WV Water Crisis Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

Key Health Players Look Back At The 2014 Water Crisis

Ten years ago, a state of emergency and water advisory was issued for nine West Virginia counties following a chemical spill in the Elk River.

On Jan. 9, 2014, a state of emergency and water advisory was issued for nine West Virginia counties following a chemical spill of Methylcyclohexane Methanol (MCHM) from Freedom Industries, Inc. into the Elk River. MCHM is used in the coal preparation process.

State environmental officials estimated that 7,500 gallons of crude MCHM leaked into the Elk River.

West Virginia American Water told more than 100,000 customers (about 300,000 people) in Boone, Cabell, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam and Roane counties not to ingest, cook, bathe or wash with the water from their tap, even after boiling. Water in this coverage area was OK’d only for flushing and fire protection.

On Jan. 13, 2014, DHHR Secretary Karen Bowling announced at a press conference that 14 people were admitted to the hospital, 231 people were treated and released in connection to the water contamination. West Virginia Poison Control received more than 1,000 calls. No deaths were connected to the spill.

Then-director of West Virginia Poison Control Elizabeth Scharman said calls were steady from when the initial “do not use” order was first put into place.

As the ban was lifted in areas, Scharman said the center received calls about an increased odor, but that was expected.

The center evaluated each call individually and suspected that some cases of skin irritation could be caused by constant hand sanitizer use. Scharman said excessive testing would be needed to confirm the source of the irritation.

On Jan. 15, 2014, the Health Department consulted with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It recommended pregnant women continue drinking bottled water until there were no longer detectable levels of the chemical in the water distribution system.

The CDC reaffirmed previous advice that it did not anticipate any adverse health effects from levels less than 1 ppm.

A week after the spill, the CDC fielded questions from local and national media on a conference call.

“This is a dynamic and evolving event,” Dr. Vikas Kapil, chief medical officer for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health, said repeatedly on the conference call.

Kapil said only a few animal studies on MCHM exist and CDC scientists were working to make summaries of those studies available to the media and the public. He also pointed out that studies were not available on the chemical as it relates to cancer or reproductive health in animals.

Paul Ziemkiewicz, director of the West Virginia Water Research Institute, described the chemical leaked from Freedom Industries into the Elk River, crude MCHM, as a kind of detergent used to clean coal, known as a surfactant.

“You’re trying to separate the coal from the non-burnable stuff like shales, clays, stuff like that,” Ziemkiewicz said. “The process takes advantage of the fact that coal is lighter than these clays and rocks, but they have to be separated. So you use these surfactants to help that separation process.”

He said that water ends up in slurry impoundments, and then often is recycled to wash more coal.

“MCHM, which is of course, methylcyclohexane methanol,” Ziemkiewicz said. “It’s a relatively volatile compound, and when I say that, that means it tends to first of all, float on top of the water, and since it floats on top of the water, and it’s volatile, so it’s lighter than water, less dense than water, it floats on top just like an oil would. And it tends to be volatile, which means that if you give it a chance, the MCHM disperses as a gas into the atmosphere.”

One of Ziemkiewicz’s crews was on-site at Freedom Industries to study the spill in 2014.

“We mobilized the crew, one of our crews here at the water research institute, to go downstream from the spill point and measure how much MCHM was found in the Elk and in the Kanawha rivers,” Ziemkiewicz said. “And what we found there was pretty much dispersed fairly quickly and was non-detectable by the time it got to the Ohio River.”

Ziemkiewicz said one of the things that went wrong during the spill was that the water intake at the water treatment plant remained on, pulling the chemical compound along with water into the water distribution system for nine counties.

“The MCHM was essentially trapped in these distribution pipes, and it took a long time to flush that MCHM back out of the system,” Ziemkiewicz said.

Mike McCawley, a clinical associate professor in WVU’s Department of Occupational and Environmental Health Sciences, said a group of his students volunteered to work in the Charleston area during the spill.

“They were going around helping to inform people, and also taking information about what people were doing to kind of protect themselves,” McCawley said. “So it was a time when we got to talk a lot more about chemical exposures, environmental chemical exposures that people had not thought about before.”

McCawley called it a time of stress and worry for the state.

“It was a difficult time, because both drinking and bathing are something that people were worried about doing because they didn’t know what the long-term health effects were,” McCawley said.

The 2014 water crisis spurred the creation of WVU’s School of Public Health which was previously the Department of Community Medicine.

