Note: please see update at bottom of post

I’m happy to see continuing coverage of the Merck cyanide spill in the Philly papers, but Sandra Shea’s article (if you can really call something that begins with the word “Eeeeew!” a legitimate act of journalism) raises more questions than it answers. Most of them center on the following paragraph:

In the case of the Merck release - which apparently happened June 13, though Merck didn’t discover it until a week later, after the fish-kill - authorities could tell something bad was happening not just because of the number of fish affected but because of the way the fish were acting: They were jumping out of the water and swimming upside down.

– “Agencies Downplay Water Mess”, Philadelphia Daily News, 6/26/06 [emphasis added]

Uh, hello? Are there any reporters in the house?

Here are some suggested follow-up questions:

1. Is Merck really claiming that it did not know about the spill until a week after it happened, when Water Department officials told them that a thousand fish were floating belly-up in the Wissahickon Creek?

2. Were they winking, or perhaps proffering a wad of hundred dollar bills, when they claimed that?

3. If Merck did not know about the spill until they were contacted by “authorities,” doesn’t that prove that their monitoring systems are completely ineffective? And that this probably isn’t the first time they’ve dumped toxic chemicals into Philadelphia’s waters?

4. What penalties will Merck face for this spill, and for their delay in reporting it?

5. Who regulates Merck’s industrial dumping? If it’s the EPA (as I think it is), why isn’t an EPA official being asked about this?

6. Have the regulations governing sites like the Merck plant changed in recent years? How long has it been since the facility’s control mechanisms have been tested?

7. Exactly how many plants dump treated waste into the waters that feed Philly’s water supply? How often are they — not the water, but the plants themselves — tested?

8. Is using fish as “canaries in the coal mine” (see full article) really a good substitute for proper environmental regulation? Has anyone asked the fish about this?

9. Back to number 2 for a second: they really expect us to believe that they didn’t notice this spill? Really?

The Daily News and the Philadelphia Water Department can pat our heads and tell us that the river has never been cleaner, but something stinks here, and it’s worse than the cyanide, the raw sewage, or the rotting fish.

I only hope that an enterprising reporter in this city smells it, too.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: It looks like reporters from the Inquirer, at least, are on the case. When I wrote this post, I missed an article from last Friday, Merck faces fish-kill probe. It answers some of the questions I posed here, and it begins with a discussion of the week-long delay.

The EPA is indeed performing an investigation, and there are some penalties for Merck’s act:

[Jon M. Capacasa, director of the EPA’s water-protection division] said the general provisions of the Clean Water Act called for penalties of up to $32,500 per violation, per day.

State Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Dennis Harney said conditions on the Wissahickon also violated the state clean-streams law, which carries maximum penalties of $10,000 per day per violation.

“Something like this would most likely constitute multiple violations,” he said.

Of course, it’s hard to imagine that fines of that size would do much to stop future dumping.

Previously:
Merck’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
The Clean Party
We’re All Going to Die

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