Elk River Chemical Spill: Health Effects, Settlement, and Tank Law

The Elk River chemical spill was a January 9, 2014 leak at Freedom Industries in Charleston, West Virginia, that released roughly 11,000 gallons of a coal-processing chemical called MCHM into the drinking water supply for about 300,000 people across nine counties. A “do not use” order kept taps shut for days, hundreds of residents went to emergency rooms, six company executives were later convicted of environmental crimes, and a class action against the water utility and the chemical’s manufacturer settled for $151 million. The state law passed in response has since been cut back to cover a fraction of the tanks it originally regulated.

What Happened on January 9, 2014

Early that morning, residents around Charleston began calling 911 to report a licorice smell in the air and water. West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection inspectors traced it to Freedom Industries’ Etowah River Terminal, a tank farm on the Elk River about a mile and a half upstream from the Kanawha Valley Treatment Plant run by West Virginia American Water.¹

The source was Tank 396, a 46,000-gallon aboveground tank holding Shurflot 944, a mixture of crude methylcyclohexanemethanol (MCHM) and polyglycol ethers known as PPH. Pitting corrosion on the tank floor had opened two holes, one about four-tenths of an inch across and another about three-quarters of an inch. Over an estimated six to eight hours, roughly 11,000 gallons drained out.²

The dike around the tank should have caught it. Instead, the secondary containment was cracked and holed from years of neglect, and the chemical also traveled through a subsurface culvert running beneath the adjacent tanks, bypassing every barrier on the site.²

Investigators later found Freedom officials had known about the dike problems and about Tank 396’s condition. The tanks had not been internally inspected for at least a decade. The DEP held a stormwater permit for the site but could not produce the required groundwater or stormwater pollution prevention plans, and outside of limited air quality checks the facility had not been inspected since 1991.³

Who Lost Water and For How Long

West Virginia American Water determined that its carbon filters could not remove MCHM. That evening the utility issued a “do not use” order covering 93,000 customer accounts, about 300,000 residents in Boone, Cabell, Clay, Jackson, Kanawha, Lincoln, Logan, Putnam, and Roane counties.⁴ Governor Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency the same day.¹

People were told not to drink the water, cook with it, bathe in it, or wash with it. Schools and daycares closed. Hospitals scaled back. Restaurants and hotels shut their doors. Marshall University’s Center for Business and Economic Research estimated businesses lost about $19 million in revenue for each day the ban was in effect.⁵

Officials began lifting the order on January 13, starting with hospitals and moving zone by zone. Residents were told to flush their plumbing before using the water. The final restrictions came off on January 17, more than a week after the spill.⁴ Many residents stayed skeptical. MCHM’s licorice odor is detectable at concentrations thousands of times below the official screening level, and the smell kept turning up in tap water for weeks after flushing.²

Health Effects on Residents

A review of records from ten local hospitals between January 9 and January 23, 2014, identified 369 emergency department visits tied to the spill. The most common symptoms were nausea (38 percent of patients), rash (29 percent), vomiting (28 percent), abdominal pain (24 percent), diarrhea (24 percent), and headache (22 percent). Patients who had bathed or showered in the water were more likely to report skin symptoms; those who had swallowed it were more likely to report gastrointestinal ones.⁶

Thirteen people were hospitalized, generally patients with pre-existing kidney, liver, or lung conditions. The other 356 were treated and released, often after IV fluids or medication for nausea and itching. Lab work on the emergency department patients showed no new liver or kidney damage.⁶

A second wave of illness followed the flushing itself. When residents ran hot water through their pipes as instructed, the heat volatilized residual MCHM and increased inhalation exposure. Poison control data and syndromic surveillance showed a rise in symptom reports beginning around January 13, and patients in flushed homes were more likely to report sore throats.⁷

A 2018 study found a statistically significant decrease in five-minute Apgar scores among infants born in the affected area after the spill, though it did not find significant effects on birthweight or gestational age.⁸

