Good Morning.

We all like licorice, right? I use oil of anise in a couple of signature cookies around baking season...of course I'm part Italian and Sicilian so I've got a bottle of Sambucca kicking around my liquor cabinet somewhere...curiously though, I don't like black licorice; I prefer the red kind, but I digress.

But suppose you got up one morn, went to brew coffee or brush your teeth, and got some weird blue goo that smelled of elderberries? [poetic license]


Astonishingly, this is what happened to the good people of Charleston, West Virginia earlier this week. Even more surprising was that nobody heard about it for days. I myself became aware of the story via the BBC some 24 hours after the fact.

It seems like this big beefy dude cast a huge shadow over a bridge, a city, and much of the East Coast all week. It was all too easy to get sucked into the vortex and ignore all else, but I suppose that's what happens in New York.

But back to West Virginia. It's a delightful chemical called 4-methylcyclohexane methanol that is causing all the trouble. It leaked out of a holding tank, found its way to the river, and wasn't even discovered until the aforementioned 'unusual' tap water was noticed.

The problem with the stuff is, nobody even knows what the long-term effects of exposure are. Whether it's an overabundance of caution or not, the authorities have declared that the water is only safe for "flushing toilets and putting out fires".

As you would expect, this triggered an instant run on bottled water, and of course it's completely disappeared from the Charleston Metro area. Some 300,000 people are affected by the ban. Despite some early instances of hoarding, the population has been mighty civil about this entire thing. Given the gun culture of Appalachia though, I expect to read about fisticuffs and shootouts over water in the coming days, but of course your mileage may vary.

But why was this chemical precariously stored near the water supply anyway? Well of course it's all about the coal. I don't pretend to understand, but it was described in the article as a chemical used for 'cleaning' coal. To what end remains unclear. (Cue RW meme: See? we tried to make the coal cleaner and this happened! It's Obama's fault!)

This will bear watching for a while. It's just people now, but the impact on the environment and gentle, furry, woodland creatures remains unclear. And of course being coal, I have to wonder how many steps in the background our friendly Koch brothers are?