Deferring to Industry

Mr. Manchin, who has a thick shock of steel-gray hair and an affable Appalachian drawl, grew up in the coal mining town of Farmington. An uncle and five classmates died in the Farmington mining disaster of 1968, which killed 78 people and led to more federal regulation of West Virginia’s mines. Before entering state politics, he started a coal brokerage company, Enersystems. His memorable 2010 Senate campaign ads showed him blasting a shotgun at a climate-change bill that would have curbed pollution from coal-fired plants.

In his maiden speech on the Senate floor, Mr. Manchin called for the repeal of a Clean Water Act regulation on mountaintop mining. His Senate financial disclosures state that he made nearly $1.5 million a year in 2011 and 2012 from his coal brokerage firm. He is a current co-sponsor of a bill that would block President Obama’s efforts to regulate global-warming gases.

West Virginia’s record of deferring to industry is long and deep, reflecting its heavy economic reliance on coal, chemicals and, most recently, natural gas. The tank farm where chemicals were stored, just a mile and a half upstream from the intake of the state’s largest water provider, seems to have fallen outside the bounds of multiple state and federal antipollution laws.

Randy C. Huffman, the state cabinet secretary in charge of environmental protection, said that because the facility stored chemicals but did not produce them, his department had no responsibility for regulating it. Other states inspect storage facilities as well as production ones.

Initially, state environmental officials said inspectors had not visited the site in more than two decades. But on Thursday, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection said it had made a half-dozen visits since 2001 when the tank farm, which once stored gasoline, was sold and converted to chemical storage. Inspectors checked the air and soil quality, but apparently not the dozen or so tanks.

State officials have also said a 2008 federal law requiring the tank’s owner, Freedom Industries, to report chemicals stored on-site to the state’s Division of Homeland Security did not require emergency planning for a spill because the chemical that leaked was not legally designated “extremely hazardous.” Still, the report the company filed listed the chemical as one with “immediate (acute) hazards.”

But if the regulatory issues in this case seem opaque, the state’s overall priorities seem clear.

Groundwater in mining regions has been tainted by wastewater pumped into the ground, where it seeps into wells. In 2010, Mr. Manchin, then governor, sued the Environmental Protection Agency over tougher water pollution rules for coal mines that blasted mountain tops and dumped debris into valley watersheds. The current governor, Earl Ray Tomblin, promised the day before the spill in his State of the State address to “never back down from the E.P.A.”