By Michael Kelly, Communications Director (Follow Michael on Twitter - @MichaelEdKelly)
Three weeks ago nearly 300,000 West Virginians
lost their tap water because of a spill at a chemical storage facility less than a mile and half from an intake for the region’s drinking water. Cities and businesses were shut down and people couldn’t use their water for more than five days.
Numerous failures led to this disaster, including a lack of state inspection of the facility for the last decade to the
lack of health data available on the chemical.
The question is, what have we learned?
- We need stronger safeguards to protect drinking water sources from disasters like the Freedom Industries spills and everyday pollution from coal plants and other industrial activities
- We need to know more about the chemicals in use around us every day and we must reforms to our chemical management policies
- It’s time to put drinking water first
We have been talking about “Putting Drinking Water First” for a long time and it is more than a talking point. It means making impact on drinking water one of our main considerations when we think about the activities which lead to water pollution. If drinking water truly were our first concern, many of our priority campaigns would be won in no time.
We need to close the gaps in Clean Water Act protection which have left drinking water sources for over 117 million of us at risk of pollution for more than a decade. We need to win protective limits on toxic discharges from coal-burning power plants, many of which go right into drinking water sources. a strong rule that ends coal plant water pollution. We need to not stop talking about putting drinking water first and we need Congress to pass bills like the Safe Chemicals Act to reform our outdated and ineffective chemical policy law.
That’s where you come in. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be developing recommendations for how we can better protect our drinking water sources. We will be putting our expertise on drinking water issues to work to make sure that the interest in preventing risks to drinking water does not fade. We will also keep working on campaign priorities we had long before this terrible spill in West Virginia and we still need your help on those. The
toxic discharges from coal plants are not as dramatic as the recent spill in West Virginia but they’re harmful and preventable.
Please let the President know you support action to protect our rivers, lakes and streams from this unnecessary pollution.
We need you to help us do what we’ve been doing for more than forty years – Put Drinking Water First