“One of the recommendations that Dr. (Rahul) Gupta, in fact made, was that there should be a School of Public Health at West Virginia University, which was the impetus for turning our Department of Community Medicine into a school, a whole school of public health,” McCawley said.

While the water crisis left thousands without water for weeks, McCawley said he has not heard of any long-term health effects from the spill.

At the time of the spill, the short-term health complaint McCawley heard most often was headaches.

“Headaches were a big thing that people were complaining of,” McCawley said. “That was probably, I think, top of the list.”

While some policies and practices have changed since the 2014 spill, McCawley believes there is still plenty of room for improvement.

“There needs to be regular good inspections, and reporting that is done from that,” McCawley said. “We found that the leaks that were occurring, didn’t seem to get taken seriously, as soon as they possibly could have.”

McCawley also emphasized the need for “inflammation” as a symptom to be taken more seriously and to report exposure to any chemical to a doctor.

“We know inflammation can lead to a lot of things,” McCawley said. “We don’t know how much inflammation leads to what necessarily, but we know it leads to all sorts of nasty things. And so we should keep it in mind and maybe make sure our doctors know that.”

By Jan. 17, 2014, the last of the “do not use” water restrictions were lifted for the last customer area in West Virginia American Water’s Kanawha Valley district.

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.

Illustrated Novel Looks At Central Appalachia

“Pop: An Illustrated Novel” is a new book by author Robert Gipe, set in a fictional central Appalachian county during the runup to the 2016 elections with parts of the plotline connected to the 2014 West Virginia Water Crisis.

Eric Douglas spoke with Gipe from his home in Harlan, Kentucky to find out more about the story.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: Tell me a little bit about “Pop.” Tell me how you came to write this book.

Gipe: The book is set in Eastern Kentucky and East Tennessee and in Charleston. It concerns a woman who’s been the protagonist of two prior books, Dawn Jewel, who grew up in Eastern Kentucky. In my first novel, she was the 15-year-old narrator. And now she has a 17-year-old daughter. It’s set in the run up to the 2016 election. Dawn’s husband works for a chemical company that is selling “coal float” to a coal company in West Virginia.

Douglas: This book is the third story in a trilogy. As I understand it, when you wrote your first book, you had it planned as three books. Is that accurate?

Gipe: Yep, pretty much. I knew I was gonna write three books. I didn’t know what was gonna happen.

Douglas: Were these your first books? It’s ambitious to start out and say I’m going to write three full books.

Gipe: I started going to the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Harlan, Kentucky, when I first decided that I wanted to try and write a novel. I’d been involved in playwriting before that and had done some original theater here in Harlan. So I started going to the Appalachian Writers Workshop just to see what I could do. Most of us were working full time and trying to write on the side. One of the exercises was to visualize all the books you would ever write, because most of us were older. Many of us were dealing with the difficulty of visualizing ourselves as a writer at all. That’s where I came up with the names of the three books and then I just kind of wrote the titles and worked backwards.

Douglas: One of the subplots that I thought was interesting was the adventure tourism angle, but also the film company coming to Canard County to create a film. I love the scene where they’re all sitting around, everybody’s drinking and all the locals are saying, “This is what you ought to put in your movie.” And you had the film company actually incorporate a lot of their ideas. I thought that was an interesting twist on the idea that usually it’s groups coming in from outside to tell a story without actually talking to anybody locally.

Gipe: Yeah, that was one of the fantasy aspects of the writing. Actually, in my community, we had a film crew produce a feature film here that we were involved with, and they were actually very open to input from the community.

Douglas: With your first two books, you had one or two narrators, but with this one, there’s a number of different perspectives throughout the book. Why did you choose to incorporate those different voices?

Gipe: My first job here in the coalfields was working with a documentary film center in Whitesburg, Kentucky called Appalshop. At the core of most of the work was interviewing and oral history work. And then the Higher Ground Theater series that I’ve been a part of here in Harlan is also very interview driven. So that was a natural storytelling mode for me; first person narrators, almost like edited interviews. It’s out of that documentary tradition.

Douglas: Why did you choose to incorporate the West Virginia water crisis into the story?

