According to the Washington Post weekend edition, there are 80,000 different chemicals sold in the United States and for the vast majority of them, the health risks to human beings is unknown. Hence, what we have going on in West Virginia is the tip of the iceberg.

As the population grows, forests are cut down and land is developed, there are fewer and fewer places to hide these chemicals (or hide from them) and we will be exposed to them ever more frequently in our drinking water and in our food supply.

This is related to what utilities are spraying millions of gallons of all over rural areas. SWEPCO and Carroll Electric spray herbicides all over rural Missouri and Arkansas 
and they have no idea what the effects on humans are, but rely on their do-not-consume label warnings as adequate protection.

It is amazing to me that utilities can go out and spray herbicides all over the rural areas with no warning. I can be out walking my dogs five minutes after “who knows what will happen to you” chemicals are sprayed on vast stretches of vegetation, most nowhere even close to a power line. It gets universally sprayed and that’s just OK with regulators who also think it’s OK to clean coal next to the drinking supplies of 300,000 people.

Something is wrong with all of this. Very wrong. And hopefully we won’t turn into a cesspool state like many of the others where chemicals, deforestation and selfish greed are ruining what is their most treasured asset — clean air, water and the right to walk outside without being threatened by chemical sprays.

It’s interesting how companies can just go bankrupt overnight, like Freedom Industries in West Virginia, and no government personnel will be blamed. The cycle just keeps going round and round until ashes, ashes we all go down in a chemical nation.

Susan Pang

Garfield