CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Around the swollen Elk River, now flowing with a chemical that’s hard to pronounce, myriad streams and rivulets tumbled from the hillsides over the weekend, the result of a drenching downpour. Logs and branches floated downstream, toward the junction with the Kanawha in the heart of the city. Potholes on the beat-up country roads had turned into deep puddles.

As they say: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

“DO NOT USE WATER,” say the signs taped over sinks at the airport, and in the State Capitol the sinks are entirely wrapped in plastic bags. People line up for free water at the fire stations or buy it at the Dollar General — $1.60 for a 20-ounce Dasani, $39 for a flat of 24 bottles.

A chemical used in coal processing has leaked from an old tank along the Elk and invaded the water supply, a crisis that has affected nearly 300,000 people in nine counties and effectively closed the largest city in the state. You can’t drink the water, bathe in it or do laundry with it. It’s good only for flushing.

Monday will mark the fifth day of the water emergency, which began early Thursday when people all over town registered a powerful odor like black licorice. Two state employees tracked the leak to Freedom Industries, which owns a row of vintage storage tanks along the south bank of the Elk. The chemical had leaked from an inch-wide hole in the bottom of one tank, pooled in a containment area and then seeped through a porous cinder-block retaining wall, down the bank and into the river.

Government officials said Sunday that chemical levels had dropped significantly over the weekend, enabling the West Virginia American Water Co. to begin flushing out the contaminated pipes. The entire process will take a number of days and will occur in stages, starting in Charleston and working outward to the remote areas of the distribution system.

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The infrastructure here was primed for a water crisis. The intake for the system is downstream by a little more than a mile, and on the same side of the river, as the tanks containing the chemicals. “The impacts caused by this were caused by the public water intakes being so close,” said Randy Huffman, secretary of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

Mike Dorsey, a top official with the agency, said that the substance in the tank was not considered a “hazardous material” and that the site was not subject to regular inspections by the state.

After the leak, he said, he was informed by Freedom Industries that the company had set aside $1 million in escrow to upgrade the containment area around the tanks. But those upgrades had not begun.

An attorney for Freedom Industries who was at the aging facility Saturday would not comment on the record. He provided a reporter with a copy of a news article saying that the chemical is not very toxic.

The facility was crowded with contract workers in hard hats. The buzz of heavy machinery filled the air along with the lingering licorice odor.

Freedom Industries executives have kept a low profile since a news conference Friday in which the company’s president, Gary Southern, complained of having a long day, repeatedly swigged from a bottle of water and several times tried to cut short questions from reporters. Southern played down the scale of the leak, saying, “We don’t believe a great deal of material left the facility.”


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