West Virginia officials revealed Tuesday that a second potentially harmful chemical had also spilled into the Elk River contaminating the water supply of over 300,000 area residents.
According to the Charleston Gazette, it wasn’t until 12 days after the Jan. 9 spill that Gary Southern, the President of Freedom Industries—the source of the leak—told the state Department of Environmental Protection emergency response director Mike Dorsey that the 7,500 gallons of Crude MCHM also contained a chemical known as “PPH,” which contains potentially toxic glycol ethers.
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The Gazette reports:
State officials said late Tuesday that they believe the West Virginia American Water utility company would “likely have removed the chemical from drinking water during its normal treatment process,” and are performing additional testing of water samples from the first days after the incident to confirm that.
“We have to go back and confirm things and make sure we’re doing our due diligence for public health,” said Gen. James Hoyer of the West Virginia National Guard.
The news comes less than a week after WVAW announced the water was safe to drink.
Ahead of the revelation, the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) and the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) sent an open letter to the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention denouncing the “lack of openness” on the part of government officials regarding the spill and ongoing clean up effort.
The groups write:
The lack of transparency regarding the spill coupled with the unregulated containment of toxic chemicals along the region’s water supply have raised many questions regarding the state’s notoriously lax regulation regime.
On Monday, West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin announced new proposed legislation that would regulate above-ground chemical storage tanks— in response to which Huffington Post reporter Jason Linkins quipped: “Wait, you mean that West Virginia regulators weren’t doing this stuff already?”
Reuters reports:
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