| recoiled. If the water wasn’t safe for pregnant women, why was it safe for infants or toddlers? Day by day, schools that had been declared safe were running into problems. Plumbing systems differed, so one school could be free of MCHM while another still had traces. Governor Tomblin stopped urging people to drink the water and adopted a legalistic position: “I’m not going to say absolutely, one hundred percent, that everything is safe. But what I can say is, if you do not feel comfortable don’t use it.” He added, “It’s your decision.” On February 5, two schools shut down after teachers and kids complained of dizziness and nausea. “The following day, we had three more schools close,” Gupta said, “and we had up to fourteen schools that complained, but the day ran out, so the kids were let go.” At the end of February, he told me, “We’re getting complaints from schools almost every day.” For West Virginians, the battle to obtain some of the basic elements of government service—potable water, safe schools, public health advice—was disorienting. Josh Shriver said, “They didn’t know exactly what it was, they didn’t know how much of it had leaked, and they didn’t know how long it had been leaking.” At one point, Candi Shriver, hauling water from outside to flush the toilet, said to her husband, “It’s like we’re living in a Third World country.” Once the water ban was lifted, attention shifted to determining what had happened, who was |
diverse temperate hardwood forests on the planet. For eons, the hills had contained more species of salamander than anywhere else, and a lush canopy that attracted neotropical migratory birds across thousands of miles to hatch their next generation. But a mountaintop mine altered the land from top to bottom: after blasting off the peaks—which miners call the “overburden”—bulldozers pushed the debris down the hillsides, where it blanketed the streams and rivers. Rainwater filtered down through a strange man-made stew of metal, pyrite, sulfur, silica, salts, and coal, exposed to the air for the first time. The rain mingled with the chemicals and percolated down the hills, funneling into the brooks and streams and, finally, into the rivers on the valley floor, which sustained the people of southern West Virginia. Emily Bernhardt, a Duke University biologist who spent years tracking the effects of the Hobet Mine, told me, “The aquatic insects coming out of these streams are loaded with selenium, and then the spiders that are eating them become loaded with selenium, and it causes deformities in fish and birds. The Mud River, downstream of the Hobet, has one of the highest rates of bluegill deformities ever measured in a natural water body.” She said, “Eighty percent of the landscape has been converted to this thing that’s chemically distinct. You’re getting a totally different landscape.” The effects distorted the food chain. Normally, tiny insects that hatched in the water would fly into the woods, sustaining toads, turtles, and birds |
