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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

If boiling and filtering is impossible to clean, well that means their water table is screwed for decades, no?

Pretty much abandon the area or risk cancer.

"Freedom Industries" indeed.

It completely depends on the type of chemical. Your scenario imagines something like radiation. Perhaps the chemical isn't incredibly toxic and can be flushed out. If someone spilled bleach you wouldn't be able to boil or filter it out but you could dilute it to where it's safe for consumption.

City of St Albans water, mentioned in the story as safe, appears do be drawn from the Kanawha, downstream of where the Elk River flows in.

So yeah, dilution appears to be the solution (really, the problem seems to be that one treatment plant drew in a large quantity of contaminated water).

That was my first thought too. According to http://www.reddit.com/r/chemistry/comments/1uunyw/4methylcyc... however: "The material is lighter than water, so it's going to float on top."

It's water soluble- this chemical cannot simple be skimmed from the surface like an oil.

Actually, it's not very water soluble at all. It's a large cyclohexane that's relatively non-polar (the first comment in that reddit link agrees). Approximately 5000 gallons of the chemical spilled into the river, so there likely isn't very much of the chemical mixed in with the water. Most likely not enough to seriously harm anyone.

It's not insoluble, it is up to 3% soluble. "Most likely not enough to harm anyone." For some reason the state has declared it a federal disaster? check out this green ice- look, it's not soluble! Fine to drink! http://i.imgur.com/pzBsLRP.jpg

Its solubility maxes out at 3%. ~5000 gallons in a river is hardly enough to get to those levels. The news is reporting that the concentration is about 3ppm. 3ppm of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol is about 0.021g of the chemical in 1L of water. The lowest LD50 for ingesting the chemical I've found is 800mg/kg. This means you'd have to drink 3086L of water for it to be lethal. The LD50 for skin contact is at least double the ingestion LD50.

That being said, I'm not going to take the risk, and I've only used water out of water bottles since this started.

LD50 is fairly useless as it gives no indication of the toxicity of lower levels of the substance. It takes a large volume for some chemicals to kill you, but a much smaller amount can make your life very unpleasant.

The NIH has much more information about methylcyclohexanol here: http://toxnet.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/sis/search/a?dbs+hsdb:@ter...

Edit -*

The NIH link is to a 4-methylcyclohexanol (CAS: 589-91-3), not to 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (CAS: 34885-03-5), a similar but distinct compound.

methylcyclohexanol and 4-methylcyclohexane methanol are different compounds.

That damn extra carbon.

Any idea why the Wiki article gets the oxygen / hydrogen counts wrong?

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-methylcyclohexanemethanol]

As of this revision it matches what I see elsewhere:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=4-Methylcyclohexan...

Presumably whoever created the page copied the info box and forgot to edit it.

That's a good point. It doesn't appear to be particularly dangerous at low levels - just unpleasant.

Sghodas- I think you are missing the point. By your math and 'rational' it seems there shouldn't be an issue. This spill was not some homogeneous mixture you can easily calculate in PPM. This chemical has travelled wholly through the water plant into the water supply- solubility doesn't matter. Two to seven days have elapsed between intake from river, through filtration/ozone treatment, to holding water tower, then into public use. How many PPM do you think are in the green ice cubes someone found in their freezer? And at what PPM does ingestion cause long-term health effects?

5000 gallons? That's not much, in the context of a river. I'd guess this won't turn out to be a long term big deal.

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