As Saturday's second anniversary of the January 2014 Elk River chemical spill approaches, citizen groups are releasing a report to promote their proposal for a public takeover of the West Virginia American Water Co. regional drinking water system that serves hundreds of thousands of people in the Kanawha Valley and surrounding communities.
The report says West Virginia American remains unprepared to respond to major pollution incidents affecting its source water, is moving too slow to maintain and upgrade its water-delivery infrastructure, and continues to seek large rate increases from local customers.
"WVAW serves as an example of how things can go wrong when transparency and accountability suffer in a privatized water scheme," says the report, called "West Virginia American Water Company and the Case for Public Ownership and Operation."
The 75-page report from the Civil Society Institute, a Boston-based think tank and nonprofit organization, was released Thursday with support from the Advocates for a Safe Water System, a Charleston group formed after the 2014 spill, and the Charleston branch of the NAACP.
Cathy Kunkel, a report editor for the Advocates group, said that area residents have learned in the last two years that the Kanawha Valley has "a serious infrastructure problem" with its water system.
"Main breaks are an increasingly common occurrence," Kunkel said. "At the current rate of investment, it will take nearly 400 years for WV American Water to replace all of the water mains in our system."
Last year, the Advocates launched a campaign to press for a public takeover of the local drinking water system.
West Virginia American has generally declined to respond directly to the call for a public takeover of the system.
On Thursday, water company spokeswoman Laura Jordan said she had not seen the report, but that West Virginia American officials "strongly disagree with the accusations made in the press release and believe they are not accurate or factual." In its own recent report, West Virginia American touted a variety of major infrastructure upgrades, source-water protection planning efforts and a new customer emergency notification system.
On Jan. 9, 2014, a leaky chemical storage tank at the Freedom Industries facility spilled Crude MCHM and other chemicals into the Elk River just 1.5 miles upstream from West Virginia American's regional drinking water intake. The incident prompted a "do not use" order that lasted for up to a week, and sent hundreds of area residents to emergency rooms with symptoms that were consistent with exposure to the chemicals. Reports from a variety of agencies and experts have expressed concerns that residents were exposed to MCHM through inhalation or through skin contact while bathing or washing hands -- or through contact during the "flushing" of home plumbing systems after the spill -- routes that the CDC and the Tomblin administration did not consider when telling residents that their water was again safe to use.
The spill led to passage of new state legislation to protect water supplies and regulate chemical storage tanks, though that legislation was subsequently rolled back last year, and to the federal prosecution of former owners and officials from Freedom Industries for Clean Water Act crimes.
On Saturday, the West Virginia Rivers Coalition is hosting an event to mark the spill anniversary. The group's forum, from 3 to 6 p.m. at the state Culture Center, will focus on how citizens can be involved in protecting their drinking water.
Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.