DomeCropped.jpg The West Virginia State Capitol building in Charleston sits on the Kanawha River, which is fed in part by the Elk River — the main water supply for nearly 300,000 of the state’s residents.
That is the case for MCHM, a chemical that was created to help in the washing of coal.
You could smell it in the parts per billion, and what that means is that with the tiniest, tiniest fraction of a drop, if you were to put it in a pool, you would still be able to smell it, and that smell was licorice,” says Hoback, who first entered the national scene with his acclaimed 2013 film about the information that is collected by the government and corporations through online browsing, “Terms and Conditions May Apply.” “So, had there been no smell the contamination wouldn’t have been uncovered, and people would have just drank the water without knowing.” ‘A lot more harmful than we thought it was’ Amazingly enough, Hoback discovered MCHM had received the classification of being a nonhazardous chemical, giving it fewer regulations and no required inspections of tanks that hold it.
“This chemical, because it had an odor, people started looking into it, looking into the data behind it and uncovering that, gosh, this chemical is actually a lot more harmful than we thought it was,” Hoback says, who adds MCHM has found to be twice as toxic as the initial report that came out from its manufacturer, Eastman Chemical.
Hoback recalls one family where one person’s neck “inflated to the size of a balloon.” Says Hoback: “They had no idea what was causing this originally, and at the same time, the government was coming out and saying, ‘No, the data says that this chemical couldn’t have this effect, certainly not at these levels.
This included a meeting between industry lobbyists and members of the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
One of the questions Hoback asked Edwards centered around the following: How could agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the CDC knowingly publish false reports when the reason for their existence is to protect the public’s health?
Don’t find bad things,” Hoback says.
“Scientists who try to do the right thing, they get fired.
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