Posted on 01/11/2014 2:22:05 PM PST by Morgana
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (WSAZ) -- During a press conference Saturday afternoon, the DEP said they now estimate 7,500 gallons of MCHM (4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol) have leaked into the Elk River in Kanawha County.
The emergency do not use water order is still in place Saturday as crews continue to test water supplies from several different areas.
Mike Dorsey with the DEP says they are "fairly confident" that the leak started Thursday.
West Virginia American Water customers in parts of nine counties are under a do not use water order. Those counties are also under a state of emergency issued Thursday evening by Governor Earl Ray Tomblin.
Crews currently have boats in the Elk River trying to contain the chemical from coming on shore. They say 7,500 gallons is believed to have spilled from the tank at Freedom Industries, through a one-inch hole. They don't believe the chemical is still leaking. They also say they are having more communications with the company.
Officials say they are still getting test samples on the water every hour, from where the water is coming into the plant, to areas along the way to distribution centers. Those tests originally took about 46 minutes, but now they have been able to reduce that time to 20 minutes. West Virginia American Water says they have four labs helping to do the testing.
Friday during a press conference, Adjutant General James Hoyer reported that testing showed the chemical at 1.7ppm in the water. The CDC reports that 1ppm is safe for use. During Saturday's press conference officials would not release an updated number. Jeffery McIntyre, President of WVAW said, "We have insufficient results to form conclusions at this time."
(Excerpt) Read more at wsaz.com ...
FReepers...
The Elk river runs into the Kanawha River.
The Kanawha river runs into the Ohio river.
The Ohio River runs into the Mississippi River.
Members of the Polar Bear club NO SWIMMING!
This is going to be an epic event you won’t hear much about. Could last weeks or months and as you said, keep spreading southwards.
Anyone still laughing at preppers?
There are 7.48 gallons of water in a cubic foot.
The spill was 7500 gallons.
You do the math.
Does anyone know what the chemical(s) involved are? Why is it a secret? Is it proprietary?
evening Morgana,
7500 gallons!
You believe that?
Industrial foaming agent that smells like licorice.
Probly wouldn’t take much to give you industrial “anal leakage”(?).
Dilution IS the solution to pollution.
4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM exposure include “severe burning in throat, severe eye irritation, non-stop vomiting, trouble breathing or severe skin irritation such as skin blistering.”
I guess the non-stop vomiting would kill you first.
In the General/Chat forum, on a thread titled DEP Estimates 7,500 Gallons of Chemical Leaked, Water Ban Still in Place (WV Chemical Spill), Morgana wrote:
FReepers...
“The Elk river runs into the Kanawha River.
The Kanawha river runs into the Ohio river.
The Ohio River runs into the Mississippi River.”
Affected are those municipalities and apparantly farms which get their processed potable water from these rivers not ground water (wells). With all this hype and poor reporting by the media it may seem an unimportant distinction but isn’t.
For it to get as bad as it has means somebody was not doing their job early on, or the system they were using was unable to detect this polution. Radio reports are of 32 cases claiming water poisoning.
I guess the non-stop vomiting would kill you first.
That's referring to the pure undiluted form. What does the FDA and CDC have to say about dosage/exposure amounts? And what about chemically neutralizing it at the water plant? Do we have any FReeper bio-chemists out there?
The LD50 for a human, correlated to the rat LD50, is going to be ~100-200 grams and the TLV-TWA is 50 ppm (200 mg/m(3)).
In as much water as it’s dispersed in, it’s going to maybe be an odor problem for a few days, with the resultant placebo effect on every one with the slightest itch, scratch or cough creating millions of dollars in economic activity for lawyers...
Well that does it for me. I am not going to drink any untreated water out of the Ohio River now.
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