I knew Eric Waggoner's essay about the chemical spill went viral when a vice president at NPR sent it to me and said I should read this.
In
fact, it's been featured on CNN and Huffington Post. Waggoner is a
professor at West Virginia Wesleyan who published the essay under the
title "Elemental" on his blog, Cultural Slagheap.
He
says he's surprised his words have traveled so far and wide. The best
part, he says, is hearing from West Virginians who say, "That's how I
feel."
Here it is, republished with Waggoner's permission with two minor language changes so I can allow my ten-year-old daughter to read this:
My
dad, a lifelong firefighter, used to teach Hazardous Materials Response
and Safety classes to first responders. The first informational point
he covered at the beginning of the course was how to read the
classification marks on transportation tankers—the little diamond-shaped
signs, usually mounted on the back of the tank, that announce via
numerical code what kinds of chemicals are stored in those transport
vehicles, and what levels and types of health risks would be associated
with a spill in the case of a wreck.
The first homework
assignment he gave was for the firefighters to go home and stand on the
main cross street in their neighborhoods and home towns for about an
hour, and write down the numbers on every tag they saw pass through that
intersection, then go look up the numbers. Dad said that the next
week, when those students came back for class, invariably there’d be two
or three groups of firefighters whose faces were white as flour.
***
This
is not going to be a very cogent post, I’m afraid. We’re still in the
middle of the mess that got made for us, and there are still a lot of
things we don’t know, including when the water is going to be drinkable
again. I’ll try to be as articulate as I can.
Yesterday,
Saturday January 11, I drove to Charleston WV, the city where I was
born, and where my parents, my sister and her husband, my niece, and
many of my family still live. I’m two hours north now, up in lumber
country. They’re still down south in coal country. One of the ways we
identify regional demarcations in this state is through industry.
I’d
been talking to my folks ever since the spill at Freedom Industries on
Thursday morning. Here’s what we know so far: The spill dumped 7,500
gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) into the Elk River, a
mile and a half upstream from the intake pipes for West
Virginia-American Water, a company that serves nine counties.
The
spill was caused, according to the most reliable reports we’ve been
seeing to this point, because of deterioration of Freedom Industries’
storage and transfer materials for chemicals used in coal processing.
We’re talking here about your basic rusted pipes and breached concrete
containment walls. Freedom Industries hadn’t been inspected by the
Department of Environmental Protection in over 20 years. There was,
we’re being told, no plan—no plan—on the books for procedure and
protocol, should one of those containment tanks happen to be breached.
I
drove down to Charleston on Saturday morning with ten cases of bottled
water, as my folks, my sister and brother-in-law, and my niece haven’t
been able to use tap water since Thursday. Saturday morning it rained
in Buckhannon—rained hard. It rained off and on all the way to
Charleston, a sheeting, high-wind downpour that at times, through the
windshield, looked like driving through a car wash.
About ten
miles out of Charleston, the rain slacked off. The temperature was
mild, about 60 degrees. I drove south to the point where I-79 South
ends, and you pick up I-64 West to head into the interstate exchanges on
the freeway that runs the length of downtown. And there, about a mile
and a half out, I smelled it, smelled the odor of the MCHM coming in
through the car vents.
I keep hearing the odor described as
“licorice.” That’s not quite right, at least to me. But I can see how
you’d make that association. The smell was both sweet and sharp, and
strangely light, at least in comparison to the smells I associated with
chemical leaks growing up. But it was there, suddenly, like someone had
flipped a switch. It wasn’t there, and then the next second, there it
was.
I-64 West into Charleston, coming from southbound, unrolls
in a big left-hand curve just after you come into the city. I’ve driven
this route hundreds, maybe thousands of times. I grew up here. I
recognize every building from the freeway—the banks, the hospitals, the
hotels and apartment complexes, all of it. In the deepest part of that
big left-hand curve, down off the freeway and to my left, there was West
Virginia-American Water Company, and the smell suddenly became very,
very strong.
On my way in, the rain had let up. Now there was
low-lying fog, white-and-gray tufts and tendrils of vapor rising up from
the street level all around the small wood-frame houses and gas
stations and grocery stores. The sky was dark, and the fog was in the
streets, and the smell was everywhere. I looked at the water company,
and I smelled the air, and suddenly I was filled—I mean
filled—with a rage that was quite sudden, very unexpected, and utterly comprehensive.
We
can never predict what moments are going to affect us this way. I’m no
dewy-eyed innocent about chemical leaks. They were regular occurrences
when I was a kid. On the merits, this doesn’t seem right now to be the
worst industrial threat West Virginia has ever endured. Hell, it isn’t
the most immediately threatening one my family has endured personally;
that would be the bromine leak in my very own hometown of Malden in the
1980s, the one that forced a complete evacuation of the entire town
until the leak could be contained.
But something about this
confluence, the way I had to bring potable water to my family from two
hours north, the strange look of the landscape wreathed in rain and
mist, the stench of a chemical that was housed directly upstream from
the water company—something about all of that made me absolutely buoyant
in my rage. This was not the rational anger one encounters in response
to a specific wrong, nor even the righteous anger that comes from an
articulate reaction to years of systematic mistreatment. This was blind
animal rage, and it filled my body to the limits of my skin.
