![]() West Virginia has a long legacy of regulations that go unenforced by state agencies. And loopholes in environmental laws may mean that the disposal of potentially harmful chemicals into the Elk River - whether intentional or not - was perfectly legal. The patchwork of lax state and federal regulations governing chemical storage facilities like those owned by Freedom Industries allowed the company to go uninspected for decades. It’s not clear how long the chemical had been leaking into the river before it was discovered by the DEP, but it’s also not clear - at least from a legal standpoint - that anything went wrong. "It was apparent that this was not an event that had just happened." "This was a Band-Aid approach," state DEP air quality inspector Mike Kolb told the paper. ![]() To contain the spill, Freedom Industries appeared to be using a cinder block and a 50-pound bag of absorptive industrial powder, according to the Charleston Gazette. When West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection inspectors visited Freedom Industries, where a chemical spill into a river caused 300,000 people to lose access to clean water last week, they found a 400-square-foot pool of the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane-methanol, or MCHM, sitting outside one of Freedom Industries’ tanks.įreedom Industries hadn’t told the DEP about the spill - regulators were there because of nearby residents’ complaints about a funny smell coming from the company’s storage facilities. ![]()
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