The Rude Pundit has a few things to share about the West Virginia chemical spill:
1/13/2014
A West Virginia Friend Talks to the Rude Pundit:
"The difference this time," said the Rude Pundit's old friend in Charleston, West Virginia, "is that it wasn't just poor people who were affected." She was referring to the chemical spill into the Elks River, just a mile and a half upstream from the water treatment plant for 300,000 people in the Kanawha Valley, including the state capital of Charleston. "It was rich people. It was politicians," she continued. "I guarantee that when some legislator's wife couldn't bathe the kids, there was hell to pay." She's right, of course. The rural residents of West Virginia have had to deal endlessly with water filled with chemical leaks, run-off from coal processing, and general disgustingness, like mass fish kills caused by the aforementioned things. You just rarely heard about them because, you know, they're dirt poor and who the fuck cares because they're lucky to live in America.
Still, when you live in Charleston, you get used to a certain amount of poison. You get used to there always being some kind of odor. It's one of the things the Rude Pundit noticed when he visited there a few years ago. The friend said, "This time it was different. I smelled it when I first got up in the morning and it got powerful strong later on." She's a professor, by the way, with a PhD.
There's a whole lot of anger to go around. For instance, the storage facility that held the 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (calm down there, tweakers. Different meth) did not have to be inspected by regulators for leaks because you don't want too many rules holding back the liberty of capitalists, man. It hasn't been inspected since 1991 because West Virginia law requires inspections only for chemical production facilities, not chemical storage joints. If that makes no sense to you, you hate the job creators.
And, for instance, the dude-bros who own the fucking retardedly-named "Freedom Industries" are fucking assholes and fucking criminals. The company, as it exists now, is only two weeks old. Yeah, three other companies merged at the end of 2013 to become the FI that we all know and love. Oh, and there's a chance that the storage facility was completely automated. So not only was it uninspected, but it was completely absent any human beings that might have smelled something funny. (Yeah, you still have to take off your shoes at an airport, but most of our chemical storage places are unguarded.)http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-west-virginia-friend-talks-to-rude.html
The one thing that sticks out most about The Rude Pundit's post above, and which The Gadfly wrote about in an earlier post, was the point about how the storage tanks which were the source of the chemicals leaked in to the waterway, are not required to be inspected, ever apparently. And as far as The Gadfly is concerned, that frightening lack of very doable oversight and regulation is the equivalent of the political and corporate overlords of West Virginia playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette with the lives of the people of it's state. The overlords, by virtue of their anti-regulatory idiocy are basically holding a gun to the heads of the residents of the West Virginia, spinning the revolver's cylinder and then pulling the trigger. And it is just a matter of time before the hammer of the gun is going to make contact with the bullet's primer and at that point it's game over.
It is the same self-inflicting wound of deregulation foolishness that laid the groundwork for the massive explosion in West, Texas in April of last year, which snuffed out the lives of 15 human beings, injured another 160, and nearly wiped half of the town off the map. Prior to that explosion the plant had not been inspected by Texas officials since 1985. As it turns out, they were storing 270 tons of ammonium nitrate and 55 tons of anhydrous ammonia on the site. Since 9/11, Federal law has required that any plant, anywhere in the U.S., to notify The Department of Homeland Security whenever they have more than ONE ton of ammonium nitrate stored on site --- for obvious terrorism prevention reasons. But nobody knew -- because nobody wanted to know, and more to the point, nobody wanted to infringe on the FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEDOM! and liberty of the plant operators to run their business any damn way they felt like it. Gee -- how'd that work out for you West, Texas??
Increasingly -- every time The Gadfly hears of one of these catastrophes occurring in one of these states that has made a calculated decision to let these chemical and petroleum corporations police themselves, The Gadfly becomes ever more desensitized and disinterested in the human carnage that predictably results. The Gadfly acknowledges that this is a horrible thing to say, but in a sense, it is almost as if the people affected by these disasters are deserving of the misfortune visited upon them from these events, since it is quite clear that their own stubborn and ill-advised opposition to having these industries monitored and regulated is the principal factor at the heart of their misery when things do inevitably go bad. It's like the classic Tom & Jerry cartoon - Tom keeps chasing Jerry around the yard and every time he rounds the corner he steps on the rake and the rake handle flies up and cracks him in the face. Frankly, as it is with Tom the cat, there is only so much empathy to be had for people who keep stepping on the same rake over and over and over again.
----TFG
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