Gipe: The first book dealt with a campaign I’d been involved with to help protect the land around the highest peak in Kentucky. I was very interested in the idea that you could talk about activism and justice work within fiction without losing any drama. I’m always dealing with something that’s going on, that’s bigger than whatever’s kind of going on at the community level or with individual families. In the second book, we looked at some issues around mining as well. In the actual historical event, the chemical that spilled was manufactured in my hometown. So that happened when I was working on the book, or had recently happened and that’s how that ended up in there.

Douglas: The other question I have for you is, why the illustrations?

Gipe: I started publishing some of the chapters on some friends’ literary blog, back before I had a publishing contract, and incorporated the illustrations then. And the publisher thought that would be worth doing with the printed version, so I just kept doing it. I like graphic novels and comic strip derived stuff. All of the illustrations are the characters speaking, directly addressing the audience, and they underline the idea that there is a person that’s speaking rather than writing.

“Pop: An Illustrated Novel” completes a trilogy of illustrated novels set

in Appalachia. It is now available through Ohio University Press.

This story is part of a series of interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.

Novel ‘Poison Flood’ Uses Water Crisis As Backdrop

Poison Flood, a new novel by Jordan Farmer, is set against the backdrop of an environmental disaster in southern West Virginia. It includes murder, theft and riots. The book is described as a crime and noir-style mystery by the publisher.

The disaster Farmer writes about is based loosely on the 2016 West Virginia Water Crisis that poisoned the water of 300,000 central West Virginia residents for more than a week. His version is more devastating than the original, however.

When Farmer spoke with Eric Douglas, he said he wanted to tell an entertaining story, but he also wanted to have a main character that was outside the norm.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Douglas: What do you hope readers take away from the book?

Farmer: First of all, I want them to be entertained. I think that any art that doesn’t entertain you or connect with you on some kind of emotional level, if it’s just all just moral, then I think it fails the test of what art should do. So at first, I want them to be entertained and engaged and to have some kind of emotional reaction to the characters. I want them to love them or hate them or feel sympathetic towards them, and have some kind of empathetic response.

Douglas: Your character Hollis is a tremendously talented musician. But he also had a pretty significant disability. Why did you decide to throw that into the mix?

Farmer: I wanted to write a story with somebody, a narrator or a protagonist, that had what I would refer to as an unconventional body. I kind of have one myself. I have a bone disorder that’s stunted my overall growth so I’m about five feet tall. When I was younger, and was really interested in literature and books, I never found characters who had these kinds of different physical bodies or were physically different in some way.

If I did find a story about them, it was always a story that was entirely concerned with the struggle of being physically different. It was never about them succeeding in business or love or making art or something else. It was always just focused on the body itself.

Douglas: Hollis deals with the stress of his life by composing music in his head, and then has to get a guitar and compose music to help himself calm down. What’s the root behind that? Are you a musician?

Farmer: No, I’m not a musician myself. I play a little bit of a bad punk rock and sort of cowboy-chord country guitar. I wouldn’t call myself a musician, but being a creative guy growing up in a small town without a writer group, or people who were interested in the same kind of art forms I was, a lot of my friends were musicians. And I think I was deeply influenced by the kind of music I grew up around. My grandfather gave me Johnny Cash records and stuff to listen to when I was younger. So I wanted to write about the creative process. But I wasn’t necessarily interested in the idea of writing about writing. Those kinds of books don’t always interest me. I like music and I like the performative aspect of music.

Douglas: Is your next book also set in West Virginia? Is that something you plan to continue? Or are you moving elsewhere with the next one?

Farmer: Poison Flood, and the next manuscript I’m working on, take place in a sort of a fictional town in West Virginia, much like Faulkner wrote about a fictional area of Mississippi. It’s called Coopersville County, which is my way of being able to have a town similar to the communities that I grew up in, but also to not have complete and total realism.

Douglas: Are you at all concerned about people saying, ‘well, that’s just some West Virginia story’ and not being interested in your work because it is such a small, remote place.

Farmer: I had this idea when I was younger that there just wasn’t a place for stories about West Virginia. Or a desire for stories from small towns or rural America or places where I’m from. Now, I’m not so sure that’s true. Now, I think that as long as you’re telling an interesting story and the themes are something that anyone anywhere can understand, I think people will engage with it regardless of the area. I think that your first concern is simply to tell an engaging story.

Jordan Farmer was born and raised in a small West Virginia town, population approximately two thousand. He earned his master’s degree from Marshall University and his Ph.D. at The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Poison Flood was released in May by Putnam Publishing. Listen to other interviews with authors from, or writing about, Appalachia.