Paden City WV: Toxic PCE Known To Be In Water Supply For 20 Years, But No Action Until 2/4/20
How does a State of Emergency get declared for an entire town, but no one know about it until over two weeks later? Ask the people of Paden City, a small town straddling the line of Tyler and Wetzel counties in West Virginia.
On February 4, 2020 Governor Jim Justice finally took executive action over a decades old water crisis plaguing the citizens of this town. Paden City has dangerously high levels of the dry-cleaning chemical Tetrachloroethylene or PCE in their water supply and city officials have known about the abnormally high readings since at least 1999.
Even though these levels have been recorded for more than two decades, it wasn’t until March 2019 when the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection sent a letter to them stating that levels had reached 5.5. This is the level declared by the Environmental Protection Agency as dangerous to humans. Water quality readings have been recorded as high as 49.6 (2013) but the WVDEP did not recognize the issue until last March.
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With over two decades of water pollution with a carcinogenic contaminant, residents worry how using the water for so long unaware of the problem will impact their health. Paden City resident Tonya Schuler conducted a series of online and in-person surveys about health problems among town residents. The results are staggering. Tonya told WVPB, “We found clusters of cancer, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, etc.” Why the secrecy? Why did it take so long for the WVDEP to acknowledge the crisis? Why are they not conducting weekly water quality tests? Why has the Bureau of Public Health not visited the city to track illnesses among citizens? Why has Governor Justice not utilized the State of Emergency to provide safe, clean drinking water to the citizens of Paden City?
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/2/21/1921076/-Water-Emergency-in-Paden-City-WV
