There is this town in West Virginia. It's called
Charleston and it has been built up along the banks of the Elk River.
This river is currently among other things a source of domestic
water for some three hundred thousand people in a nine county area of
West Virginia. It is also a source of income in the area as a result
of just being a river. In pre-EPA days it also served as a sewer in
which to dispose of all sorts of unwanted things. You name it and
the river took it away for you. The coal-mining companies and their
support industries dominate the economy and the politics of the area.
There is very little local regulation of those core industries. The
lion's share of regulation probably comes out of investigations
undertaken by the Environmental Protection Agency was created during
the presidency of Richard Nixon. This agency (which actually has
Cabinet rank) is the same EPA the current GOP caucus in the House of
Representatives have vowed to close down. God help the people of WV
because their local politicians and pretty much the entirety of their
congress critters aren't going to be of much help.
A company called Freedom Industries
operates a coal-field services company in Charleston. When you think
of coal-field think oil-field as in oil-field services company like
Halliburton Industries and its former CEO Dick Cheney. Among all the
other things it owns on its campus along the Elk River is at least
one storage vessel containing chemicals used in the mining of and/or
treatment of coal extracted in the area. It contains perhaps a
hundred thousand gallons of something I am going to call methylethyl
bad shit. I am calling it that or MEBS because the exact nature of
the chemicals used in many operations in the energy industry
generally are regarded as protectable property interests. They are
called trade secrets. So as a result we really probably won't find
out what exactly has been flowing out of that tank into the Elk
River. My point is simply that no one really knows what is stored in
that tank. The problem of course is that somewhere around 7500
gallons of what I call MEBS and the industry calls a trade secret
have leaked from that tank over an unknown period of time and into
the passing Elk River. As a result of this catastrophe the domestic
water supply for the surrounding nine county area has been shut down
Local
domestic water service is provided by an entity calling itself West
Virginia American Water. This company is owned/controlled by a
for-profit corporation traded on the NYSE under the ticker symbol
AWK. It is a large company and provides water service in 30 of the 50
states of the union and in parts of Canada. It even claims to have
facilities in California. It is the largest for profit water and
wastewater facility in the US. Its name is American Water. According
to its website it engages in “regulated activities” which I
assume is the manufacture, storage and delivery of water for whatever
use its customers want to make of it. It also has something it calls
“market based” activities. I am not even sure I want to know what
those are. Perhaps American Water *AWK” is moving into the medical
marijuana business. Who knows? I will admit that as a four term
veteran of the governing board of a publicly owned water utility that
I have a bias against privately owned water utilities even if they
call themselves publicly traded as does American Water. American Water says it is publicly
traded in order make you think you have some say in its policies and
operations. The only control you have is the universal choice
offered by every monopoly, if you are unhappy “go buy from my
competitor.” You can't even 'fire the bastards' at the next
election. Frankly stated my position is that essential utilities
like power, water, sewer, communications and internet providers are
too important to us in this time of our history to be owned by
plutocrats whose only concern is the dollar value of their
investment.
It
seems there has been an intrusion of MEBS into the local water supply
which is the river that runs along side the town. Yes the Elk River.
Suddenly the powers that be in West Virginia who exercise whatever
regulatory powers the dominant industries have endowed them with have
decided that the domestic water supply drawn from the river is unsafe
for any use whatsoever. Don't drink it. Don't cook with it. Don't
bathe with it. Don't let it touch you. It may kill you or make you
seriously ill. That's a mouthful for any water purveyor to say even a
for profit one like West Virginia American Water.
Water
is a public resource without which life could not exist and consequently
we as a society have gathered together and created publicly owned and
controlled entities to manufactures, treat, store and distribute water to
enable our society to exist and hopefully prosper. It is here to be
shared not just by us but by other inhabitants of the planet. It is
not here to be fouled by us or anything else including our
destructive energy extracting policies tilted in favor of the
extractors.. This public resource has been fouled and perhaps even
destroyed because of lax profit-driven in-name-only schemes of
regulation operating for the benefit of the regulated not for the
benefit of us.
Now this great big multi-national water
utility is faced with the problem of having to restore dependable,
healthy, safe drinking water to 300,000 customers. This is going to
be an enormous and enormously expensive operation. The first thing
that needs to happen is to determine all the source[s] of the leakage
into the Elk River and then stop them. Soil will probably even have
to be removed and trucked elsewhere. Once
that is done American Water can begin the process of draining the
current storage and delivery facilities affected by the leak and
flushing the entire system until such time as contaminants are below
specified parts per million. That of course begs the question what
are we going to do with the contaminated effluent? Dump it back in
the Elk River? That water is going to have to be relocated and
effectively dumped in someone else's backyard.
This is going to be a major undertaking
and I am sure beyond the resources of West Virginia American Water.
Don't expect the parent American Water, the publicly traded NYSE
company or any of its subgroups to dig deep to fund this. That is one
of the reasons why the legal structures of AWK is so diversified
along state lines in order to insulate AWK and its owners from having
to dig deep to pick up the tab for cleanups like the Elk River Mess.
If all else fails West Virginia American Water can simply file for
bankruptcy relief effectively isolating AWK and its other subunits
from the Mess in Elk River and walking away. There is an ugly reality
staring us in the face and we had better figure out a way to deal
with it. If nothing else this critical occurrence in Appalachia shows
the need for independent monitoring of industrial uses along critical
waterways. It also points the way to the folly that is the
privatization of essential utilities. Privatization is a fraud and we need to recognize that. We also need to understand the
almost suicidal folly eliminating the EPA is that is now buzzing
around the ears of Congress members. All this is learnable from the
Elk River Mess.
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