Chemical spill in W.Va.

[BlueStreak]

Originally Posted by MrPots

Turns out that as a chemical storage facility, it had no regulations or inspections to which it needed to comply. Nice little loophole there.

This is a nice jumping board into the water safety debate though, what with frackers on one side saying "don't worry" about the earthquakes and water, while the other side uses it's water Fawcett's as flame throwers and duct tapes it's pipes every time the earth shifts.

That's really weird. Because I know from past experience that chemical storage regulations can get pretty anal. At the headlamp plant, we had to build a separate "explosion proof" building just to house paints and solvents.

[BlueStreak]

Mine flies all the time.

But, if I saw somebody buring one, my only thought would be, "Asshole.", then I'd walk away. I'm not about to kill anybody over protest that I find distasteful. There's just something so "un-American" about that.

[piece-itpete]

Originally Posted by BlueStreak

Mine flies all the time.

But, if I saw somebody buring one, my only thought would be, "Asshole.", then I'd walk away. I'm not about to kill anybody over protest that I find distasteful. There's just something so "un-American" about that.

Nothing wrong with a punch in the nose there Dave. Don't HAVE to shewt'em, but it wouldn't hurt

Pete

[BlueStreak]

Originally Posted by piece-itpete

Nothing wrong with a punch in the nose there Dave. Don't HAVE to shewt'em, but it wouldn't hurt

Pete

I don't believe in quelling non-violent protest. Even if the idiots protesting disgust me. Give them a piece of my mind, perhaps. Hurt anyone over it? Never. I've grown up, in that regard.

Besides, I've been present when force was used to disperse peaceful protesters. It wasn't pretty. (At the behest of coal mine owners.)

[MrPots]

I thought it odd too, but that's what was reported on NPR this AM.

My own industry (my day job) is regulated out the ass.......

[Tom Joad]

Originally Posted by BlueStreak

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...A0902T20140111

Yeah, no need for environmental regulation. All it does is kill jobs, anyways. Besides, the companies will do an excellent job of policing themselves. They drink the water and breathe the air too, you know

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...ith-government

Let's take a look at the track record of private industry over the last 200 hours.

The giant retailer Target let it be known that it wasn't 40 million customers who had their financial data stolen, it was 70 million...and then it was 110 million...and it was also PIN numbers and email addresses that got snatched, too. If the federal government had allowed so profound a theft of financial information to take place, the good people at Fox News would be handing out the pitchforks and torches. After a third of the country was placed in peril of having their money stolen, thanks to the failure of private industry? Silence.

In West Virginia, some 300,000 people have been deprived of water to drink, bathe in, or prepare food with for days upon days now. Hospitals and retirement homes have had no water to work with, restaurants and other small businesses have been closed, because the water is so dirty you cannot even boil it to make it clean. Why? Because thousands of gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol were dumped into the Elk River by the magnificently-misnamed Freedom Industries, a private company that deals with coal.

But damn those pointy-headed bureaucrats in Washington, right? Except it's the public servants in Washington who are running down the crooks who stole all that information from Target. It's the public servants who are cleaning up the mess made by Freedom Industries, and who are trucking in thousands of gallons of clean water to make sure the West Virginia residents affected by this get through it.

And there's this, too: the site of the spill in West Virginia has not undergone a government inspection since 1991, because government is the problem, so they de-regulated everything. And when it does go wrong, as it always does (ask West, Texas), it's the taxpayer who pays for the clean-up that is performed by the public servants.

Clearly, the decades-long push to privatize everything will lead us all to paradise on Earth.

[MrPots]

Originally Posted by Tom Joad

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/ite...ith-government

Tom, industry pretty much writes regulation these days. They write the regulations, submit them with a campaign check, and the lawmakers put their stamps on it without question.

This is our plutocracy.

[Rajoo]

I expect this company to declare bankruptcy and walk away. Just how these go down.

Here is this: One lawsuit was filed Monday by a family who lives near Freedom's facility and alleges that they smelled the licorice smell off and on for more than a year. The lawsuit alleges that the family, identified only by their initials, had made several complaints to the state Department of Environmental Protection about the odor.
http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201401...=2&build=cache

This usually means that there is possible ground water contamination and that is a very expensive cleanup.

[piece-itpete]

Heck I spoke to a hazmat truck driver a couple years ago, he inadvertently spilled a little nastiness when he decoupled his hose (tanker truck), they had to remove 6 square yards of gravel/dirt from the site!

Pete

[merrylander]

Given the Law of Conservation of Matter I would imagine that all of these spills are still out there polluting the environment even though they are diluted. Sooner or later the concentration will be enough to cause harm.