Honestly - if Americans don't get infuriated by this, then when it eventually happens in your backyard, you have no right to complain, and certainly no reasonable expectation of having anyone listen to you or care about your dilemma:
A week after a massive chemical spill at a Freedom Industries storage facility contaminated the Elk River in West Virginia with 7,500 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol and forced 300,000 residents of the state to go without potable, usable water, life is slowly starting to return to normal.
Well, that's the casual way of describing what's happening, anyway. In truth, the story continues to develop in sad and interesting ways. Two days after local authorities gave the all-clear and started to lift the ban on water usage, we found out that was a blown call -- area hospitals very quickly "saw an uptick in patients after the 'do not use' advisory was lifted," and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a warning to pregnant women, "Maybe don't drink this stuff, after all." (I am paraphrasing.)
Meanwhile, about 15 miles up I-64 from Charleston, in the town of Nitro, you'll never guess what's been discovered. Unless, of course, you immediately guessed, "Oh, there was probably another Freedom Industries chemical storage facility with a similar level of substandard containment and due cause to issue citations for multiple safety violations." In which case, points for you!
The good news, I suppose, is that timely scrutiny has been applied to another environmental time bomb. Lord knows that's not the norm. As National Geographic reported this week, the "coal-cleansing chemical that spilled from Freedom Industries' storage tank into the Elk River last Thursday is only the latest insult in what for some has been a lifetime of industrial accidents that have poisoned groundwater, spewed toxic gas emissions, and caused fires, explosions, and other disasters that neither state nor federal regulators have been able to protect against."http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/19/west-virginia-chemical-spill_n_4627394.html
The Gadfly forgets who said it, but when news of this preventable disaster came to light, some public figure made the salient point that if it had been some mid-east terrorist organization responsible for poisoning a major drinking water source for hundreds of thousands Americans, the U.S. military would have gone to DEFCON 1, the Seals and the Spec Ops boys would have been mobilized, and we would be in the process of dropping tons of explosive armaments from our stealth bombers on whatever medieval, back-assward country our crack intelligence agents deemed even partially responsible.
The Gadfly supposes that some folk truly aren't all that concerned about being poisoned by companies - especially as long as the poisoning was done in the name of free-market capitalism.
But since it was a good ol' American corporation with a patriotic sounding name (Freedom Industries), then all is forgiven because . . . . FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM!! There's a word for behavior that derives pleasure from pain . . . . [ see picture at top of post ].
And that is not only sad, it's fucked up.
----TFG
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