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Evan Osnos: A Chemical Spill in West Virginia : The New Yorker
At 8:16 a.m., a resident called the state Department of Environmental Protection and said that something in the air was, in the operator’s words, “coating his wife’s throat.” Downtown, the mayor, Danny Jones, smelled it and thought, Well, it’s just a chemical in the air. It’ll move. A few minutes passed. “I stuck my mouth up to a water fountain and took a big drink, and I thought, We’re in trouble,” he recalls.
This was West Virginia’s fifth major industrial accident in eight years. Most accidents unfold deep in the mountains that contain the state’s natural resources. In this case, the leaders of the state were less than three miles away—near enough to smell it.
West Virginia has moved so far to the right that, in 2012, President Obama lost all fifty-five counties, a first for a Presidential candidate of either major party.
The state has become a standard-bearer for pro-business, limited-government conservatism. The day before the chemical spill, the governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, delivered his State of the State address, criticizing federal environmental regulators and vowing, “I will never back down from the E.P.A.
By this time, people had been drinking the water all day. Authorities urged the public to watch for symptoms of exposure, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, and wheezing. Just after midnight, President Obama declared a federal emergency. He dispatched fema and sent in the National Guard to deliver truckloads of bottled water.
West Virginia ranks among the nation’s worst states when it comes to smoking, obesity, disabilities, and prescription-drug abuse; it trails much of the nation in the rate of college graduation. So many young people leave in search of work that West Virginians joke that kids learn the three R’s: reading, ’riting, and Route 77—the road out. In McDowell County, at the southern end of the state, the average man lives to be sixty-four—a level on a par with Yemen. Over the border in Virginia, men in Fairfax County live eighteen years longer.
After the spill and the ban on water this past January, schools, restaurants, and businesses shut down.
People were getting in knock-down drag-outs over the last case of water.
In the first three days, more than two hundred people showed up at emergency rooms with rashes, nausea, and other complaints.
The public recoiled. If the water wasn’t safe for pregnant women, why was it safe for infants or toddlers? What about pregnant women who had been told that it was safe and resumed drinking it?
“In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”
When I asked Dr. Gupta, the head of the health department, if he and his family were drinking from the tap, he said that they were not. The water at their house still had an odor. “It is very difficult to drink licorice-flavored water,” he said. I asked if there were any outstanding scientific questions, and he laughed.
The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act allows every resident of the United States to have access to safe drinking water. So how do we say that, for three hundred thousand people in this part of West Virginia, it’s O.K. to have ‘appropriate’ water? Do we understand the path we’re taking here, by defining two different classes of water, for two different groups of population? Do we really want to go down that path?
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Senate Republicans Introduce Bill to Abolish the EPA
Read the comments below the article.
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So that's it. Republicans are tired of big government "interfering". Should tax payers have to come to the rescue of Republican Red States who poison their own drinking water? Why? Remember, it's Republicans who scream out "let them die". OK, "let them die". Isn't that what they want?
Gotta love the part about North Carolina where restaurants have signs in the window saying they only use "bottled water".
At 8:16 a.m., a resident called the state Department of Environmental Protection and said that something in the air was, in the operator’s words, “coating his wife’s throat.” Downtown, the mayor, Danny Jones, smelled it and thought, Well, it’s just a chemical in the air. It’ll move. A few minutes passed. “I stuck my mouth up to a water fountain and took a big drink, and I thought, We’re in trouble,” he recalls.
This was West Virginia’s fifth major industrial accident in eight years. Most accidents unfold deep in the mountains that contain the state’s natural resources. In this case, the leaders of the state were less than three miles away—near enough to smell it.
West Virginia has moved so far to the right that, in 2012, President Obama lost all fifty-five counties, a first for a Presidential candidate of either major party.
The state has become a standard-bearer for pro-business, limited-government conservatism. The day before the chemical spill, the governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, delivered his State of the State address, criticizing federal environmental regulators and vowing, “I will never back down from the E.P.A.
By this time, people had been drinking the water all day. Authorities urged the public to watch for symptoms of exposure, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, and wheezing. Just after midnight, President Obama declared a federal emergency. He dispatched fema and sent in the National Guard to deliver truckloads of bottled water.
West Virginia ranks among the nation’s worst states when it comes to smoking, obesity, disabilities, and prescription-drug abuse; it trails much of the nation in the rate of college graduation. So many young people leave in search of work that West Virginians joke that kids learn the three R’s: reading, ’riting, and Route 77—the road out. In McDowell County, at the southern end of the state, the average man lives to be sixty-four—a level on a par with Yemen. Over the border in Virginia, men in Fairfax County live eighteen years longer.
After the spill and the ban on water this past January, schools, restaurants, and businesses shut down.
People were getting in knock-down drag-outs over the last case of water.
In the first three days, more than two hundred people showed up at emergency rooms with rashes, nausea, and other complaints.
The public recoiled. If the water wasn’t safe for pregnant women, why was it safe for infants or toddlers? What about pregnant women who had been told that it was safe and resumed drinking it?
“In the past ten or fifteen years, they’ve systematically weakened virtually all the major water-quality standards that apply to the coal industry,” he said. “One by one, there’s been a steady effort to undermine the implementation of environmental laws, to the point that it’s become a part of everyday normal life here.”
When I asked Dr. Gupta, the head of the health department, if he and his family were drinking from the tap, he said that they were not. The water at their house still had an odor. “It is very difficult to drink licorice-flavored water,” he said. I asked if there were any outstanding scientific questions, and he laughed.
The 1974 Safe Drinking Water Act allows every resident of the United States to have access to safe drinking water. So how do we say that, for three hundred thousand people in this part of West Virginia, it’s O.K. to have ‘appropriate’ water? Do we understand the path we’re taking here, by defining two different classes of water, for two different groups of population? Do we really want to go down that path?
--------------------------------------------------------------
Senate Republicans Introduce Bill to Abolish the EPA
Read the comments below the article.
--------------------------------------------------------------
So that's it. Republicans are tired of big government "interfering". Should tax payers have to come to the rescue of Republican Red States who poison their own drinking water? Why? Remember, it's Republicans who scream out "let them die". OK, "let them die". Isn't that what they want?
Gotta love the part about North Carolina where restaurants have signs in the window saying they only use "bottled water".
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