Chemical spill in West Virginia: Koch brothers' Freedom Industries had freedom from EPA regulations

Sign petition to hold Freedom Industries responsible. UPDATE

Oh, by the way, says Freedom Industries, there was a second chemical leaking from that tank
by Meteor Blades
Daily Kos
Jan 21, 2014

Chemicals, schemicals, you can't expect Freedom Industries to keep track of all of them.

Ken Ward Jr. at the Charleston Gazette reports:

Federal and state investigators learned today that an additional chemical that wasn't previously identified was in the tank that leaked on Jan. 9 at the Freedom Industries tank farm just upstream from West Virginia American Water's regional drinking water intake.

Company officials told investigators that the "Crude MCHM" that spilled also contained a product called "PPH," which stands for polyglycol ethers, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.

The chemical, the company claims, has "low oral toxicity."

Uh-huh. And it's probably as safe for pregnant women as the other stuff they spilled into the Elk River.


by GleninCA


The Koch brothers

WV: Freedom Industries Has Ties to Koch Brothers
dharmafarmer
Daily Kos
Jan 11, 2014

Very briefly ...

If news reports have left you with the impression that Freedom Industries - the company that has contaminated the water supply serving 300,000 people (and who knows how much wildlife) in nine West Virginia counties - is a rinky-dink Charleston operation, that might be because the media isn't mentioning its influential ties.

In 2008, Freedom Industries was specially selected by Georgia-Pacific Chemicals as a distributor of G-P's Talon brand mining reagents for West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, Minnesota, Kentucky and Michigan.

Georgia-Pacific Chemicals is, of course, a subsidiary of Georgia-Pacific, which was acquired by Koch Industries in 2005.

"We are excited to offer our customers inventive products like Talon that push past the status quo in coal recovery to bring profit and productivity benefits to mining preparation plants," said Joshua Herzing, director of business development for Freedom Industries. "Georgia Pacific's longstanding technical expertise and R&D capabilities combined with the industry knowledge, skill and reputation of Freedom Industries will provide an excellent platform for growth and development of new technology to meet existing and future customer demands. We are proud to be part of Georgia-Pacific's strategy as a global supplier of mining reagents in multiple market segments."

There's lots more to the story, People.


SURPRISE: Water-Poisoning Freedom Industries Had ‘Freedom’ From EPA Regulations!
John Prager
AATTP
January 13, 2014

Freedom Industries, the company that freely and negligently poisoned the water supply in nine West Virginia counties with a chemical used in the coal industry, seems to be enjoying a lot of freedom from EPA regulations. According to the New York Times, the company is exempt from Environmental Protection Agency rules because it stores chemicals, rather than produces them.

The tank, which leaked over 7,500 gallons of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol (2,500 more than previously estimated) into West Virginia’s Elk River, had reportedly been leaking for an extended period of time. MCHM is not lethal unless ingested in large quantities, but can cause non-stop vomiting, burning throat, blisters, and other “poor people problems.” CEO Dennis P. Farrel’s fur-wearing girlfriend told Facebook that she was able to brush her teeth and shower therefore, despite Governor Earl Ray Tomblin declaring a state of emergency and numerous experts urging customers not to drink the water or use it for anything besides “flushing,” she feels that “no one and no thing” has been harmed due to the leakage.

Farrell himself has avoided facing the public for his company’s reprehensible and irresponsible lack of safety measures, but president Gary Southern has made it very clear that…he doesn’t care either.

The leak has been shut off and levels of the chemical are slowly dropping, but residents still do not know when their water will be declared safe by anyone who is trying to deny that there is a problem. Governor Tomblin has promised to look into tightening regulations relating to chemical storage facilities. “There are certain reporting things that companies have to do,” he said. “And I do think we have to look at them to make sure this kind of incident does not happen again.”

President Obama has declared a federal emergency, and federal law enforcement authorities have opened an investigation into the release of the chemical.

FEMA has brought in over 360,000 gallons of water to the nine counties affected by Koch-affiliated Freedom Industries‘ “freeing” of a dangerous chemical into the water supply, but residents are still having trouble even finding clean water at the store. Over 120 people to date have gone to the hospital reporting nausea and vomiting.


EXCLUSIVE: Girlfriend of CEO Whose Company Poisoned WV Water Plays the Victim While Enjoying Lavish Lifestyle
John Prager
AATTP
January 12, 2014

“I showered and brushed my teeth this morning and am just fine,” may seem like an odd justification for poisoning the water that supplies nine counties and over 300,000 people ... that logic comes from the girlfriend of the CEO of Freedom Industries...

Social media strategist Kathy Stover-Kennedy, Freedom Industries CEO Dennis P. Farrell’s girlfriend spoke out on Facebook, saying that poor Denny has been receiving threats over his company’s lax, uncaring, and completely unfair treatment following the incident. She remarks on the backlash her beloved has received over his avoidance of publicly addressing the matter, saying that he “is not a spokesperson and has no desire to be.” She elaborates, indicating that he is too important to address such mundane matters as the poisoning of an entire population’s water supply himself in a Facebook post. Besides, according to her, there is no public danger for this “accidental” failure to identify what has been deemed a likely long-term leakage from a company tank.

Boy Scouts put rare plant in danger

Boy Scouts put rare plant in danger
May 21, 2013
Susanne Rust
CIR Center for Investigative Reporting

Expulsion from the Boy Scouts of America is a dishonor few Scouts endure. But that was the punishment imposed on Kim Kuska, a self-taught naturalist and former biology teacher who had been with the organization for more than 50 years.

