The Mountaineer State's image as caring more about corporations than people is
really being bolstered this week.
West Virginia emergency planners never put together any strategy for dealing with spills of a toxic chemical from the Freedom Industries' tank farm, despite the facility's location just 1.5 miles upstream from a drinking water intake serving 300,000 people, officials acknowledged this morning.
Local emergency official likewise didn't act to prepare for such an incident, even though they had been warned for years about storage of toxic chemicals so close to the West Virginia American Water plant serving the Kanawha Valley and surrounding region.
"That's just something that's kind of fallen by the wayside," said Larry Zuspan, administrator of the Kanawha-Putnam Emergency Planning Committee.
They had other priorities than health and safety
I guess.
Freedom Industries' tanks don't fall under an inspection program, and the chemicals stored at the facility weren't considered hazardous enough to require environmental permitting.
Just like most of
the American media.
[cross-posted at
Firedoglake]
Rising Hegemon
7 comments:
The YouTube shows aggressive, outraged reporters ready to do their jobs. Wonder how that happened. They were as docile and polite as you please when the Massey Energy mine up the road exploded.
Oh, yeah. They’ve been denied a shower for a couple of days, and they’re uncomfortable. Guess that’s what it takes to get them off their butts and do their jobs.
Blankenship skated, so will this Gary Southern dude.
Mr Southern, said his voice was sore from talking a lot and that it had been "an extremely hard day" the balls!
"The chemical, even in its most concentrated form, isn't deadly. However, people were told they shouldn't even wash their clothes in affected water, as the compound can cause symptoms ranging from skin irritation and rashes to vomiting and diarrhea" No contingency plan here folks, move along
Finally, proof that "trickle down" economics really works!
Oh for heaven's sake! Leave Freedom Industries aloooone! Nobody could have possibly foreseen that the storage tanks might ever leak, or rupture, or get hit by a tornado. That just never, ever happens!
And who could have predicted that if some of those wayward chemicals got into the river adjacent to the tanks, why you'd have to be Nostradamus hisself to figure that it would drift a mile downstream to the water plant.
We can argue all day long about whose chemicals poisoned whose water, but the fact of the matter is that Freedom Industries is pretty darned mad about all this, too. So let's just say that everyone's to blame, and why isn't the government getting this mess cleaned up faster?
What do they do with this shit when it hasn't leaked, under their normal use. That's what I wanna know. They have so much of it, where the hell does it go normally?
how much is the job worth? crapitalism says the worker pays.
maybe when a reporter actually DOES their job, we might hold the carping for a minute? She was pretty in charge there.
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