A contractor is set to begin excavating soil contaminated by the January 2014 chemical leak that fouled public water supplies for hundreds of thousands of…
A contractor is set to begin excavating soil contaminated by the January 2014 chemical leak that fouled public water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people in Charleston and the surrounding region.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection says the contractor hired by Freedom Industries will start digging Monday. Up to 10,000 tons of soil will be removed.
The department says the work, which also includes soil sampling backfilling the site with contaminant-free dirt, is expected to take up to three months.
The spill into the Elk River occurred just a mile-and-a-half upstream of a water intake that serves about 300,000 people in nine counties. As a result, residents were ordered not to use the water for anything but toilet flushing for several days.
Mike Youngren has lived in Charleston for the last 20 years. A West Virginia Public Broadcasting alum, Youngren pursued filmmaking after retiring. When the January 9th chemical leak happened, Youngren decided the problem was widespread enough for people to stop to pay attention to what he had to say. With this in mind, he decided to develop his documentary, Elk River Blues.
Youngren’s film, Elk River Blues will have its world premiere on Friday, January 9th, at the Culture Center. It is a part of a list of special events occurring that same night commemorating the one year anniversary of a chemical spill into the Elk River near Charleston.
A West Virginia panel is suggesting a new tax credit, $12.2 million in extra funding and other tweaks to a law that responded to a January chemical…
A West Virginia panel is suggesting a new tax credit, $12.2 million in extra funding and other tweaks to a law that responded to a January chemical spill.
The Public Water Supply System Study Commission suggested changes in a 47-page report submitted Monday.
The $12.2 million in recommended funding over three years would help utilities complete more intensive source water protection plans.
The proposed state income tax credit would reward landowners who use land for water protection.
In March, lawmakers cleared reforms responding to the January spill that tainted 300,000 people’s water for days. A tank leaked chemicals into the Elk River, which West Virginia American Water uses for the region’s water supply.
The group has to produce reports on the law’s effectiveness by Dec. 15 annually.
Janice Summers-Young is one of two West Virginian artists who were selected for a new exhibit at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia. The exhibit, called Second Time Around: The Hubcap as Art, features 287 artists from 36 different countries and opened yesterday.
Young lives in the community of Queen Shoals, about a mile from the Elk River, right on the line between Kanawha and Clay Counties. By day, she and her husband Terry work for their construction business. Most weekends they spend hiking, camping, and collecting materials that Young uses in collages that are on display throughout their home.
“I’ve always loved art, and I’ve always done some form of art, and tried to make my whole life a kind of art,” said Young.
When Young and her husband began to build their home, they discovered fossils in the rocks that they dug out of the dirt. So they decided to use the fossilized stones to build the exterior of their home.
“The area had been coal mined quite a bit, some years back. We started building our house here, we started hand-picking our stones from where we had dug here, the excavation, the stones we turned up, and also stones along the creek bank, because they’re rich in fossils. And I also wanted it to look like this house fit here,” said Young.
Credit Roxy Todd
/
Young with one of her collage pieces
Young’s art, like her home, also includes objects from nature, from wasp nests that are preserved with porcelain, to pieces of driftwood that are constructed into circular collages, inspired by whirlpools she finds in rivers.
She also finds imaginative ways to incorporate pieces of trash that other people dump in the woods, like using scrap wire to shape into trees.
Her work drew the attention of Pennsylvania artist Ken Marquis, founder of the Landfill Arts Project. He invited Young to submit a piece of art for a new exhibit, which opened on September 7th. Over 1,000 artists from around the world were given a hubcap. Each of them repurposed their hubcap in their own way. Young was one of a few hundred artists whose piece was selected for the exhibit.
“When I got the hubcap, the first thing that entered my mind was the driftwood piece, inside the hubcap. I’ve seen so many hubcaps in the river. And I’ve watched them pop off the hill and roll down into the river.
And there’s swirlholes where the whirlpools land, and they’re circular. And they’ll have little bits of wood or stones collect inside of them, said Young.”
The Landfill Arts Project organized the exhibit to help encourage the public to think creatively about re-purposing old materials. What one person might consider trash, artists like Janice Young see as materials that can be used to create.
Credit Roxy Todd
/
Painting of an owl, by Janice Summers-Young
“I thought it was a really really neat project that’s gonna have that many people from all around participating in something that I’m passionate about. You know, just not wasting so much and trying to reuse as much as possible. No, we can’t all be environmental saints, but any little thing that we can do all adds up eventually,” said Young.
Young says she doesn’t consider herself an environmentalist. But as a West Virginian artist, she does feels inspired by the delicate beauty of the mountains and the rivers. Often, it’s a beauty that she thinks is abused.
Credit Roxy Todd
/
Part of one of Young’s paintings
When she sees trash in the river, she picks it up, and tries to turn it into art. Now, that art will be on display in a museum, surrounded by the works of artists from across the world. All 287 of them are tied together by the willingness to create– out of the waste that most people call trash.
Young and another West Virginian artist, Romney Shelton Collins, will both have their hubcap art on display at The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley in Winchester, Virginia through next March. The museum is open Tuesday-Sunday, 10-4.
