Photo Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Last week’s major chemical spill into West Virginia’s Elk River, which cut off water to more than 300,000 people, came in a state with a long and troubled history of regulating the coal and chemical companies that form the heart of its economy. 
 
 “We can’t just point a single finger at this company,” said Angela Rosser, the executive director of West Virginia Rivers Coalition. “We need to look at our entire system and give some serious thought to making some serious reform and valuing our natural resources over industry interests.” 
 
 She said lawmakers have yet to explain why the storage facility was allowed to sit on the river and so close to a water treatment plant that is the largest in the state. 
 
 Ms. Rosser and others noted that the site of the spill has not been subject to a state or federal inspection since 1991. West Virginia law does not require inspections for chemical storage facilities — only for production facilities. 
 
 Some other states do require inspections of chemical storage facilities. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said he was working with Randy Huffman, the secretary of the State Department of Environmental Protection, to come up with recommendations aimed at avoiding future leaks. 
 
 The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Sunday that a team of experts from the United States Chemical Safety Board asked the state three years ago to create a new program to prevent accidents and releases in the Kanawha Valley, known as Chemical Valley. 
 
 That came after investigation of the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two workers at the Bayer CropScience plant in Institute, W.Va. No program was produced, and another team from the same board is expected to arrive Monday to investigate this accident. 
 
 Critics say the problems are widespread in a state where the coal and chemical industries, which drive much of West Virginia’s economy and are powerful forces in the state’s politics, have long pushed back against tight federal health, safety and environmental controls. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 “West Virginia has a pattern of resisting federal oversight and what they consider E.P.A. interference, and that really puts workers and the population at risk,” said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a lecturer in environmental health at George Washington University. 
 
 But Mr. Huffman disputed that accusation, noting that West Virginia’s economy is more heavily dependent than other states on the coal and chemical industries. “Based upon the types of industrial activity, how does it compare to the rest of the country? It’s not in context.” Although he added, “That’s no excuse for any incident where someone gets hurt.” 
 
 Efforts to clean up the spill showed signs of improvement on Sunday. 
 
 “The numbers look good, and like last night, they are very encouraging,” Governor Tomblin said in a news conference on Sunday. “I believe we’re at a point where we can say we’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel.” 
 
 Officials said tests conducted at a water treatment plant downstream from the site of the leak showed little to no traces of contamination on Sunday morning, allowing testing to move to the next phase. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 Once the testing is complete, the water company plans to begin lifting the do-not-use ban by zones. The work will start in downtown Charleston and three other “priority zones” that include the city’s four major hospitals and 25,000 customers who use more than half of the company’s water, said Jeff McIntyre, the president of West Virginia American Water. 
 
 “I don’t believe we’re several days from starting the lift, but I’m saying not today,” Mr. McIntyre said. 
 
 Government offices and many businesses planned to reopen on Monday, while many schools in the affected areas would remain closed, officials said. 
 
 “Stores are open,” said Jimmy Gianato, the state director of homeland security. “We’re starting to get back to normal.” 
 
 Emergency rooms have treated about 169 patients for symptoms related to chemical exposure, said Karen Bowling, the state health secretary. Ten people were admitted to three hospitals with symptoms that were not life threatening, she said. 
 
 The chemical in last Thursday’s spill was 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, known as MCHM. The leak at the Elk River storage facility came from a ruptured tank storing this chemical, which is used to wash coal. 
 
 No charges have been filed against Freedom Industries, the company that owns the plant, but the United States attorney’s office has already begun an investigation into the spill. 
 
 “Whenever you have a discharge of a pollutant or a hazardous substance you have potential violation of the environmental laws,” said Booth Goodwin, the United States attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, according to a news report on WVVA.com. 
 
 This is not the first chemical accident to hit West Virginia’s Kanawha Valley. 
 
 After an explosion at a West Virginia chemical plant owned by Bayer CropScience killed two employees in 2008, a 2010 congressional investigation found that managers refused for several hours to tell emergency responders the nature of the blast or the toxic chemical it released. It also found that they later misused a law intended to keep information from terrorists to try to stop federal investigators from learning what had happened. The plant manufactured the same chemical that was being processed at the time of a gas release in 1984 that killed 10,000 in Bhopal, India. 
 
