In case you missed it, things have gone from bad to worse in West Virginia this week, with Freedom Industries now owning up to the fact that there was a second chemical in the leaking tank:
Amy Goodwin, spokeswoman for Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin, said state public health officials had contacted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier in the day for assistance in understanding the chemical’s potential health effects but had not heard back from the CDC as of Tuesday evening.
A Freedom Industries data sheet on the chemical says it can irritate the eyes and skin and is harmful if swallowed. The sheet lists the material as less lethal than Crude MCHM but also says no data are available on its long-term health effects.
Mike Dorsey, director of homeland security and emergency response for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said he learned about the additional chemical’s presence in the tank that leaked at about 10 a.m., just before a routine daily meeting with various agencies and Freedom Industries about the situation at the site.
Dorsey said Freedom Industries President Gary Southern asked to speak with him privately, told him about the chemical being in the tank, and handed him data sheets on the material, which Dorsey referred to as polyglycol ethers.
Source: West Virginia Gazette
You might also be wondering why one river supplies water to over 300,000 people and all of the businesses in that area – it’s because the mining industry has so completely fouled the ground water that no one can drill wells without bringing poison up with the water. Here’s what a former West Virginia coal miner had to say about that:
“I watched the coal industry poison our water for years. Now they’re telling us not to drink the water? We’ve been dumping this stuff into unlined ponds and into old mines for years,” he says. “This MCHM was just one of the chemicals we were told was highly toxic but that we dumped into old mine shafts and slurry ponds, and it’s been seeping into the groundwater for years.”
It sounds bad even before Stanley explains that coal mines are constantly pumped to clear ground water, aquifers, and underground streams: “As soon as we’re out of that mine it immediately fills with water. And where does it go from there? I don’t know, your guess is as good as mine.”
“I haven’t drank the water here in years, and I suggest you do the same,” he says, pausing and then reiterating. “Don’t drink the water. Just don’t do it.”
There’s plenty of evidence to support Stanley’s claims.
Source: Business Insider
I got my source material for this post from one that’s at the top of the recommended list at DailyKos titled The News Just Keeps Getting Worse for West Virginia and It Doesn’t Stop There written by a user named Mary Anne Hitt. The real scary part is referenced by the phrase “it doesn’t stop there”:
We know the coal industry is getting away with poisoning our waterways nationwide, and a new study of federal data by the Associated Press shows just that. Coal industry chemicals and waste “have tainted hundreds of waterways and groundwater supplies, spoiling private wells, shutting down fishing and rendering streams virtually lifeless.”
And here’s the damning detail: “Because these contaminants are released gradually and in some cases not tracked or regulated, they attract much less attention than a massive spill such as the recent one in West Virginia.”
Coal-fired power plants are the nation’s biggest water polluters, spewing millions of pounds of toxic metals and other pollutants like arsenic, boron, cadmium, chromium, lead, mercury, and selenium into surface waters each year.
Please go read the whole thing – and then lobby your elected representatives to end our dependence on coal. And if you are personally burning coal, let’s say for home heating? Stop…
Coal has powered China’s rush to industrialization, making possible cheap Ipods and 50″ TVs for us. They are now paying the price, as pollution levels reach 500 on an air-quality index that goes all the way up to … 500. That level of smog is “hazardous for everyone.” The smog is so pervasive that (unlike the Great Wall), it’s visible from space.
I am most emphatically NOT making an argument that we don’t need to stop using coal over here, because of China. We do need to stop it, regardless of what China or other actors do. We also need to stop exporting it for other countries to burn. We do not need it any more; there are clean alternatives.
We stopped filling the air and water with lead from gasoline; we can stop polluting our world with coal.
So unless you want a night time satellite photo of the U.S. to mirror North Korea, meaning pitch dark, then coal is a necessary mix of our energy resources.
Facts: coal is responsible for over 700,000 direct and indirect jobs. We have billions of tons of coal, more reserves than OPEC has of oil. We can keep the lights on for hundreds of years with our coal reserves.. Emissions from major coal-fired plants have been reduced by 90% since the 70’s. Over 90% of the coal consumed is used for electricity. States like Texas that rely primarily on coal for electricity, have the cheapest electrick rates. It’s no wonder Texas gets all the mfg. jobs.
I personally use coal for heat (anthracite, not bituminous) and it works so well, I can’t tell we have a Polar Vortex outside, in fact, the colder it is outside, the better coal heat works, b/c I get to crank it up. I convinced 3 other people to get rid of their wood stoves for a coal stove, and all 3 thank me, especially their wives. No more pulled muscles trying to split wood, no more cold nights b/c the wood died out, no more bugs inside the wood or an ugly stack of wood in the yard.
why not? (more)
That would be a win-win?
My comment was a little bit tongue in cheek, but I am advocating that a significant reduction in energy usage is necessary and would be generally beneficial. The North Korea example is a bit extreme, but the idea that a country needs to look like a Christmas tree every hour of every day is just as absurd. There are good reasons to have indoor and outdoor lighting at night, but holding lighting up the entire night sky as some sort of minimum standard of civilization is something we need to, at least, revisit.
Of course, it’s not just lighting. We should not regard reduction in energy usage as some sort of regression in our civilization. Efficiency is progress.
More to your point — conservatives are constantly arguing that to reduce waste you have to “starve the beast”, which is to say reduce the available resources. Setting aside the reasons this does or does not work in the usual context — why would it not work for energy use? I posit a hypothesis that a reduction in cheap energy by the gradual phase out of a heavily polluting source could be beneficial outside of the obvious pollution benefits. Does it come back to the previous point — that the very idea of reducing energy use is somehow bad — that if we don’t burn away as much as we possibly can in every way we possibly can (e.g. by lighting up the night sky) then we are backwards people like THOSE GUYS?
The light that a satellite picks up is almost ALL wasted energy.
Efficient lighting lights the GROUND, not space. It lights the inside of buildings. Even exterior lighting of a building illuminates the sides — not roof — of the building.
The premise that lighting up the sky at night is a good thing exemplifies the utterly failed attitudes towards energy and the environment that are so catastrophically destructive.
When I first saw that title to your comment I thought it would refer to the energy on the part of ykozlov wasted by responding to DFW:)
As my girl Michelle Bachman warned us when the libs came from our incadescent bulbs, or as my other girl Laura Ingraham would but it in her poetry ‘first they came for my Edison bulbs, then they came for the Jews, then they came for my coal, and then I had nothing left to lose’. Get it cause Jews and lose rhymes in my world. This libby dan is using a newer fuel then me, I just use wood and withches to fuel my fire!
-Guest post from StanfromStoneham