editor of The Charleston Gazette, the excellent (and independent) flagship newspaper of the state, drives past the Freedom Industries plant on his way to work every day. Thursday morning, something was different. “The smell,” he told me. “It just smelled like Robitussin coming into the car.” Later that day, a colleague took a drink from the newsroom water fountain. Oh. My. God, he said. Another colleague didn’t believe him and went and took a drink. And that’s the last drink taken.
There haven’t been any deaths, and Byers described it as more of a major inconvenience than a full-out crisis. For now, the National Guard has started bringing in bottled water. No one can say, or is willing to say, how long things are going to stay like this. In a rather unfortunate coincidence, the chemical plant is just upriver from a water intake facility. So the water system has been heavily infiltrated. In essence, the whole region’s water system has to be flushed out until the chemical runs through (to where, let’s not even think). “Does everybody just have to run their water at the same time?” Byers wryly wonders.
Maggie Koerth-Baker explains what exactly is contaminating the Elk River:
First off, what is 4-methylcyclohexane methanol? It’s used in coal washing, a process that it would be reasonable to think of as “a good thing”, because washing coal is what removes a lot of the sulfur that would otherwise contribute to acid rain. Basically, while we’d all prefer we didn’t burn coal, if we’re going to burn it, we want it to be washed. To do that, coal is crushed fine and dumped into a bath of frothy, foamy water. Relatively light coal floats and sticks to the foam. Relatively heavy sulfurous rock sinks. 4-methylcyclohexane methanol is one of the chemicals that can be used to make the froth.
This could explain why there hasn’t yet been any news of major fish kills associated with the spill, writes hydrologist Anne Jefferson at the Highly Allochthonous blog. This stuff is chosen for the job it’s meant to do because it’s light and floats on water. Meanwhile, because it’s winter, most of the fish are hanging out deeper in the water. But that doesn’t mean it’s safe and everything is cool. In fact, the big problem with 4-methylcyclohexane methanol is that there doesn’t seem to be a well-documented safety profile on it, one way or the other. Deborah Blum, a journalist and author who writes extensively about chemicals, poisons, and toxicology, tried to track down the safety data on 4-methylcyclohexane methanol and had a damn hard time doing so.
Chris Mooney talks to Blum about how little we know:
“We know methanol is toxic, we know that methylcyclohexane is moderately toxic, but I haven’t seen a full analysis of the entire formula,” says Blum. “Still, I think we can assume there’s nothing here that we’d want to drink or like to see in our rivers.” However, given that it is in the Elk River it will be “very diluted,” she added, and likely will ultimately be broken down and digested by microbes. In the meantime, Blum praised authorities’ cautionary approach. The fact that relatively little is known about the compound, says Blum, represents “another reminder that we have way too may poorly researched compounds in the toxic registry and we desperately need to update our creaking regulations regarding industrial materials.”
Benen thinks now might a good time to start talking about safety regulations again:
If recent history is any guide, once the crisis is resolved, the policy debate will fall into a familiar pattern: conservatives and their industry allies will insist that government regulation of free enterprise must always be resisted. But in this case, it was the private sector that caused the calamity; it’s the public sector helping put things right; and it’s government regulations that can help prevent similar crises in the future.
The Dish 