Last week's major chemical spill into West Virginia's Elk River, which cut off water to more than 300,000 people, came in a state with a long and troubled history of regulating the coal and chemical companies that form the heart of its economy.''We can't just point a single finger at this company,'' said Angela Rosser, the executive director of West Virginia Rivers Coalition. ''We need to look at our entire system and give some serious thought to making some serious reform and valuing our natural resources over industry interests.''
She said lawmakers have yet to explain why the storage facility was allowed to sit on the river and so close to a water treatment plant that is the largest in the state.
Ms. Rosser and others noted that the site of the spill has not been subject to a state or federal inspection since 1991. West Virginia law does not require inspections for chemical storage facilities -- only for production facilities.
Some other states do require inspections of chemical storage facilities. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said he was working with Randy Huffman, the secretary of the State Department of Environmental Protection, to come up with recommendations aimed at avoiding future leaks.
The Charleston Gazette-Mail reported Sunday that a team of experts from the United States Chemical Safety Board asked the state three years ago to create a new program to prevent accidents and releases in the Kanawha Valley, known as Chemical Valley.
That came after investigation of the August 2008 explosion and fire that killed two workers at the Bayer CropScience plant in Institute, W.Va. No program was produced, and another team from the same board is expected to arrive Monday to investigate this accident.
Critics say the problems are widespread in a state where the coal and chemical industries, which drive much of West Virginia's economy and are powerful forces in the state's politics, have long pushed back against tight federal health, safety and environmental controls.
''West Virginia has a pattern of resisting federal oversight and what they consider E.P.A. interference, and that really puts workers and the population at risk,'' said Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a lecturer in environmental health at George Washington University.
But Mr. Huffman disputed that accusation, noting that West Virginia's economy is more heavily dependent than other states on the coal and chemical industries. ''Based upon the types of industrial activity, how does it compare to the rest of the country? It's not in context.'' Although he added, ''That's no excuse for any incident where someone gets hurt.''
Efforts to clean up the spill showed signs of improvement on Sunday.
''The numbers look good, and like last night, they are very encouraging,'' Governor Tomblin said in a news conference on Sunday. ''I believe we're at a point where we can say we're seeing light at the end of the tunnel.''
Officials said tests conducted at a water treatment plant downstream from the site of the leak showed little to no traces of contamination on Sunday morning, allowing testing to move to the next phase.
Once the testing is complete, the water company plans to begin lifting the do-not-use ban by zones. The work will start in downtown Charleston and three other ''priority zones'' that include the city's four major hospitals and 25,000 customers who use more than half of the company's water, said Jeff McIntyre, the president of West Virginia American Water.
''I don't believe we're several days from starting the lift, but I'm saying not today,'' Mr. McIntyre said.
Government offices and many businesses planned to reopen on Monday, while many schools in the affected areas would remain closed, officials said.
''Stores are open,'' said Jimmy Gianato, the state director of homeland security. ''We're starting to get back to normal.''
Emergency rooms have treated about 169 patients for symptoms related to chemical exposure, said Karen Bowling, the state health secretary. Ten people were admitted to three hospitals with symptoms that were not life threatening, she said.
The chemical in last Thursday's spill was 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, known as MCHM. The leak at the Elk River storage facility came from a ruptured tank storing this chemical, which is used to wash coal.
No charges have been filed against Freedom Industries, the company that owns the plant, but the United States attorney's office has already begun an investigation into the spill.
''Whenever you have a discharge of a pollutant or a hazardous substance you have potential violation of the environmental laws,'' said Booth Goodwin, the United States attorney for the Southern District of West Virginia, according to a news report on WVVA.com.
This is not the first chemical accident to hit West Virginia's Kanawha Valley.
After an explosion at a West Virginia chemical plant owned by Bayer CropScience killed two employees in 2008, a 2010 congressional investigation found that managers refused for several hours to tell emergency responders the nature of the blast or the toxic chemical it released. It also found that they later misused a law intended to keep information from terrorists to try to stop federal investigators from learning what had happened. The plant manufactured the same chemical that was processed in a giant 1985 explosion that killed 10,000 in Bhopal, India.
West Virginia is also no stranger to accidents in the coal industry.
In 2012, federal prosecutors charged David C. Hughart, a top executive at Massey Energy, a West Virginia coal operator, with a felony count and a second misdemeanor conspiracy count related to the deaths of 29 coal miners in a 2009 explosion at West Virginia's Upper Big Branch mine. Prosecutors said that Mr. Hughart and others knowingly conspired to violate safety laws at Massey's mines and worked to hide those violations by giving advance warnings of surprise inspections by the Mine Safety and Health Administration.
In 2009, an investigation by The New York Times found that hundreds of workplaces in West Virginia had violated pollution laws without paying fines. In interviews at the time, current and former West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection employees said their enforcement efforts had been undermined by bureaucratic disorganization; a departmental preference to let polluters escape punishment if they promised to try harder; and a revolving door of regulators who left for higher-paying jobs at the companies they once policed.
In June 2009, four environmental groups petitioned the E.P.A. to take over much of West Virginia's handling of the Clean Water Act, citing a ''nearly complete breakdown'' in the state.
''Historically, there had been a questionable enforcement ethic,'' said Matthew Crum, a former state mining director at the state's Department of Environmental Protection.
Cindy Rank, chairwoman of the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy's mining committee, said that the coal lobby has wielded great influence in crafting state environmental regulations. ''Accidents are always preventable. For the most part I think that's true in these disasters that keep happening,'' she said. She recalled negotiations over a groundwater protection bill from the early 1990s. ''We swallowed hard and allowed the coal industry to get away with a lot in that bill,'' she said.