Bill Price
This month marks one year since a Freedom Industries storage tank filled with a coal cleaning chemical leaked into West Virginia's Elk River, leaving more than 300,000 people in the Charleston area without clean water for weeks. And while the state legislature did pass one water safety bill months after the spill, there remains significant work to be done to protect the state's waterways from chemical spills.
To mark the one year anniversary and continue to raise awareness, environmental groups held rallies, workshops, and vigils earlier this month.
On January 9, the official one-year mark, the groups held a workshop in Charleston to train activists on how to engage public officials on water issues. Later West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Randy Huffman of the state Department of Environmental Protection took questions from those who attended the workshop.
Later that night close to 75 people gathered for a candlelight vigil by the Elk River.
Activists also held a rally on January 14 outside the State House chambers during West Virginia Governor Earl Tomblin's "State of the State" address.
"The governor didn't even mention last year's water crisis in his address, which we found alarming," said Bill Price, a Sierra Club organizer in Charleston. "This crisis is ongoing and we don't want him to ignore what's going on. This is a wider issue than just last year's spill."
Activists held another rally outside the Capitol building in Charleston on January 17, where more than 75 people showed up to march from there to the governor's mansion down the street.
"We held a large banner in front of his mansion that read, 'West Virginians are thirsty for clean water,'" said Price. "We're not going to let our public officials, our legislators, or the governor forget what happened."
Price said the West Virginia Sierra Club, the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, and many other groups have a list of demands that will help keep another Freedom Industries-type disaster from happening again.
"The point is, we're just as vulnerable right now to another water safety problem as we were on January 9, 2014," he explained. "If something spills into the Elk River again, we still don't have a secondary water source. We still don't have monitoring equipment to tell us what's coming down the river."
He pointed to a round of state inspections showing that more than 1,000 above-ground storage tanks -- like the ones from Freedom Industries that failed last year -- also failed tests. And those tanks contain everything from oil to gas and other chemicals. Thankfully they aren't all near water intakes.
"But it still shows that there are 1,000 tanks out there not up to standards," said Price. "We have a definite need for continued higher standards in water quality.
The list of demands from the coalition of groups includes:
- All state rivers and streams protected for current and future drinking water use via enforcement of existing protections;
- Adding new classifications that would provide secondary water intakes on the Kanawha River (Elk River is a tributary to the Kanawha);
- Continuing to require that coal mining permits meet water quality standards;
- Appropriating $12.2 million for source water protection planning -- and include the public in that process;
- Strong regulation of above-ground storage tanks and requiring tank owners be financially responsible for contamination events;
- Further studies and recommendations to protect water supplies must be further considered --and full funding of the WV Public Water System Supply Study Commission.
To get involved in the fight for clean water standards in West Virginia, you can email Sierra Club West Virginia's Bill Price.