West Virginia Officials Admit ER Surge After They Lifted Water Ban

Even as West Virginia officials lifted the water ban in the last of nine zones Saturday, more people were getting sick from chemical exposure from Kanawha Valley’s drinking water, according to the Charleston Gazette.

By Saturday, 411 patients had been treated at 10 hospitals for reported chemical exposure since the water crisis began on Jan. 9, according to Allison Adler, a spokeswoman for West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.

According to Adler, twenty patients had been admitted to four hospitals; none of them are still in a hospital; and none were in critical condition.

“Those numbers have increased significantly since Thursday, when the DHHR said 317 had been treated and 14 had been hospitalized,” the Gazette reports Sunday.

Nevertheless, Saturday, the remaining zones in the water ban were told they could drink and bathe in the water.

Before It’s News contributor Paveway IV commented after state officials issued a statement advising that 1 part-per-million of Crude MCHM was acceptable to drink,” “This was based on absolute junk science by the CDC and was entirely motivated by the ability of humans to smell MCHM at levels BELOW 1 ppm. The WVWA is fully capable of cleaning out their system but they don’t want to spend the money to do it.

Paveway continued:

The cheap/easy way is the preposterous ‘flush’ which is still going to leave residues. People will be able to smell those residues.

The CDC 1 ppm level was chosen to trick people to thinking that the water is clean enough even with the smell. Fact is that the analytical tests for MCHM are expensive and complicated. Koch, Freedom, WV and the CDC don’t want to bother with all that expensive, time-consuming testing all over the system. It’s a lot easier at some point to claim the plant is now producing MCHM-free water (according to their testing), and that it’s only a matter of flushing out the contaminated stuff. If someone complains in three weeks that their water is still stinky, the state will tell them to shut up because the water is fine.

1 ppm is not a terribly low amount to begin with. In fact, it’s quite a bit by other industrial poison standards. Would you drink water with one part per million of insecticide? How about a part per million of benzene? If the CDC was worried about an abundance of caution, they would be talking about parts per BILLION (and they wouldn’t have a shred of evidence that it was safe at THOSE levels).

Why does grandma get a body-cavity search on her way through a TSA checkpoint, while terrorists at Koch, Freedom and the WVWA sit back and laugh at all the little people?

Congress persons vote to support chemical disaster coverups

Ten days ago, as West Virginians learned that the chemical smell they’d experienced was from a devastating poisonous leak into their water supply, the US House of Representatives was busy gutting federal hazardous-waste cleanup law.