Why Officials Could Not Say if the Water Was Safe

MCHM was manufactured by Eastman Chemical Company, which had voluntarily done some toxicology testing. The existing studies did not include low-dose research, which is what public health officials needed to judge risk to hundreds of thousands of people exposed through drinking water.²

Eastman was not required to do those studies. The Toxic Substances Control Act, the federal law governing industrial chemicals, had grandfathered in thousands of existing chemicals without demanding adequate toxicity data. MCHM was one of them. There was no federal water quality standard for it under the Clean Water Act and no maximum contaminant level under the Safe Drinking Water Act.³

Without solid data, the CDC recommended a short-term screening level of 1 part per million for 4-MCHM, drawn from Eastman’s limited safety data sheet. MCHM’s licorice smell, though, is detectable at concentrations as low as 0.15 parts per billion. People could smell the chemical at levels thousands of times below what officials were calling safe, and that gap fueled lasting distrust. Independent toxicologists later set a more stringent screening level of 120 parts per billion, citing concern about long-term exposure for infants and other vulnerable groups.⁷

Freedom Industries made this worse. The company first reported a leak of about 1,000 gallons, then revised upward to roughly 11,000. It did not disclose that the tank also contained PPH until 12 days after the leak was found, leaving emergency responders and the water utility working from incomplete information during the critical early hours.⁹

Criminal Cases Against Freedom and Its Executives

Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of West Virginia charged Freedom Industries as a corporation and six former executives and associates with environmental crimes. All pleaded guilty before Judge Thomas E. Johnston. Every individual charge was a misdemeanor.¹⁰

Freedom Industries, Inc. pleaded guilty to negligently discharging a pollutant, unlawfully discharging refuse, and knowingly violating an environmental permit, and was fined $900,000. Company president Gary Southern pleaded guilty in August 2015 to three misdemeanors: negligent discharge of a pollutant, unlawful discharge of refuse, and negligent violation of a water pollution permit. Prosecutors dropped 12 felony counts related to bankruptcy fraud allegations. Under the plea deal, the federal government returned $7.3 million in seized assets and a Bentley to Southern, who settled civil claims for $650,000.¹¹ The maximum sentence he faced was three years in prison and a $300,000 fine, and the deal drew heavy criticism.¹²

Former president and owner Dennis Farrell pleaded guilty to two water pollution charges. Former owners William Tis and Charles Herzing each pleaded guilty to one count of unlawfully discharging refuse; Herzing was sentenced to three years of probation and a $20,000 fine.¹³ Plant manager Michael Burdette pleaded guilty to negligent discharge of a pollutant and was sentenced to three years of probation and a $2,500 fine.¹⁰ Environmental consultant Robert Reynolds also pleaded guilty to negligent discharge of a pollutant.

Freedom Industries filed for bankruptcy shortly after the spill and eventually liquidated. Just one month before the leak, the company had been acquired by Chemstream Holdings, LLC, controlled by coal industry figure J. Clifford Forrest. Chemstream settled with the bankruptcy estate in June 2015, contributing $1.1 million in cash and assigning rights to an escrow account of about $2.72 million for site remediation, in exchange for a release from further liability. A later suit trying to hold Forrest personally responsible was dismissed with prejudice in 2018.¹⁴

The $151 Million Class Action Settlement

Residents and businesses filed a class action against West Virginia American Water and Eastman Chemical Company. Freedom Industries itself was excluded because of the bankruptcy. Plaintiffs argued the water utility failed to prepare for a contamination event at a facility sitting directly upstream from its intake, and that Eastman failed to warn Freedom about storage incompatibilities given MCHM’s corrosive nature.¹⁵

A tentative $151 million settlement was announced in late 2016, with $126 million from West Virginia American Water and its parent companies and $25 million from Eastman. Neither company admitted fault.¹⁵

