From ‘Freedom Industries’ to ‘Patriot Coal’
Much of West Virginia is still reeling after a ruptured storage tank owned by Freedom Industries leaked chemicals into the Elk River, leaving 300,000 residents in Kanawha Valley without water service. Even now, local residents in many parts of the state are getting confusing and contradictory guidance about water safety, leading to, among other things, school closings.
The last thing West Virginia needed was another spill, but that’s precisely what it got today.
More than 100,000 gallons of coal slurry poured into an eastern Kanawha County stream Tuesday in what officials were calling a “significant spill” from a Patriot Coal processing facility.
Emergency officials and environmental inspectors said that roughly six miles of Fields Creek had been blackened and that a smaller amount of the slurry made it into the Kanawha River near Chesapeake.
Locals were initially told that a slurry line ruptured between a preparation plant and a refuse impoundment facility at Patriot Coal - yes, you read that right, we’ve gone from an incident at “Freedom Industries” to one at “Patriot Coal” - but state officials later said the spill was “caused by a malfunction of a valve inside the slurry line carrying material from the preparation plant to a separate disposal site, not to an impoundment.”
Either way, Harold Ward, acting director of the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Division of Mining and Reclamation, told reporters, “There has been a significant environmental impact.”