re: #3 EiMitch

According to the LA Times, the company is only legally liable for “failing to immediately report the leak or take quick action to stop it”:

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has said that Freedom violated state law by failing to immediately report the leak or take quick action to stop it. The agency said its inspectors went to the Freedom facility Jan. 9 in response to neighbors’ complaints of a licorice-like odor coming from the storage tanks.

latimes.com

According to The NY Times, “West Virginia law does not require inspections for chemical storage facilities — only for production facilities.” Naturally, that’s all due to corporate interests/greed:

Critics say the problems are widespread in a state where the coal and chemical industries, which drive much of West Virginia’s economy and are powerful forces in the state’s politics, have long pushed back against tight federal health, safety and environmental controls.

“West Virginia has a pattern of resisting federal oversight and what they consider E.P.A. interference, and that really puts workers and the population at risk,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a lecturer in environmental health at George Washington University. […]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/13/us/critics-say-chemical-spill-highlights-lax-west-virginia-regulations.html?_r=0

It’s truly disgusting. Anyone who thinks big business is capable of conscientious self-regulation that consistently puts the health & safety of local citizens above the corporate bottom line needs to have their head examined—it has been proven over and over again that it simply isn’t gonna happen.

And SCOTUS has now decided that businesses are people, at least for some purposes? Well, yeah I guess, sort of—in the Dexter/Ted Bundy mold. //