In West Virginia over 300,000 people were ordered not to use their tap water after an unknown quantity of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol—a chemical used to process coal—spilled into the Elk River, contaminating the water system serving nine counties. The ban lasted five days during which area residents could not even use their tap water for washing dishes or showering, let alone drink it. Exposure to Methyl X can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, eye, nose and throat irritation as well as rash.
Residents reported that their water had turned a blue-green color and carried a licorice odor.
Over a hundred people were treated for symptoms, and many times more were affected indirectly through closures of hospitals, nursing homes, schools and food services. Though the specific chemical involved in this spill was not deadly, it highlights the larger issues at play in a state and a country where the health of the people and the environment take a backseat to corporate interest and private profit.
West Virginia’s economy is dominated by the coal and chemical industries which use their powerful political influence to avoid meeting environmental and safety guidelines. This might explain how the site where the leak occurred, owned by Freedom Industries, had been able to avoid safety inspections for over a decade despite being located only a mile up river from the state’s largest water treatment plant. The extent and duration of the contamination might also have been impacted by the privatization of the state’s water system which reduced the number of water treatment plants serving West Virginia, as well as the centralization of the nine counties onto a single water source due to the contamination of local water sources by coal mining.
The fight for the health of their families and the land and water on which they depend has been ongoing for communities in West Virginia. In these communities cancer rates have doubled in connection with widespread pollution caused by the destructive practice of mountaintop coal mining. This flagrant disregard for human life by the corporate interest behind the coal industry has also led to acute disasters like the explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in 2009 which took the lives of 29 miners after its owner, Massey Energy, repeatedly failed to meet safety standards.
Despite this catastrophic toll on human life, political will remains beholden to the coal lobby, and coal companies continue to endanger the people of West Virginia. Today, Marsh Fork Elementary school sits in the shadow of a tank that holds 2.8 billion gallons of toxic coal sludge. Should the dam holding the sludge break, the 230 children inside the school would have less than five minutes to evacuate.
What this latest catastrophe in West Virginia reveals is the crisis of a system that places profit over public safety and the health of our environment. In the disordered values system of capitalism, corporate interest justifies putting a chemical facility along a major water source or creating a lake of toxic sludge above an elementary school if it saves or makes money. It is this same logic that endangers the very future of our earth as increased emissions by the coal and other industries drive us towards rapid and irreversible climate change.
Whether it’s for the safety of the water in West Virginia, or the future of our planet as a whole, what is needed is another system. Socialism is a system designed to meet and protect human needs. Under socialism, corporations that endanger people’s lives and the health of the environment would not be allowed to exist. In order to build this sort of system we need a revolutionary movement to take power away from corporations like the coal and chemical industries whose greed is poisoning our water locally, and destroying our planet as a whole.
