text: Freedom Industries Inc., facing multiple lawsuits and state and federal investigations after the Jan. 9 spill, filed a Chapter 11 petition with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of West Virginia. 
   
   Company president Gary Southern signed the paperwork, which lists the company's assets and liabilities as a range — both between $1 million and $10 million. It says the company has at least 200 creditors and owes its top 20 creditors $3.66 million. 
   
   The water was tainted after a chemical used to clean coal leaked from a storage tank and then a containment area at a facility owned by Freedom Industries. The water ran into the Elk River, contaminating the state's largest water system. 
   
   The bankruptcy document says the leaky storage tank appears to have been pierced through its base by some sort of object. It also says a current theory for the hole is that a local water line that broke near the Charleston plant could have made the ground beneath the storage tank freeze in the cold days before the spill. 
   
   After the spill, residents in a nine-county area around the state capital of Charleston were told not to use the water for anything other than flushing toilets. Some businesses and schools were forced to close for several days. The water restrictions have since been lifted for most residents. 
   
   The terminal that leaked had not been inspected by state officials since 2001, when it was owned by a different company operating under more stringent rules. State officials said Freedom Industries bought the terminal last month.
target: – Being implicated in the contamination of a state's water supply is not so good for business. Freedom Industries, the company whose tank leaked a chemical into the Elk River in West Virginia, filed for bankruptcy today, reports the Charleston Gazette. The move for Chapter 11 protection comes amid of flood of lawsuits from businesses and individuals who had to go without municipal water for several days. Most of the 300,000 affected residents have water again. The company listed its liabilities at a maximum of $10 million, which might be wishful thinking. "I think they underestimated the liabilities just a tad," an attorney who filed a class-action suit against the company deadpans to the Wall Street Journal. In its filing, the company shed a little more light on what it thinks happened: A water line broke during "extraordinarily frigid temperatures," and that made the ground freeze beneath a storage tank. The tank then got punctured by an unknown object, reports AP. "Authorities have taken note of a hole in the affected storage tank that appears to have come from an object piercing upward," the filing reads.