I'm a fly fisherman, and this is not faux outrage...

texas_ex2000

texas_ex2000

2,500+ Posts
Words cannot describe. Yes...I blame the government.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...lion-gallons-of-contaminated-water-into-river

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/10/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-spill/



animas-river-mine-waste-water-jpeg.jpg
 
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This is really sad. It should be noted that this EPA team was trying to cleanup a polluted mine. That doesn't make the outcome any better but I think adds context.

Reporting on how the breach occurred, Colorado Public Radio says that an EPA team used heavy equipment to dig into a dam at the Gold King Mine site, hoping to install a drain pipe. But because of the volume of water and the dam's makeup of soil and not rock, it spewed zinc, iron and contaminants into a runoff channel that leads to the nearby creek.
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I guess you can say "best intentions" but this is a screw up of major proportions by our Protection Agency. Some areas my never recover.
 
thanks Obama!?! or is it more like Obama's "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" moment?
 
Seattle Husker said:
This is really sad. It should be noted that this EPA team was trying to cleanup a polluted mine. That doesn't make the outcome any better but I think adds context.
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You know what the road to Hell is paved with.

First of all, I read about this on fly fishing forums 4 days ago. And the EPA was downplaying the release...both the amount and the location as just a "creek." Some anglers thought it would just be a non-event as it flowed through. Well, it's obviously a hell of a lot worse. The Animas is one of THE destinations for fly anglers in the US. Now, the flow is 3x what the EPA was originally reported (http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/animas-river-gold-king-mine-pollution) and heading to the Grand Canyon.

I like the EPA and generally don't hold any ill will against that agency. It's politicians, who the EPA has to follow, and their games I don't like. I'm also very pro-regulation for standards that prevent catastrophic industrial spills/pollution. I'm probably one of the few conservatives here who supports a moratorium on offshore drilling. And that's not because I think oil companies are evil. I just think spills are like airplane disasters. No matter how responsible an operator is and well designed a system, they aren't 100% perfect and accidents will happen. But those rare accidents are too costly to wildlife.

The bottom line is that no matter what the EPA was trying to do (which really should have been done by a field services contractor) they screwed the pooch beyond FUBAR. And pooches like this absolutely cannot be screwed. Coupled with the VA disaster, I've lost almost all my faith in the government. These aren't even Benghazi and the OPM hacks where the government failed to defend against an external threat. These are simple yet absolutely critical responsibilities that should be confidently taken care of with a reasonable level of competence. This is not an outrageous expectation, but yet we're let down again. The best part of the government, frankly, is NASA. And the coolest people in NASA are Houstonians. In my eyes, that's the federal government saving grace...Texas.

Here's what's going to happen. No one from the EPA will go to jail. If this were any private company, the Administration would be flogging them round the fleet and then hanging them from a yardarm. And then we'll hear it. I can already hear it..."this is what happens when we don't have enough funding. We need a bigger budget to do our job.":brickwall:
 
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That's a beautiful part of the world. If my memory is correct, there's a steam railroad running along that stretch of river. On the train ride, I didn't see many fisherman though I saw plenty of places I'd like to fish. I think access is problematic.
 
???
This isn't just about fishing.
Think of all the money lost to mostly small businesses in Co, NM probably Utah. They can not recoup that money.
Since it was the EPA, who BTW intentionally mislead about the severity, we will end up paying for this.

Take a look at where this water ends up. what impact will there be> How much will it cost us?
 
Horn6721 said:
???
This isn't just about fishing.
Think of all the money lost to mostly small businesses in Co, NM probably Utah. They can not recoup that money.
Since it was the EPA, who BTW intentionally mislead about the severity, we will end up paying for this.

Take a look at where this water ends up. what impact will there be> How much will it cost us?
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Of course. This is a tragedy for towns, people, wildlife. As a fly fisherman it just feels a little more personal. It feels like someone graffitied a Thomas Cole Hudson School Painting...or Hamilton Pool.
 
