Jedediah Purdy blames the contamination of West Virginia’s Elk River on a lack of oversight:
On the federal level, before the spill, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration hadn’t inspected Freedom Industries, and the E.P.A. seems to have left matters entirely to state officials. Attacking federal environmental regulation is regarded as a safe bet in West Virginia state politics, where the coal industry’s war on the Obama Administration has become a local insurrection. Democratic Governor Earl Ray Tomblin promised, in his last State of the State address, that he would “never back down from the E.P.A.” The state’s junior senator, Joe Manchin, a Democrat, was elected after he ran an ad in which he pumped a bullet into a copy of the (failed) 2010 cap-and-trade bill, to show his contempt for the regulation of coal. His comments on the spill have avoided talk of regulation or responsibility.
The entire crisis is a tableau of abdication: years of privatization and non-regulation followed by panic. It is an emergency, not least because inaction has insured that no one knows enough to say that it is not an emergency. The response thus far—issuing no-use orders for the water supply and mobilizing the national guard to distribute household water—is one of minimal government.
Meanwhile, Republicans have been busy gutting the Clean Water Act:
In a week when the contamination of a major West Virginia river has served as a painful reminder of how little clean water is left in the strip-mined state, Republicans pushed policies that would further endanger water quality. It’s a timely issue right now: The Environmental Protection Agency is in the midst of trying to clarify how much jurisdiction it has over small streams and wetlands, many of which are used for drinking water in rural communities. (In West Virginia, such streams have often been dirtied past the point of use thanks to mountain top removal and mining waste.) The think thank the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) assembled a list of environmental riders proposed by the GOP this summer. Many concern water. One, NRDC warns, “would permanently prohibit EPA from clarifying which streams and wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act”; another would “block the Department of Interior (DOI) from enforcing safeguards designed to protect streams from pollution from surface coal mining.”
The Dish 