His crime: an obsession with the rare, and unfortunately named, Dudley’s lousewort.

Since the 1970s, the Eagle Scout and adult Scout leader-turned-whistle-blower has worked to protect the plant from extinction at Camp Pico Blanco, a Boy Scout camp nestled in the mountains along the Little Sur River south of Monterey, Calif.

The camp is home to nearly 50 percent of all known specimens of Dudley’s lousewort, a flowering fern-like plant found in only three places in the world.

But over the past four decades, Scout officials and camp staff have threatened its existence repeatedly by harvesting old-growth trees it needs to survive, crushing some of the few remaining plants and introducing potentially competitive species. Under state law, it is illegal to harm a plant that is classified as rare.

The camp also cut down several trees in the old-growth forest in 2011 without a permit, a Scout official acknowledged. At each turn, Kuska was there to document the misdeeds.

Kim Kuska, a self-taught naturalist and former biology teacher, was expelled from the Boy Scouts of America last year. He says he was kicked out for exposing the Scouts’ environmental transgressions. An official says it was because Kuska was planting lousewort seeds in places where the rare plant did not already grow.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection is investigating the 2011 incident as a result of questions from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

While the Boy Scouts has drawn national attention for its intolerance toward gays, the organization also has compiled a poor record on environmental protection. In 2009, Hearst Newspapers reported that the Scouts clear-cut tens of thousands of acres of forestland across the country and operated a dam at Camp Pico Blanco that killed at least 30 federally protected steelhead trout. The camp installed a fish ladder as part of a no-fault settlement.

At the camp, which is surrounded by the Los Padres National Forest, state environmental agencies and conservationists repeatedly have warned the Scouts to protect the lousewort. Yet the Scouts have continued to harm the plants, according to records spanning more than 30 years.

In 1989, for instance, Monterey County cited the Scouts for their “repeated destruction of Dudley’s lousewort and its habitat,” the documents show.

And in 2012, Brian LeNeve, president of the California Native Plant Society’s Monterey Bay chapter, informed the organization that he was “deeply concerned” that the lousewort’s territory was shrinking dramatically because of the camp’s habitat “disruption.”

“There have been some well-documented concerns,” Ron Schoenmehl, director of support services for the Boy Scouts’ Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council, acknowledged during a recent camp tour.

But Schoenmehl said the Boy Scouts are now determined to “coexist peacefully” with the plant and are creating a camp management plan.

Kuska, 60, has been helping the Native Plant Society study the plant with its delicate white and purple flowers since the 1970s, when he served as the Scouts’ nature director at Pico Blanco.

In May 2012, before his expulsion, Kuska marked a lousewort near the dining hall with an orange flag. Two weeks later, he noticed that someone had rolled a wheelbarrow over the plant. Concerned, he added another flag to mark the plant and surrounded it with a circle of fist-sized rocks. Weeks later, he saw someone had placed the rocks on top of the plant.

“It was an unbelievably hostile move,” he said.

Schoenmehl said he was unaware of the incident.

The lousewort takes its name from the folk belief that the plant infested sheep with lice. The Pico Blanco species was named for 19th-century Stanford University botanist William Dudley. Thriving only among old-growth trees, it depends on leaf litter produced by the redwoods and on a complex array of fungi that grows on the roots of the firs.

After the Basin Complex fire swept through the area in 2008, the Scouts applied for a permit to cut 43 damaged trees. Monterey County officials granted the permit without considering how it would affect the lousewort, Associate Planner Joseph Sidor acknowledged in an interview.

The camp cut 38, including some in 2011 after the permit expired, Schoenmehl said.

“We shouldn’t have been taking down trees that weren’t covered under a permit,” he said.

Some of the trees likely were more than 200 years old, including four redwoods with diameters exceeding 6 feet, according to the Scouts’ permit application. The forest was considered old growth because it had remained largely untouched.

In April, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife found that the Boy Scouts had harvested at least one large tree in 2010 not covered under the permit.

In photos taken during the tree felling, which were posted on a Boy Scout’s Facebook page, wood cuttings could be seen piled on top of the lousewort.

The heavyset, 6-foot-4 Kuska has carefully tracked the camp’s blunders. He keeps meticulous records in boxes in the back of his covered pickup truck.

In September, the Monterey Bay Area Council declined to renew his Scouting membership, effectively expelling him without explanation. (The Monterey Bay Area and Santa Clara County councils merged in January, forming the Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council.)

Kuska says he was kicked out for being a whistle-blower and exposing the Scouts’ environmental transgressions.

Schoenmehl says it was because Kuska was planting lousewort seeds in places where the plant did not already grow, including high-traffic areas near the infirmary and camping area.

These “reckless” and “unapproved” actions, he said, could compromise the camp’s activities by creating new areas that must be protected.

In August, the Scouts’ lawyers told Kuska that he could come to the camp only during supervised visits. But on May 1, Schoenmehl notified him that the council had revoked even that permission after he contacted CIR.

“This has only created further hostilities between you and our council,” Schoenmehl wrote in a letter to Kuska.

Kuska, for his part, is crushed by his banishment from the plants he loves.

“Someone needs to be protecting this plant,” he said. “Somebody’s going to have to defend it.”

This story was edited by Richard C. Paddock and copy edited by Nikki Frick and Christine Lee.