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Crockett said:
That's a beautiful part of the world. If my memory is correct, there's a steam railroad running along that stretch of river. On the train ride, I didn't see many fisherman though I saw plenty of places I'd like to fish. I think access is problematic.
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I know there was the narrow-gauge that runs Durango to Silverton...I've ridden it during the winter. Drove between the two towns in late fall and concur that access is not the easiest at first glance...however, for those that have specific sites, the trails do exist. Coming back from Silverton, my GPS actually tried to route me down a riverside trail that got progressively worse, to the point that I had to turn around since I didn't want to have to explain how I beat up a rental car THAT badly...

The irony here is that if some eco-friendly group had done this, there would be arrests or large fines (or both). The EPA statutes regarding discharges like this one do not have a 'good samaritan' savings provision to protect those who were trying to do the right thing. But because this was the feds, it is cover-it-up and move on to the next thing to screw up.
 
2000
That was not directed to you at all. It was to point out that even if there isn't much visible fishing done on that river there is impact on everything.
I don't fly fish but the fly fishers I know are very environmentally involved and they explain that if it affects them, fishing, it affects many others things.
 
Here's another sad part. Colorado and New Mexico have declared disasters to un-restrict emergency state funds to clean up the mess - state funds to fix a mistake caused by the federal government.

Trying to get some updated info from the EPA.

Nothing on the frontpage of their homepage: http://epa.gov/

Nothing on their twitter: https://twitter.com/EPA?original_referer=http://epa.gov/&profile_id=14615871&tw_i=631171236475875328&tw_p=embeddedtimeline&tw_w=446386713636515840

But this was posted 2 hours ago!


Pretty sure private Texas companies were responsible for the majority of this.
 
texas_ex2000 said:
Yes...I blame the government.
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There is no denying that the EPA is at least partly to blame. Hell, even the EPA admits that. However, a full investigation may soften (or increase) that blame, or may reveal others who share the blame. For example:
  • A private company abandoned the mine in question (and countless more like it) decades ago. Ever since, pollutants have been leaching out of the mine and into the local groundwater. Did the owners know of the danger, or have reason to know of it?
  • If this is like everything else in the realm of environmental protection, the EPA asked for several multiples of the funds it actually got for this cleanup. Did underfunding force the EPA to take a short-cut approach to the cleanup?
I don't mean to suggest that these concerns actually exist -- just that they should be explored before you make a rush to judgment.
 
NJlonghorn said:
There is no denying that the EPA is at least partly to blame. Hell, even the EPA admits that. However, a full investigation may soften (or increase) that blame, or may reveal others who share the blame. For example:
  • A private company abandoned the mine in question (and countless more like it) decades ago. Ever since, pollutants have been leaching out of the mine and into the local groundwater. Did the owners know of the danger, or have reason to know of it?
  • If this is like everything else in the realm of environmental protection, the EPA asked for several multiples of the funds it actually got for this cleanup. Did underfunding force the EPA to take a short-cut approach to the cleanup?
I don't mean to suggest that these concerns actually exist -- just that they should be explored before you make a rush to judgment.
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NJ, without minning, there wouldn't be a state of Colorado and Coloradans. One of the best schools in the state is The Colorado School of MINES. If it weren't for minning we wouldn't be able to have this discussion or really anything because computers and technology of any sort wouldn't exist.

That said, I don't like mines near rivers or headwaters. I don't like mining companies letting their **** rot away near drinking water sources and trout spawning pools. But that's not what this tragedy is about. The more I've been reading about it, that seems to be how various interest groups are trying to spin it.

The EPA, the federal government, an adminstration that prides itself on its enviornmentalism had ONE job to do there last week. And they failed at it.
 
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It's noteworthy that this thread already has more responses than the Elk River Chemical spill. "Gotcha" EPA!!!

They should be held accountable but we given this was an attempt to clean up after private industry should be a major mitigating factor in this new attempt to bash a federal agency. We should all care just as much or more when private industry damages our environment.
 
Seattle Husker said:
It's noteworthy that this thread already has more responses than the Elk River Chemical spill. "Gotcha" EPA!!!

