Nate Sell recently posted an ETR blog on the chemical leak at Freedom Industries which spilled into the Elk River in West Virginia. In the wake of this disaster a number of questions have arisen on how this could happen and why a chemical plant would be placed so close to a river. Ken Ward, Jr., a nationally recognized reporter for the Charleston Gazette, has written a piece on state officials acknowledging they had no plan for a possible spill.
Emergency planners at the state and federal level have conceded that they never put together any strategy for dealing with spills of a toxic chemical from the Freedom Industries’ tank farm, despite its location just 1.5 miles upstream from a drinking water intake serving 300,000 people.
Ward’s article highlights the lax regulation and lack of communication between different authorities—an in-depth look at the mess, all of it. It’ll be interesting to see how West Virginia handles the situation and what results from it.
