The secretary of the state
Department of Environmental Protection says he thinks the new rules the DEP is
currently writing for above-ground storage tanks as part of a new state law
will address the problems found at Freedom Industries in Charleston — the
starting point for the Jan. 9 chemical spill that contaminated tap water in
parts of nine West Virginia counties.
“I believe that the testing
protocols that we’re going to be proposing here, through the rule, would
absolutely have caught this (and) maybe have prevented it to begin with,” Randy
Huffman said.
On Wednesday, investigators with
the U.S. Chemical Safety Board were in Charleston
to detail their findings — up to this point — on the chemical spill along the Elk River . Those with the CSB have determined crude MCHM
leaked from two holes in a storage tank that were created through corrosion
inside the tank after water came in through holes in the top of the tank.
Investigators said a hard freeze on
Jan. 8 may have been a contributing factor leading to the sudden release of the
MCHM that made it into the Elk River and, later downstream, into West Virginia
American Water Company’s Kanawha Valley Water Treatment Facility which serves
an estimated 300,000 state residents.
Legislation lawmakers approved
earlier this year includes requirements for annual inspections, leak detection
systems and spill response plans for storage tanks similar to those now being
demolished at Freedom Industries.
Officials with the DEP are still
working on the details of those regulations. “Holes don’t rust in steel
overnight or in a year or in six months. It happens over a long period of time
and these tanks, according to the CSB, there was no inspection plan by the
company in place to even detect this themselves and that’s why they recommend
regulations,” Huffman said.
Before the new law, no independent
regular inspections were required either. “Corrosion can be picked up and any
other structural integrity issues can be picked up through certain testing
protocols and that’s what we will be requiring,” he said.
CSB investigators will be
conducting additional soil tests to determine if crude MCHM was leaking into
the Elk River before the spill was first
found.
Huffman said he thinks that’s
unlikely. “We were smelling it in our water, in our drinking water at extremely
low detection limits,” he said. “To our knowledge, there were no complaints, no
issues with it being smelled either in anyone’s tap water or in and around the
plant, to any degree, prior to Jan. 9.”
Companies with storage tanks that
fall under the new law have been registering those tanks with the state DEP
through an online portal as the rule-writing continues.
Additionally, as part of the new
law, all public water utilities that rely on surface water will have to develop
and implement a source water protection plan by July 1, 2016.