They should be held accountable but we given this was an attempt to clean up after private industry should be a major mitigating factor in this new attempt to bash a federal agency. We should all care just as much or more when private industry damages our environment.
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SH, your takeaway is polluters are the real bad guys..we really need to stay on message here? Who disagrees with that?

This disaster doesn't shake your confidence in the government's competence? Do you not believe EPA leaders should be held accountable, as in get fired, pay fines, go to jail?

Did W get the same mulligan in Katrina? Wasn't FEMA trying to help those folks? They weren't responsible for the Hurricane.

I guess China is really the bad guy in the OPM hack. OPM is just trying their best. If you're up against the Chinese, identity theft of millions of Americans is bound to happen right?

And at the VA...those are W's and LBJ's fault. Or is it the Taliban and Viet Cong? I mean these vets didn't sprout from thin air in our hospitals. It's not the VA's fault. They didn't buy the Domino Theory.

The amount of heavy metals in this watershed could be a health catastrophe that won't be fully quantified for another 10 years.
 
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There's a little more to the story than some bungling by an EPA contractor (and there is that, to be sure). Read on

Really, though, the EPA wasn't the root cause of the emergency. It was, most likely, a disaster waiting to happen and the most visible manifestation of an emergency that's been going on in the Upper Animas River Watershed for decades. Here’s nine items to help you understand the big picture:

• Pollution in the Animas is not new: The Upper Animas River watershed consists of three main streams, the Animas, Cement Creek and Mineral Creek all of which drain the Silverton Caldera, the highly mineralized collapsed core of an ancient volcano, and which run together at Silverton. Miners started going after the minerals in the 1870s, and the river's been the victim of their pollution ever since. Mines simply poured their tailings directly into the creeks and rivers until, in the 1930s, downstream farmers got them to stop; the remnants of those releases can still be found under the river bed in Durango and beyond. Then there's acid mine drainage. The portals and shafts blasted into the mountainsides hijack the natural hydrology, pulling water flowing through fractures toward natural springs into the mine tunnels. There, the water reacts with iron disulfide (pyrite) and oxygen to form sulfuric acid. The acidic water dissolves naturally occurring heavy metals such as zinc, lead, cadmium, copper and aluminum. The resulting contaminated water flows out of the mine adit as if from a spring. By 1991, when the last major mine in the watershed shut down, there were some 400 mines in the watershed, many discharging unmitigated discharges into streams. Not a fish could be found for miles downstream from Silverton, and the impacts to aquatic life were felt in Durango, where, when the mines were still running, sensitive fish were unable to reproduce.

• Superfund has long been on the table, and long been swept off: As mining waned in the late 1980s, federal and state regulatory agencies started looking at how to clean up the mess. Superfund, which comes with a big pile of cash, seemed like the obvious approach. But locals feared that the stigma would destroy tourism along with any possibility of mining’s return. Besides, Superfund can be blunt; the complex Animas situation demanded a more surgical, locally-based approach. So the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a collaboration between concerned citizens and representatives from industry and federal and state agencies, was created in 1994 to address the situation. The approach was successful, at first, but then water quality began deteriorating again. The specter of Superfund returned. Many locals, worried about impacts to property values and tourism, have again resisted. Sunnyside Gold Corp. (see below) has offered millions of dollars to further cleanup efforts -- as long as there's no Superfund designation.

• The problem is massive and complex, but not hopeless: In 1991, the last big mine in the region, the Sunnyside, shut down. Its owner, Sunnyside Gold Corp., planned to plug the American Tunnel, thus stanching the flow of acid mine drainage (which it ran through a water treatment plant), and then walk away. The state wouldn’t allow it: While a plug, or bulkhead, would be a short-term fix, in the long-term the water, and its contaminants, might back up in the mine and find another way to the surface. So Sunnyside agreed not only to bulkhead its mine, but also to clean up abandoned mines nearby -- a sort of pollution offset project -- while continuing to run the waters of upper Cement Creek through a water treatment facility. That, combined with the ARSG's extensive efforts, worked: By the early 2000s, zinc, cadmium and lead levels in Mineral Creek had dropped by 50 to 75 percent, and water quality in the Upper Animas had improved significantly (Cement Creek had never supported fish, and never will). Fish appeared just below Silverton, where they hadn't been seen in probably a century. It was success, without Superfund.

