When a chemical leaked at a facility in Charleston, West Virginia, lawmakers at the State Capitol were close enough to smell it. Photo Illustration by Spruce / Background by Analogue Kid; Foreground: Sprint / Corbis

On the morning of Thursday, January 9, 2014, the people of Charleston, West Virginia, awoke to a strange tang in the air off the Elk River. It smelled like licorice. The occasional odor is part of life in Charleston, the state capital, which lies in an industrial area that takes flinty pride in the nickname Chemical Valley. In the nineteenth century, natural brine springs made the region one of America’s largest producers of salt. The saltworks gave rise to an industry that manufactured gunpowder, antifreeze, Agent Orange, and other “chemical magic,” as The Saturday Evening Post put it, in 1943. The image endured. Today, the Chemical Valley Roller Girls compete in Roller Derby events with a logo of a woman in fishnet stockings and a gas mask. After decades of slow decline, the local industry has revived in recent years, owing to the boom in cheap natural gas, which has made America one of the world’s most inexpensive places to make chemicals.

At 8:16 A.M., a resident called the state Department of Environmental Protection and said that something in the air was, in the operator’s words, “coating his wife’s throat.” Downtown, the mayor, Danny Jones, smelled it and thought, Well, it’s just a chemical in the air. It’ll move. A few minutes passed. “I stuck my mouth up to a water fountain and took a big drink, and I thought, We’re in trouble,” he recalls. People were calling 911, and the state sent out two inspectors. Eventually, they reached a chemical-storage facility run by Freedom Industries, a “tank farm,” with seventeen white metal pillbox-shaped containers clustered on a bluff above the Elk River.

The staff initially said that there was nothing out of the ordinary, but, when the inspectors asked to look around, a company executive, Dennis Farrell, told them that he had a problem at Tank No. 396, a forty-eight-thousand-gallon container of industrial chemicals. At the foot of the tank, the inspectors found a shallow open-air lake of an oily substance, gurgling like a mountain spring. When hazardous-material crews arrived, they followed a liquid trail under a concrete wall, into the bushes, and down a slope, where it disappeared beneath ice on the river.

Freedom Industries was obligated to report the spill to a state hot line. The operator, who identified herself as Laverne, asked what was leaking; the caller, a staff member named Bob Reynolds, said, “Uh, MCHM.”

“MCHM?” Laverne asked.

“Right,” he said, and offered the scientific name.

Laverne paused and said, “Say again?”

MCHM—4-methylcyclohexane methanol—is part of a chemical bath that the mining industry uses to wash clay and rock from coal before it is burned. There are more than eighty thousand chemicals available for use in America, but, unless they are expected to be consumed, their effects on humans are not often tested, a principle known in the industry as “innocent until proven guilty.” MCHM was largely a mystery to the officials who now confronted the task of containing it. But they knew that the site posed an immediate problem: it was a mile upriver from the largest water-treatment plant in West Virginia. The plant served sixteen per cent of the state’s population, some three hundred thousand people—a figure that had risen in the past decade, because coal mining has reduced the availability and quality of other water sources, prompting West Virginians to board up their wells and tap into the public system.

This was West Virginia’s fifth major industrial accident in eight years. Most accidents unfold deep in the mountains that contain the state’s natural resources. In this case, the leaders of the state were less than three miles away—near enough to smell it. The spill occurred on the second day of the annual legislative session, when lawmakers were in the State Capitol, a handsome limestone edifice with a gilded dome and landscaped grounds on the north bank of the Kanawha River.

The spill struck a state in the throes of one of America’s most thorough political transformations. Once a Democratic stronghold, West Virginia has moved so far to the right that, in 2012, President Obama lost all fifty-five counties, a first for a Presidential candidate of either major party. In the Democratic Presidential primary, a challenger had won forty-one per cent of the vote—impressive in part because the candidate, Keith Judd, is serving seventeen and a half years in a federal prison for extortion.

The state has become a standard-bearer for pro-business, limited-government conservatism. The day before the chemical spill, the governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, delivered his State of the State address, criticizing federal environmental regulators and vowing, “I will never back down from the E.P.A., because of its misguided policies on coal.” Tomblin, a conservative Democrat elected in 2011, cut corporate taxes and denounced the federal government for overstepping its authority. To balance the budget, he tapped other government funds and called for broad cuts, including reducing agency spending by seventy million dollars. For the second consecutive year, West Virginia’s Department of Environmental Protection would take a 7.5-per-cent cut in state funds, dropping to its lowest level since 2008.

At first, Freedom Industries estimated the leak to be as small as twenty-five hundred gallons, about sixty barrels. Within days, the estimate had tripled. Eventually, the company raised it to ten thousand gallons, and reported that a second chemical, known as PPH, had leaked as well. At 6 P.M., the Governor appeared on television and issued a warning unprecedented in Chemical Valley: he told three hundred thousand people that their tap water was not safe for “drinking, cooking, washing, or bathing.” It was one of the most serious incidents of chemical contamination of drinking water in American history.

By this time, people had been drinking the water all day. Authorities urged the public to watch for symptoms of exposure, including rashes, nausea, vomiting, and wheezing. Just after midnight, President Obama declared a federal emergency. He dispatched FEMA and sent in the National Guard to deliver truckloads of bottled water.

The struggle over the costs and the spoils of industrial production is as much a part of West Virginians’ self-image as the coal miner on the state flag. The historian John Alexander Williams, a retired professor at Appalachian State University, said, “If West Virginia has one enduring theme, it was in the words of those first explorers who described it as a ‘pleasing, tho’ dreadful’ land.” In the Battle of Blair Mountain, in 1921, more than ten thousand miners confronted police and federal troops backed by machine guns and biplanes. It was the largest insurrection since the Civil War and contributed to Franklin Roosevelt’s efforts, more than a decade later, to protect collective bargaining. When the Great Depression cut West Virginia coal production by forty per cent, Roosevelt pushed relief programs into the mountains and enshrined Democratic control of the state. The Party had so many patronage jobs at its command that U.S. Senator Matthew M. Neely complained that job seekers were “following me to my bathroom.”

When I finished college, in 1999, I got a job as a photographer at a newspaper in West Virginia, the Clarksburg Exponent Telegram. Clarksburg (pop. 16,400) is a small city in the northern part of the state, with an Art Deco courthouse on Main Street, where a billboard once hung that said “You have a right to be proud!” I rented a roomy apartment in a hundred-year-old building with large windows and a view of downtown. Clarksburg had never been rich, but workers in the local glass factories could afford to buy a house and a car and raise a family. The standard of living had risen in the three decades after the Second World War, as it had in much of America, when the national economy doubled in size and the earnings of the average worker doubled with it. By 1957, the local government was creating so many parks and sewers and roads that the National Municipal League named Clarksburg an “All-America City,” and the honor still appeared on signs around town.