Year after W.Virginia river spill, executives are facing charges.

• Author: Mattise, Jonathan
• Position: News

Byline: Jonathan Mattise

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- When state inspectors arrived at Freedom Industries asking about a licorice smell enveloping West Virginia's capital city, the point person at the tank farm, Dennis P. Farrell, told them he knew nothing about a chemical leak.

He seemed to brush off cause for concern over the odor in January. It was the industry's busy season, after all, with chemical shipments coming and going.

On a brief tour, inspectors and Farrell quickly saw what was already contaminating 300,000 people's drinking water: a 400-square-foot pool of chemicals, four inches deep in some spots, had oozed out of an old aboveground tank, through a dilapidated, cracked containment wall and into the Elk River below. The company tried to stop the flow by tossing a cinder block on top of one bag of absorbent material, which failed, according to state email records.

Almost a year later, Farrell, three other former Freedom executives, the company itself and two other employees are facing criminal charges in the spill. Ex-president Gary Southern and former joint-owners William E. Tis, Charles E. Herzing and Farrell face Clean Water Act charges for their roles with Freedom. As officers, they only paid for projects that would boost revenue, or ones that addressed equipment that was broken or about to break, the federal indictment said.

The four former executives will appear in federal court Jan. 8 in Charleston.

Freedom's coal-cleaning chemicals infiltrated a water treatment plant a mile and a half downstream. After the blue-green-tinged mixture poured through people's taps, everyday life in the Kanawha Valley halted for up to 10 days because of a do-not-use order on tap water. Public...