The Elk River Spill: Three Hundred Thousand Without Safe Water

On the morning of January ninth, two thousand fourteen, residents of Charleston, West Virginia, began calling nine-one-one to report a strange licorice smell coming from their taps. A storage tank with a hole in its bottom at a facility called Freedom Industries had leaked up to ten thousand gallons of a coal-cleaning chemical called crude MCHM directly into the Elk River, just upstream from the intake pipe serving the Charleston area water treatment plant. The plant had no system capable of removing the chemical.

State officials issued a do-not-use order covering nine counties, cutting off safe tap water for roughly three hundred thousand people. Residents lined up for miles at water distribution points. Hospitals scrambled to conserve water, and at least one kidney transplant was cancelled.

Freedom Industries filed for bankruptcy within weeks. Company officials later faced federal criminal charges. The spill exposed a largely unregulated category of industrial chemical storage and prompted a review of similar facilities across the country.

The tank that failed sat just above a river that served as the region's primary drinking water source, and no one had required regular inspection.