Officials Don’t Really Know How Dangerous the Chemical Spilled in West Virginia Is /

From:  TIME - Science & Space

By Bryan Walsh

 Authorities have virtually no way of regulating many industrial chemicals. The latest spill could change that.

There was no shortage of confusion when news broke in West Virginia on Jan. 9 about a chemical spill that contaminated water for 300,000 people around the state’s capital. Freedom Industries, the company that owned the tank that ruptured, spilling chemicals into the Elk River, didn’t know how the leak occurred or when it happened. It wasn’t clear who discovered the leak—Freedom Industries employees or Environmental Protection Agency inspectors—and it wasn’t clear how much of the chemical had spilled into the river, with initial estimates of 5,000 gallons eventually rising to 7,500 gallons. It wasn’t clear how long West Virginians would be without water after Governor Earl Ray Tomblin ordered a ban on drinking, bathing or cooking with tap water in the capital of Charleston and nine surrounding counties.

But most of all, it wasn’t clear how dangerous the chemical, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM), was to human health—mostly because no one knew anything about its health effects, including the company that was storing it, government regulators and even academics who study chemical safety. MCHM is one of 64,000 chemicals that were grandfathered in when the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)—the federal law regulating chemical safety—was passed in 1976. According to Richard Denison, a senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), there are no human health studies available for MCHM, just a couple of Material Data Safety Sheets (MSDS) from the chemical’s producer, one of which references a study done on the toxic effects of the chemical on rats. But even that study isn’t publicly available—it’s considered proprietary by the Eastman Chemical Company, the maker of MCHM. Otherwise, this is what is publicly known about the human health effects of the chemical:

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