• Then it got even more complex: Sunnyside cut a deal with the state and Gold King mining, a small operation owned by a Silvertonian. Sunnyside would leave, and turn over its water treatment operations to Gold King, along with enough cash to keep it running for a while. Gold King hoped to eventually resume mining the Gold King (not far from the American Tunnel). For decades, the Gold King, like the nearby Red and Bonita mine, had not discharged any water. But not long after Sunnyside sealed its bulkheads, water started pouring out of all of them. "It was not a coincidence," says Peter Butler, ARSG co-coordinator. The backed up water had found natural fractures to follow into the other mines. Together, the Gold King and Red and Bonita would become some of the biggest polluters in the basin. Initially, their waters were run through the treatment plant that Sunnyside had left behind. But before long, Gold King ran into technical, financial and legal troubles and the treatment plant stopped operating. Water quality for miles downstream once again deteriorated. The fish that had returned to the Animas below Silverton were wiped out. Part of the renewed impetus for a Superfund designation was to bring in funds to resume water treatment as well as figure out ways to clean up the basin’s remaining major polluting mines.

• In the meantime, a piecemeal approach continues: The ARSG, along with federal and state agencies, continue to do what they can to clean up mines. In some cases, this means plugging them, which is what the EPA is working on at the Red and Bonita, and planned to do at the Gold King, when the dam broke. Other methods include diverting water before it gets into the mine in the first place, and removing waste piles at the entrances to mines so that acidic discharge from the mine can’t leech minerals out of the rock. Until the Gold King is plugged, it will continue to discharge acid mine drainage, just as it had before the spill.

• This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened, nor is it the worst: In June of 1975, a huge tailings pile on the banks of the Animas River northeast of Silverton was breached, dumping tens of thousands of gallons of water, along with 50,000 tons of heavy-metal-loaded tailings into the Animas. For 100 miles downstream, the river "looked like aluminum paint," according to a Durango Herald reporter at the time; fish placed in a cage in the water in Durango all died within 24 hours. It was just one of many breaches of various magnitude. Just a decade before, the same tailings pile was found to be spilling cyanide-laced water into the river. In 1978, after the Sunnyside Mine workings got too close to the floor of Lake Emma, the lake burst through, sending an estimated 500 million gallons of water tearing through the mines, sweeping up huge machinery, tailings and sludge, and blasting it out the American Tunnel and sending it downstream. No one was working in the mine at the time, which is either miraculous, or suspicious, depending on who you ask.

• Short-term impacts aren’t as bad as the water looks: Sampling done by the EPA upstream from Durango show that the plume's peak put the Animas River's water's acidity on par with black coffee, and contained elevated levels of iron, manganese, zinc and copper. But by the time it reached town, the acidity had been diluted significantly, and levels of those metals were far lower, but still "scary," according to EPA officials. Still, the plume moved through quickly, lessening harm. A test by Colorado Parks and Wildlife, in which trout in cages were placed in the river prior to the plume’s arrival, has so far shown no acute effects: Only one of 108 fish had died during the first 24 hours in contaminated water. Meanwhile, the Mountain Studies Institute has been monitoring macro-invertebrates, and their results have been similarly positive.

• Long-term impacts are still unknown: As the plume moved downstream, sediment settled onto the river bottom and its rocks, which could affect aquatic bugs. And it’s likely to get kicked up during high water flows. If thick enough, the sediment could even affect the river’s appearance, providing a Tang-colored reminder of this disaster for months to come. Also, water in some domestic wells near the river reportedly had a yellow tint in the days after the spill moved through, but it's not yet known what other contaminants may have gotten into the water. Irrigators had to shut down their ditches in hot weather, which could damage crops, and the ag economy, just as the river closure is costing rafting companies thousands of dollars each day. The plume moved through critical habitat for razorback suckers and pike minnows further downstream; they may prove more sensitive than the trout. But then, the Animas and San Juan rivers in New Mexico had their own water quality issues before the spill: alarmingly high levels of human fecal bacteria.