And this is what I thought:
To hell with you.
To
hell with every greedhead operator who flocked here throughout history
because you wanted what we had, but wanted us to go underground and get
it for you. To hell with you for offering above-average wages in a
place filled with workers who’d never had a decent shot at employment or
education, and then treating the people you found here like just
another material resource—suitable for exploiting and using up, and
discarding when they’d outlived their usefulness. To hell with you for
rigging the game so that those wages were paid in currency that was
worthless everywhere but at the company store, so that all you did was
let the workers hold it for a while, before they went into debt they
couldn’t get out of.
To hell with you all for
continuing, as coal became chemical, to exploit the lax, poorly-enforced
safety regulations here, so that you could do your business in the
cheapest manner possible by shortcutting the health and quality of life
not only of your workers, but of everybody who lives here. To hell with
every operator who ever referred to West Virginians as “our
neighbors.”
To hell with every single screwjob elected
official and politico under whose watch it all went on, who helped write
those lax regulations and then turned away when even those weren’t
followed. To hell with you all, who were supposed to be stewards of the
public interest, and who sold us out for money, for political power.
To hell with every one of you who decided that making life convenient
for business meant making life dangerous for us. To hell with you for
making us the eggs you had to break in order to make breakfast.
To
hell with everyone who ever asked me how I could stand to live in a
place like this, so dirty and unhealthy and uneducated. To hell with
everyone who ever asked me why people don’t just leave, don’t just quit
(and go to one of the other thousand jobs I suppose you imagine are
widely available here), like it never occurred to us, like if only we
dumb hilljacks would listen as you explained the safety hazards, we’d
all suddenly recognize something that hadn’t been on our radar until
now.
To hell with the superior attitude one so often
encounters in these conversations, and usually from people who have no
idea about the complexity and the long history at work in it. To hell
with the person I met during my PhD work who, within ten seconds of
finding out I was from West Virginia, congratulated me on being able to
read. (Stranger, wherever you are today, please know this: Standing
in that room full of people, three feet away from you while you smiled
at your joke, I very nearly lost control over every civil checkpoint in
my body. And though civility was plainly not your native tongue, I did
what we have done for generations where I come from, when faced with
rude stupidity: I tamped down my first response, and I managed to
restrain myself from behaving in a way that would have required a deep
cleaning and medical sterilization of the carpet. I did not do any of
the things I wanted to. But stranger, please know how badly I wanted to
do them.)
And, as long as I’m roundhouse damning
everyone, and since my own relatives worked in the coal mines and I can
therefore play the Family Card, the one that trumps everything around
here: To hell with all of my fellow West Virginians who bought so deeply
into the idea of avoidable personal risk and constant sacrifice as an
honorable condition under which to live, that they turned that condition
into a culture of perverted, twisted pride and self-righteousness, to
be celebrated and defended against outsiders. To hell with that
insular, xenophobic pathology. To hell with everyone whose only
take-away from every story about every explosion, every leak, every mine
collapse, is some vague and idiotic vanity in the continued endurance
of West Virginians under adverse, sometimes killing circumstances. To
hell with everyone everywhere who ever mistook suffering for honor, and
who ever taught that to their kids. There’s nothing honorable about
suffering. Nothing.
To hell with you. This is the one
moment in my adult life when I have wished I could still believe in Hell
as an actual, physical reality, so that I could imagine you in it.
That
was what I thought. Not in those words—it came to me in a full-body
rush—but I think that’s a reliable verbal representation of the feeling.
Like
I said, it wasn’t rational or cogent. I’m not an eco-warrior or a
Luddite, and I’m not anti-business or even anti-industry. But for
years, I’ve watched from inside and out while the place I grew up in,
the place where many people I love still live, got sold out and scorched
and plowed under and poisoned and filled with smoke.
There are sensible, sane ways to do things. (A mile and a half
upstream from a water intake facility.
Upstream.)
It’s essential for state and federal governments to consult with
scientists—actual, real scientists, in spite of this area’s long and
fierce tradition of anti-intellectualism when it comes to public
policy—and provide a regulatory apparatus for maintaining safety
standards and making sure things are up to code, and that there’s a
protocol in place for when systems fail. That’s what a society does to
protect the people who live in it. Or the people who live in it
will—should, anyway—naturally come to the conclusion that their health
and safety mean zero in the calculus of industry and politics.
Over
the past couple of decades, the resource manufacturing industries have
been leaving the state in a slow trickle—of their own volition, though,
and not, as might have been hoped, at the end of a pike—and gradually,
the state is going to have to move to a post-coal, post-chemical
economy. That’s a good development, to my mind. But the history of
sellout politicians and cheapjack business interests in this region
keeps me on watch for the next plague of locusts.
Having been
made to endure poisoned Air, Earth, and Water, we ought to be mindful of
that history, and make sure that history goes with us, always, into the
voting booth, into the streets, into the home, into the wider world.
Otherwise,
to steal a line from the old hymn—and don’t we love our Jesus, our
stories of noble suffering around here—we’ll all of us, residents and
politicians and operators alike, find ourselves standing in the Fire
Next Time.
