Who cares about water pollution? Opinions in a small-town crisis

International Journal of Environmental Impacts: Management, Mitigation and Recovery

PloS one, 2015

A January 2014 industrial accident contaminated the public water supply of approximately 300,000 homes in and near Charleston, West Virginia (USA) with low levels of a strongly-smelling substance consisting principally of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM). The ensuing state of emergency closed schools and businesses. Hundreds of people sought medical care for symptoms they related to the incident. We surveyed 498 households by telephone to assess the episode's health and economic impact as well as public perception of risk communication by responsible officials. Thirty two percent of households (159/498) reported someone with illness believed to be related to the chemical spill, chiefly dermatological or gastrointestinal symptoms. Respondents experienced more frequent symptoms of psychological distress during and within 30 days of the emergency than 90 days later. Sixty-seven respondent households (13%) had someone miss work because of the crisis, missing a median of 3 days of...

Sociological Perspectives, 1985

Energy Research & Social Science, 2021

New solutions : a journal of environmental and occupational health policy : NS, 2007

We identify and explain factors that affected a community's perception of risk due to extensive industrial contamination and people's distrust of government agencies regarding the environmental investigations.

Directly affecting the drinking water of over 300,000 people in nine counties of West Virginia, the January 9, 2014 chemical spill in the Elk River at Charleston was labeled by The New York Times as " one of the most serious incidents of chemical contamination of drinking water in American history. " Organized as a forum of informal presentations and interactive dialog, this roundtable session explores the work of several participants in a collaborative oral history project sponsored by the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy and funded by the Oral History Association's Emerging Crisis Research Fund. We will describe partnerships created with other researchers, scholars, documentarians, writers, students, activists and other citizens as the project continues to emerge. Since this collective project began in earnest in the months following this catastrophic spill, several other unfolding disasters involving contaminated drinking water on a mass scale have been revealed—including, most recently, the case of widespread lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan. Against the sordid backdrop of these manifestly harmful events, as well as in the milieu of widespread concern for short and long-term impacts of hydro-fracking across the United States, this roundtable will allow for broad consideration of far-reaching social, economic, and health effects of toxic exposure as expressed in the accounts and everyday lives of local people. A physician recounts learning about the spill very late in the day and having to evacuate the hospital. An attorney and longtime activist says that he suddenly feels as though he's living in an unfamiliar world. A pregnant woman describes the fear and unease she carries along with her baby. A home health care worker questions how this threat could have gone unnoticed for decades. A small business owner wonders if he and his family would be better off someplace else. Seemingly having to pick between business interests and jobs, on the one hand, and overall quality of life and public safety, on the other, communities like Charleston may find themselves painfully torn as they seek to find a way forward in a world of imperatives shaped by powerful

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019

Understanding public perceptions about environmental health hazards, exposures, and health impacts can help environmental public health practitioners to target and prioritize community activities, policy needs, and communication strategies. The online cross-sectional 2013 summer wave of the ConsumerStyles survey sampled U.S. adults and used questions from the Centers for Disease Control’s Environmental Public Health Tracking Program to measure public awareness of governmental efforts to track environmental exposures and links to health impacts, as well as perceptions of environmental health issues. Unadjusted and adjusted logistic regressions examined the associations between demographic characteristics and level of awareness of government environmental public health efforts or level of concern about health risks associated with environmental pollutants. Responses were received from 4033 participants, yielding a response rate of 66.0%. More than half of respondents (57.8%) noted con...

Sustainability, 2020

Hazard information plays an important role in how risk perceptions are formed and what actions are taken in response to risk. While past studies have shown that information on water and air pollution is associated with changes to individual behavior, there is a need for examination of water quality information in the context of environmental disturbances. This study fills that gap by examining water pollution in an active industrial region of the United States—the Galveston Bay of Texas. Using original survey data collected in 2019 of 525 adults living in the Galveston Bay region, logistic regression was used to analyze the association of awareness and use of water pollution information on changes to outdoor activities and consumption of drinking water and/or seafood. Controls for chronic and acute exposure to environmental hazards, environmental knowledge and experience, and demographics were included in the model. The findings indicate frequent use of water quality information is ...