• The EPA messed up, but they’re not the root cause: It’s true that EPA officials took a “cavalier attitude” (EPA Region 8 administrator Shaun McGrath’s word) in the first hours after the spill, downplaying the impacts and failing to notify those downstream. And they admit that before tinkering with the mine, they should have taken better steps to mitigate a possible disaster, such as drilling into the mine from the top to assess the situation without the danger of busting the dam. Had they not messed with it at all, though, the gathering water and sludge might have busted through the de facto dam sometime anyway. Clearly, the water quality issue goes far deeper than this one unfortunate event.
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https://www.hcn.org/articles/when-our-river-turned-orange-animas-river-spill
 
Giovanni Jones said:
There's a little more to the story than some bungling by an EPA contractor (and there is that, to be sure). Read on



https://www.hcn.org/articles/when-our-river-turned-orange-animas-river-spill
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Again, this take is like focusing on the Viet Cong and LBJ instead of the VA. Promoting that perspective will hurt the enviornment because it disracts our attention from the real problem - government competence, toward something that few folks disagree with - regulating minning to prevent waste runoff.

I think I read that this particular mine dates back to at least the 1920s. And minning in Colorado in that region goes back 150 years. Again, minning is what built the State of Colorado. The world is a different place now. We're smarter, we have a modern economy, we're at a place when these particular sorts of minning operations are obsolete. We can and should be doing it better, cleaner, smarter and more selectively than we did in the past. Duh. I'm telling you, I don't want to fish in a river that could be contaminated from mining runoff. I don't want the wildlife to deal with that ****. I don't want the children in these small towns, all in "flyover" country, to suffer from health problems.

And your article points out that these mines must be cleaned. That was the EPAs job at Gold King Mine. The EPA's job was not to cause a spill so thay we can publically flog the ghosts of Colorado's minning industry (likewise, it is also not the VA's job to let vets die so we can debate about the cost of wars). No. The EPA had ONE job to do. Whether that mine was 5 years old, 50 years old, or 150 years old it was to treat that water and clean it.
 
If you read Giovanni Jones' linked article, you will understand the depth of the problem. There are 400 old mines in Colorado, all full of heavy metals and near streams and/or watertables. The local governments did not want the area declared a superfund site, due to fears the designation would affect tourism. This hamstringed the EPA, which admittedly screwed up in this instance, but was trying a bandaid fix to a much bigger problem that should be properly addressed with superfund cleanup money.
This problem will not go away by burying it. It must be fixed, not left as a gift to future generations.
 
accuratehorn said:
If you read Giovanni Jones' linked article, you will understand the depth of the problem. There are 400 old mines in Colorado, all full of heavy metals and near streams and/or watertables. The local governments did not want the area declared a superfund site, due to fears the designation would affect tourism. This hamstringed the EPA, which admittedly screwed up in this instance, but was trying a bandaid fix to a much bigger problem that should be properly addressed with superfund cleanup money.
This problem will not go away by burying it. It must be fixed, not left as a gift to future generations.
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I read the whole article. I know what the big picture is. That is what the EPA was tasked to clean up. And this is exactly what I thought I would hear in my previous post. "We, the Feds, need more money." An article stating folks didn't want a superfund designation because of tourism impact is editorializing.

And whether or not a site is a superfund, doesn't mean you can just take a bulldozer willy nilly into the walls of a runoff pond.
 
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I think I have a better idea why last summer I didn't see many fishermen in the train ride along the Anamias from Durango to Silverton. The watershed isn't great fish habitat because of mine tailings. It's not that far to a lot of cleaner rivers and streams.
 
