ALJAZEERA: A handful of people have been hospitalized and several hundred thousand remain without water after a chemical leaked from a storage tank in Charleston into the public water treatment system, state authorities said Saturday.
About 300,000 people in nine counties entered their third day Saturday without being able to drink, bathe in, or wash dishes or clothes with their tap water after a foaming agent escaped a chemical tank belonging to Freedom Industries – a Charleston company that produces specialty chemicals for the mining, steel and cement industries – and seeped into the Elk River. The only allowed use of the water was for flushing toilets…
State regulators said Friday that the company never told them of the leak, and found out only after residents complained of a strange smell, according to the State Journal… (more)
