toxic chemical spill

Charleston residents are baffled— and indignant—that MCHM leached into their water so easily. (“We want answers,” read one placard at a protest at the state capitol building. “Prosecute the poisoners,” read another.) But the spill in West Virginia was not a freak occurrence. The United States sees more than its share of industrial accidents. Consider the 2008 spill of 1 billion gallons of coal-ash slurry in Kingston, Tennessee, which coated the surrounding land in a 6-foot-deep layer of sludge that cost an estimated $1.2 billion to clean up. Or the 2013 ammonium nitrate explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant. That catastrophe—at a facility that federal inspectors had not visited for 27 years—injured more than 300 people and claimed 15 lives. No single government agency is responsible for tracking and verifying chemical spills, so their exact number is unknown. But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) puts the figure at “thousands” each year, while Bloomberg Businessweek counted 3,885 in 2013 and CBS identified more than 6,500 in 2010.