West Virginia Is Open for Business

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

18 February 14

don't care any more what's the matter with Kansas because Kansas doesn't seem to care what the rest of us think, but what in the fk is the matter with West Virginia? Specifically, what in the fk is wrong with the elected officials in West Virginia, and more specifically, is Governor Earl Ray Tomblin waiting until you can see the state glow from space before he realizes that his business-friendly environment is primarily occupied wth poisoning the state's actual environment?

Right now, as the state is still grappling with the effect of the chemical spill from the conveniently bankrupt Freedom Industries, and from a deluge of coal slurry into a river an Kanawha County, this one courtesy of the recently-emerged-from-bankruptcy Patriot Coal, Governor Earl Ray and his environmental secretary have decided that this is the ideal moment to turn West Virginia into a catchbasin for fracking fluids.

The legislation, HB 4411, which would allow the disposal of drill cuttings and associated drilling waste generated from well sites in commercial solid waste facilities, passed the House Energy Committee yesterday. And the Energy Committee is seeking to bypass the House Judiciary Committee and move the bill straight to the House floor.In July 2013, Huffman, without consulting solid waste authorities throughout the state, sent a memo to landfill owners and operators laying out how they could blow by their monthly tonnage limits to accommodate the fracking wastes.

Once again, as it is on so many other issues, it is out in the states where environmental issues are most directly being either ignored, or actively exacerbated, largely because state governments are cheaper and easier to buy. (Here's a nice story about the lagoons of pig shit currently afflicting Iowa.) There's a straight line to be drawn from unregulated exploding fertilizer plants in Texas to the decision by West Virginia's government to turn their already poisoned state into a repository for the toxic byproduct of an entirely new form of dirty energy extraction. There doesn't seem to be any penalty to be paid for a governor who willingly allows his state to get poisoned as long as JOBS! can be waved around as a talisman. And, well, the rest of their constituents have to live with it. Or not.

Wetzel County County Solid Waste authority member Bill Hughes is concerned about the radioactivity of fracking wastes. "When you are drilling down, your gamma log, gamma radiation detector starts spiking,"Hughes said at a Wetzel County Commission meeting in September 2013. "That's how they know they are in the Marcellus. They want to stay in the real rich black stuff. That's where the money is, the gas is. When you bring this up to the surface, the radiation doesn't stay down there. All the fluids, all the solids, bring it up." Hughes said that while Pennsylvania requires radiation monitors, West Virginia does not. "My concern is the landfill workers," Hughes said. "They are there daily at the site, working at the landfill, unloading these trucks. I don't know in what proximity they are to the drill mud. These are all unknowns. My point is we don't even know."

You're not supposed to know. That's the point.