 West Virginia is also no stranger to accidents in the coal industry. 
 
 In 2012, federal prosecutors charged David C. Hughart, a top executive at Massey Energy, a West Virginia coal operator, with a felony count and a second misdemeanor conspiracy count related to the deaths of 29 coal miners in a 2009 explosion at West Virginia’s Upper Big Branch mine. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hughart and others knowingly conspired to violate safety laws at Massey’s mines and worked to hide those violations by giving advance warnings of surprise inspections by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. 
 
 In 2009, an investigation by The New York Times found that hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia had violated pollution laws without paying fines. In interviews at the time, current and former West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection employees said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization; a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promised to try harder; and a revolving door of regulators who left for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed. 
 
 In June 2009, four environmental groups petitioned the E.P.A. to take over much of West Virginia’s handling of the Clean Water Act, citing a “nearly complete breakdown” in the state. 
 
 “Historically, there had been a questionable enforcement ethic,” said Matthew Crum, a former state mining director at the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. 
 
 Cindy Rank, chairwoman of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy’s mining committee, said that the coal lobby has wielded great influence in crafting state environmental regulations. “Accidents are always preventable. For the most part I think that’s true in these disasters that keep happening,” she said. She recalled negotiations over a groundwater protection bill from the early 1990s. “We swallowed hard and allowed the coal industry to get away with a lot in that bill,” she said. ||||| Hundreds of thousands of West Virginia residents have gone more than four days without clean tap water after a chemical spill, though officials say that chemical readouts are returning to safe levels. NBC's Anne Thompson reports. 
 
 The latest tests of poisoned water in West Virginia have shown that the quality is improving “in the right direction,” the state’s governor said Sunday — a hopeful sign for the 300,000 residents currently under a strict tap water ban following a chemical spill four days ago. 
 
 "We are at a point where we can see a light at the end of the tunnel," Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said at a news conference. 
 
 But officials stopped short of saying when the do-not-use order would be lifted. 
 
 "I can tell you we’re not several days from starting to lift, but I’m not saying today," said Jeff McIntyre, president of West Virginia American Water, which runs the water treatment plant. 
 
 The chemical spill first noticed Thursday on the Elk River has contaminated the water supply in the heart of the state, shutting down schools and businesses across nine counties, and forcing emergency agencies to truck in clean water to the Charleston region. 
 
 Lt. Col. Greg Grant of the West Virginia National Guard said two tests Sunday morning at the treatment facility show the chemical’s concentration at 0 parts-per-million for water going in and out of the plant. 
 
 Before the all clear can be given once and for all, water sample test results must consistently show that the chemical’s presence in the public water system is at or below 1 parts-per-million, the level recommended by federal agencies. 
 
 "That is a very encouraging and allows us to move forward" with the next phase of sampling and testing, Grant said. 
 
 Sixteen teams were collecting samples from affected areas in the region, and officials cautioned that the ban won’t be lifted until results were in and the state health department signs off. Communities will be given the OK on a zone-by-zone basis. 
 
 Marcus Constantino / The Daily Mail via AP Members of the West Virginia Army National Guard, along with a member of the Belle Police Department and a volunteer, offload emergency water from a military truck to a forklift as citizens line up Saturday for water at the Belle Fire Department in Belle, W.Va. 
 
 West Virginia American Water is launching an online map to show which communities can begin using their tap water. The company will also autodial customers when the ban in their zone has been lifted. A hotline is also being made available to them. 
 
 Schools will also be closed or partially closed in six counties Monday, although officials expect most students to be back in classrooms by Tuesday. 
 
 The reliance on bottled water is taking its toll on frustrated residents who’ve stripped stores and spent hours in long lines to collect water from tankers set up by the National Guard. Until the water is deemed safe, residents have been asked not to drink, bathe and cook with the tainted tap. 
 
 The environmental emergency began Thursday morning, when the state Department of Environmental Protection began receiving complaints around 8:15 a.m. of a licorice-type odor in the tap water. It took three hours before officials found the source of the spill. 
 
 The source turned out to be the chemical 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, which had leaked out of a 40,000-gallon tank at a Freedom Industries facility along the Elk River. 
 
 Freedom Industries didn’t report the leak to a spill hotline until 12:05 p.m. ET Thursday. 
 
