From the tap

Both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had a field day last night with the drinking water contamination in West Virginia. If you missed their opening bits, enjoy them here:






Huh. We're not doing any gloating here, though, not with 300,000 people in and around Charleston going without clean drinking water. Because Freedom Industries built their chemical storage tanks upstream from a major water treatment plant. And then decided that regular inspections weren't really worthwhile. What were you doing in 1991? That's the last time these tanks were inspected. TWENTY THREE years ago. Jesus I'm old.

CNN has a pretty decent piece about the whole fiasco here. My favorite parts? This line: "Two U.S. congressmen say the spill exposes regulatory gaps in the country's chemical control laws." Ya think? But thank you, Representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif) and Paul Tonko (D-NY) for pointing it out anyway. Because sometimes, recognizing what's terribly obvious can be the hardest thing of all.

And the bit where the head of WV Department of Environmental Protection (hahahahahaha) Randy Huffman says, "The materials they were storing there is not a hazardous material." Pathetic grammatical errors aside, I think the residents of the Charleston area who are puking and sh*tting their guts out would disagree.

I'm going to watch the fallout of this disaster. We'll see what change comes of it, since there are chemical AND energy companies with interests here. If nothing else, John Grisham's next novel just wrote itself.

Yours,
Jazzy