Who’s going to drink a coal-processing chemical? But one theory is that there would have been little reason to think Freedom would've needed to. Again, the jury is still out regarding why. Freedom wasn't required to provide OSHA with detailed data sheets. Industrial companies that use solvents, for example, are required to provide OSHA with Material Safety Data Sheets that thoroughly explain procedures for how to work safely with a chemical, and how to avoid injury in the event of an emergency. "If you would've had proper secondary containment on the site, this wouldn't have excited anyone's interest at all."įreedom Industries’ chemicals were not considered “a hazardous material”įreedom Industries was also able to avoid submitting detailed instructions about how to deal with its chemical if spilled. “The idea that there would not be concern about those chemicals seeping into the river is a big problem,” Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute, told The Verge. Freedom Industries' containment facilities sit maybe 50 feet from the Elk River's shoreline, up a steep hillside covered with mud and leafless trees and bushes. Lack of worry about chemicals flowing into the river, in retrospect, seems absurd. The main problem was that Freedom avoided having to prove that it had designed a backup plan if its chemicals breached the porous retaining wall surrounding its toxic containment units and seeped into the ground. But consensus has grown around the idea that Freedom Industries’ chemicals were not considered “a hazardous material,” a DEP cabinet secretary told the Associated Press, so “it flew under the radar.” The reason? Various juries are still out. They were also sold out.Įldridge drove back to work - easily an hour late returning from his lunch break - empty-handed.įreedom Industries - which was actually a conglomerate of smaller companies owned and operated by at least one convicted felon - had managed to escape the oversight of not only West Virginia’s DEP, but also the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). He didn’t, and after he and the clerk spent 20 minutes searching the store for one, they gave up. He visited Walmart, a Foodland grocery store, then a Target - all sold out in what Eldridge called "a trail of failure." Then, at a sporting goods store, a clerk asked if he had a bucket with him to fill it up with water from an untainted Huntington tap. Eldridge started there, hoping to find bottled water and disposable 5-gallon water jugs at whichever store had any left to sell. On his lunch break Friday - with his wife and child at home - he made a 45-minute drive to a mall in Huntington, which had not been affected by the water crisis. "I gotta get water for my family," he told himself. It didn't appear to Eldridge that this was related to the water leak (his wife had been sick in the days prior), but his daughter's fever and coughing and sneezing made him nervous. When Eldridge's two-year-old woke up Friday, she suffered flu-like symptoms. "So it wasn't until the next day, last Friday, that I realized, 'Ok, this might be a problem.'" "I'm not someone who tends to freak out about things," Eldridge told The Verge yesterday. But they decided not to let it worry them that first night. They noticed the liquorice - or maybe coconut oil - smell of the coal chemical when they flushed their toilets. And because not much is known about MHCM, the state's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was forced to order last Thursday that no one use the water flowing into homes and businesses in a nine-county region surrounding Charleston.Īt first, Eldridge and his wife weren't concerned. The Elk supplies drinking water to some 300,000 residents through the publicly traded West Virginia American Water company. It wasn't until afterwards, however, that they turned on the evening news and saw the main story: the tap water he'd used to fix his family's meal was poisoned.īy now, it's been thoroughly reported that Charleston-based Freedom Industries - a small, two-week old company that stored and distributed coal-processing chemicals from 11 huge, 48,000-gallon containment units on the shores of the Elk River - accidentally allowed 7,500 gallons of the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) to seep into the region’s main water source. When 35-year-old Jason Eldridge arrived home last Thursday from his job as a systems administrator with a healthcare company in Charleston, West Virginia, he acted no differently than he normally would: he made dinner (that night, it was tacos) for his wife, his two-year-old daughter, and himself.
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