 State officials said Saturday they believe about 7,500 gallons leaked. Some of the chemical was contained before flowing into the river; it’s not clear exactly how much entered the water supply. 
 
 All told, 169 people have sought treatment at hospitals for symptoms such as nausea. Of those, 10 were admitted to three different hospitals, but their conditions weren’t serious. 
 
 Federal authorities, including the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, have opened an investigation into Thursday’s spill. 
 
 According to the state DEP, Freedom Industries is exempt from DEP inspections and permitting since it stores chemicals, and doesn’t produce them. 
 
 But the DEP ordered Freedom Industries to move its coal processing chemicals to a safer site and said it has 24 hours to start writing a plan on how it will clean up the spill and any soil contamination. 
 
 The company did not take part in Sunday’s news conference, and Gov. Tomblin said the state hasn’t had much guidance from the company about the chemical in question. 
 
 "Perhaps they could have been a little bit more forthcoming to offer their assistance about what problems this particular chemical could cause," Tomblin said. 
 
 Tomblin said he will work with his environmental agency chief on tightening regulation of chemical storage facilities in the current legislative session. 
 
 Most visitors have cleared out of Charleston while locals are either staying home or driving out of the area to find a hot meal or a shower elsewhere. Orders not to use tap water for much other than flushing toilets mean that the spill is an emergency not just for the environment but for local businesses. 
 
 Lisa Hechesky / Reuters Boats sit in the Elk River in front of the Freedom Industries plant in Charleston, W. Va., on Saturday. 
 
 In downtown Charleston, the store Taylor Books usually fills the 40 seats in its cafe. But the cafe was shut down by the state Department of Health on Friday because it said employees had no way to safely wash their hands before serving customers. On Saturday only three people sat in the bookstore using the wireless Internet. 
 
 Taylor Books' manager Dan Carlisle said he canceled a musician scheduled to play that night and the store was going to close five hours early. 
 
 “It’s pretty annoying,” Carlisle said about Freedom Industries’ response to the spill. “I feel like you should just be honest with people immediately.” 
 
 In a statement issued Friday, Freedom Industries said that it was working with government agencies to contain the leak, and “the first priority was safety, containment and cleanup.” 
 
 The chemical spill has forced West Virginia's residents to examine the state's reliance on the coal and chemical industries. 
 
 Coal is critical to the economy. Strong coal prices and demand proved vital to the state budget during and after the national recession, from 2009 through 2011. 
 
 In Gov. Tomblin's recent State-of-the-State speech, he touted the chemical industry, saying it was among those that grew substantially over the last year. 
 
 The spill that tainted the water supply involved a chemical used in coal processing. But it didn't involve a coal mine — and that's a point state officials are trying to convey to the public. 
 
 When asked if the emergency is one of the risks of being a state that relies heavily on the coal industry, Tomblin quickly responded: "This was not a coal company incident, this was a chemical company incident." 
 
 "It's used in processing coal, as I understand it, but obviously it was not a coal company, it was a chemical company that left the breach and the tanks that's holding this particular chemical," he said. 
 
 The coal industry, too, was saying they should not bear the blame in this case. 
 
 "This is a chemical spill accident. It just so happens that the chemical has some applications to the coal industry, just that fact alone shouldn't cause people to point fingers at the coal industry," said Jason Bostic, vice president of the West Virginia Coal Association. 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report.
– The chemical spill that has left more than 300,000 people in West Virginia without water appears to be the product of lax regulation in a state where coal and chemical firms have long operated with little oversight, the New York Times finds. A document released over the weekend reveals state authorities were aware that the company responsible was storing up to a million pounds of the coal-cleaning chemical Crude MCHM at a riverside facility near a water treatment plant, but it's not clear whether the treatment plant knew about the risk, reports the Wall Street Journal. "We can’t just point a single finger at this company," says the director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, noting that the site of the spill hadn't been inspected since 1991. "We need to look at our entire system and give some serious thought to making some serious reform and valuing our natural resources over industry interests." A tap water ban is still in place in the Charleston region, where many schools and businesses remain closed, but authorities say they can "see the light at the end of the tunnel" and they expect the ban to be lifted within days, starting in downtown Charleston and other priority zones, NBC reports.