According to this article, there are 22,000 abandoned mines in Colorado. And there were problems with toxic substances leaching into the watershed even before miners began drilling in the 19th century.

The sight of the wastewater, long pent up in a mine that hasn’t been operational since 1923, shocked the state and put the EPA in the hot seat. Why was the agency using heavy machinery at a site known to be full of toxins?

The answer, like the wastewater itself, is a part of Colorado’s history.

Burrowed into the state’s craggy mountains are thousands of mines like Gold King, built during the mining bonanza that marked Colorado’s beginnings. Though most of them have been closed for decades, they continue to make their presence known through the acids that slowly leach — and occasionally violently burst — into the water around them.

“The great news is that modern mining does not allow the release of these waters,” Elizabeth Holley, assistant professor of mining engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, told the Denver Post. “The bad news is we owe our statehood to mining prior to any environmental regulations.”

The documented gold discovery in Colorado is attributed to a Georgia prospector named Lewis Ralston, who was part of a wagon train bound for the already famous mines of California. According to lore, members of the train were resting for a day and Ralston, on a whim, decided to dip his gold pan into an unnamed mountain stream. It emerged with $5 worth of gold, a sizable sum for the time.

A fellow traveler noted in a brusque June 22, 1850, diary entry, “Lay bye. Gold found.”

Members of the wagon train lingered only a few days to examine the find, but Ralston would return eight years later with a team of prospectors. Those men soon found rich gold deposits in the mountains nearby, setting off the gold rush that would turn Colorado from an unexplored frontier of Kansas territory into its own booming state. Colorado was admitted to the Union in 1876.

The towering San Juan mountains around Silverton, Colo., were opened to prospectors in 1874. By the 1880s, more than half a dozen mines were operating in the area, including Gold King, most of them run by the Sunnyside Gold Corp.

Rich with veins of silver, gold and other precious metals, the mines drew thousands of people to the area. The nearby towns — Silverton, Telluride, the aptly named Eureka — were built on the estimated $150 million in minerals that were extracted from the mountains. But the wealth came at a cost.

When underground water runs through a mine, it picks up traces of the minerals that are buried there, explains Colorado Public Radio station KUNC. When it mixes with mineral pyrite, it reacts with air to form sulfuric acid and dissolved iron. It also picks up other heavy metals, like copper and lead, as well as any of the chemicals that miners have been using to extract the resources. By the time it trickles out of the mountain and into nearby waterways, it’s an acidic, often-toxic brew.

In mineral-rich mountains like the site of the Gold King mine, this process can happen even before prospectors start digging in. Cement Creek, the waterway that was first flooded with sludge last week, had been declared undrinkable in 1876, before mining in the area became widespread, according to the Denver Post. But drilling into the mountain sped things up quite a bit.

Ginny Brannon, director of the Colorado Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety, told the Denver Post that until 1977, Colorado had few laws requiring mining companies to deal with the wastewater they created.

“Folks could go out and do what they want and walk away from the sites, and this is one of them,” she said.

The Gold King mine hasn’t been operational since 1923, but several other sites in the same network of mines remained open for decades after. For more than 100 years, the mines were the lifeblood of the surrounding community. They provided the bulk of the jobs and one-third of the county’s annual tax revenue, according to the Durango Herald.

Even two major disasters in the 1970s — a breach in a “tailing pond” (the basins that store contaminated water for processing) that sent tons of wastewater into the local watershed and a 1978 lake collapse that flooded the mine with water and a million tons of mud — didn’t dampen support for the operation.

The multimillion-dollar cleanup costs did. In 1991, Sunnyside shut down its last mine in the area. And much of San Juan County was shut down with it.

“We lost half our population,” Beverly Rich, the county treasurer and chairwoman of the San Juan County Historical Society, told Westword magazine in 2005. “We went from about 200 children to 43 kids in our school. We lost one-third of our county tax revenue. We lost a lot of our volunteer firemen — and good-paying jobs. Mining pays well, and tourism jobs don’t quite cut the mustard.”