In July 2017, U.S. District Judge John Copenhaver Jr. rejected the initial terms without prejudice, citing concerns about the fairness of business payouts, eligibility criteria, timeliness, and attorney fees. The original agreement had also included language that would have let West Virginia American Water recover its settlement costs from customers through a rate case; that provision was dropped in the revised deal.¹⁶ The amended plan replaced fixed payment tiers with percentage and cost-based factors for business and medical claims, and raised the simple household claim from $525 to $550.¹⁷

Judge Copenhaver granted final approval on June 8, 2018. More than 95,000 claims were filed.¹⁸ Checks began going out in September 2018. With about 90 percent of eligible households participating, the head-of-household payment was adjusted to $482, plus $180 per additional resident. Business payouts ranged from $1,875 for most businesses up to about $64,000 for lodging establishments, based on annual revenue.¹⁷ Copenhaver also ordered Southern’s personal settlement contribution raised from $350,000 to $1 million.

The Aboveground Storage Tank Law and Its Rollback

Two months after the spill, the West Virginia Legislature unanimously passed Senate Bill 373, creating the Aboveground Storage Tank Act. Governor Tomblin signed it on April 1, 2014, and it took effect June 6, 2014.¹⁹²⁰²¹

The law initially covered nearly 42,000 tanks. The legislature amended it in 2015 through Senate Bill 423, and further changes carved out exemptions for oil and gas tanks and other categories. Over the following decade there were at least 12 legislative attempts to loosen the original requirements. By 2026, the act applied to approximately 4,500 tanks, an 89 percent reduction from its original scope.²²

In March 2026, the West Virginia House of Delegates passed Senate Bill 641 on a 58-34 vote, further weakening the law by downgrading brine water tanks of 10,000 gallons or less from “level 1” to “level 2” regulatory status, reducing inspection requirements and fees. Supporters said it would help small gas companies. Opponents said the original act had protected drinking water and that further deregulation risked public health.²³

The tank farm that caused the spill is gone. The law written in its aftermath now covers a fraction of what it once did.

1
WV Encyclopedia. Elk River Chemical Spill
2
U.S. Chemical Safety Board. Freedom Industries Investigation Report
3
NPR. West Virginia Chemical Spill
4
WV Public Broadcasting. Key Health Players Look Back at the 2014 Water Crisis
5
ICMA. Elk River Case Study
6
WV DHHR. Elk River Medical Record Summary
7
American Chemical Society. Syndromic Surveillance and Environmental Monitoring of the 2014 West Virginia Chemical Spill
8
Oxford Academic. The Economic and Health Effects of the 2014 Chemical Spill in the Elk River, West Virginia
9
U.S. Chemical Safety Board. CSB Releases Final Report Into 2014 Freedom Industries Mass Contamination
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Freedom Industries and Former Plant Manager Sentenced
11
WV Gazette-Mail. Southern Plea Deal Returns Millions to Former Freedom Executive
12
Facing South. Executive in WV Spill Pleads Guilty, Gets His Bentley Back
13
U.S. Department of Justice. Former Freedom Industries Owner Sentenced
14
WV Supreme Court. Forrest Motion to Dismiss
15
NPR. $151 Million Settlement Deal Reached Over West Virginia Water Poisoning
16
Courthouse News Service. West Virginia Chem Spill Case Settled for $151M
17
WSAZ. $151 Million Proposed Settlement Filed in 2014 Water Crisis
18
WV Public Broadcasting. Settlements From 2014 Freedom Industries Spill Not Ready to Be Paid Out
19
WV DEP. Aboveground Storage Tanks
20
WV Legislature. Senate Bill 373
21
WV DHHR. Source Water Protection, WV Code 16-1-9
22
News From the States. WV House Energy Approves Watered-Down Version of Bill Loosening Regulations for Storage Tanks
23
West Virginia Watch. WV House Adopts Narrower Version of Bill to Loosen Regulations for Aboveground Storage Tanks