WV Water Unsafe Due to Coal De-Foaming Chemical: How Does Something Like This Happen?

By Lynn Thorp, National Campaigns Director (Follow Lynn on Twitter - @LTCWA) The chemical spill in West Virginia, which has resulted in undrinkable and unusable tap water for hundreds of thousands of people, definitely falls into the category of Things We Are Not Doing to Put Drinking Water First.  As readers of this blog know, we are committed to identifying activities which put our drinking water at risk and to solving those problems before they get into the treatment plant or in fact into your kitchen sink. Here are some of the questions we have today:

• Why allow a storage tank containing tens of thousands of gallons of a chemical, which could cause problems if it leaks, to be situated where it could ever leak into a drinking water sources, in this case the Elk River?
• Why does it appear that the company responsible for this tank did not know it was leaking?
• What mechanisms should be in place for Public Water Systems to not only know about such risks but to have a voice in challenging them when they threaten the drinking water source through which they provide water to the public?
• When will we start looking at our choices with an eye toward their ultimate threat to one of our most precious resources – the water we use for drinking, bathing and other daily needs? All of our activities pose risks of many kinds, but reliance on tens of thousands of gallons of an irritant chemical in order to get coal to market is one I’m pretty sure most people have not considered.

The Safe Drinking Water Act, passed forty years ago this year, has done so much to ensure that the water delivered by our Public Water Systems to over 85% of us meets federal standards.  Yet that law doesn’t create authority to protect the bodies of water which are our sources of drinking water. The Clean Water Act is supposed to help fill that gap, but something went wrong here. How does something like this happen? Because we don’t Put Drinking Water First and that has to change.