The effects of more than a century of mining didn’t disappear along with them. They’re easily visible in the histories of local community, which often glorify their mining past. Silverton’s motto, after all, is “The mining town that never quit.”

“Did mining kill people? Of course, it killed people. Driving cars kills people, too. Do you want to get rid of cars?” Historian Duane Smith, a Durango resident and Fort Lewis College professor who has written several books about Silverton, told the Durango Herald in 2013. “Silverton owes its existence to mining, that’s the truth.”

The lingering effects are also noticeable in the area’s waterways, which were suffering even before this latest breach. According to the Herald, three of the four fish species in the Upper Animas water basin (which includes Cement Creek and drains into the Animas River) disappeared between 2005 and 2010. Five years after that, the river was completely devoid of fish.

Insects and bird species have also fared poorly. And tests of the water flowing into Bakers Bridge, about three dozen miles south of Silverton, found that it carried concentrations of zinc toxic to animals. U.S. Geological Survey Scientists told the paper that the area was the largest untreated drainage site in the state.

The Animas River Stakeholders Group that was set up to deal with the issue after the mines were closed, which includes Sunnyside Gold Corp., didn’t have the estimated $12 million to $15 million it would take to treat the contaminated runoff. And for years, Silverton residents resisted EPA involvement out of fear that the “Superfund” label given to the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites would jeopardize the tourism industry — the only source of income that could replace the vanished mines. A few even hoped that the mines would reopen one day.

Meanwhile supporters of EPA intervention accused Sunnyside of stonewalling the cleanup attempt to avoid liability.

The two sides reached an agreement of sorts this year. The mines would not be designated a Superfund site, and the EPA would provide $1.5 billion to plug the problematic Red and Bonita mine, where polluted water drained at a rate of 500 gallons per minute, according to the Durango Herald.

But water has a habit of finding its way downhill, and plugging one mine often means it simply leaks from others, so the agency had to excavate and stabilize the Gold King mine upstream.

That’s what they were up to on Aug. 5, when the loose material holding the mine together finally gave way. The water that had accumulated in the mine’s long-abandoned tunnels went tumbling into Cement Creek.

“It was known that there was a pool of water back in the mine, and EPA had a plan to remove that water and treat it, you know, slowly,” Peter Butler, who serves as a co-coordinator of the stakeholders group, told KUNC. “But things didn’t go quite the way they planned and there was a lot more water in there than they thought, and it just kind of burst out of the mine.”

The EPA has taken a lot of flak for the way it handled the incident — residents weren’t notified for 24 hours after the breach. But agency officials said that the toxic flood just highlights the need to deal with the rest of the state’s 22,000 abandoned mines.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...yellow-sludge-spilling-into-a-colorado-creek/
 
Sangre,

I've seen your sig GIF a thousand times, and I still chuckle every time. I sat and watched it about 20 times through before typing this, and will probably watch it 20 more times before moving on.
 
Giovanni,

Did you blame substandard levies for FEMAs incompentence during Katrina?

Last I checked there weren't 3,000,000 gallons on waste water in the Animas on August 6th. And the EPA was suppose to clean up this particular mine (just like the VA is suppose to care for our vets from wars the VA didn't start). Your article reinforces the need for competent government as it relates to minning. But your 20,000 word post/article seems to miss the point. While I know you're trying to steer the message, I would be more concerned about the EPA's competence on future clean up projects.

How does the EPA bulldoze through the bank? Who reviewed the bid/workplan? What was the EPA's supervisor's experience?

It's been a week, and there still is no answer to that one. All I've heard is cleanup crews using "heavy equipment" caused the spill.
 
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http://www.wsj.com/articles/mine-busters-at-the-epa-1439336495

‘Ghostbusters” has been playing again on cable, so we are reminded that the villain of that movie classic was a bully from the Environmental Protection Agency. He broke the ghost-containment grid and all hell broke loose. So who you gonna call today when the E-men dump three million gallons of toxic slurry down the rivers of the West?

Last week an EPA hazmat team hoped to inspect an abandoned Gold Rush-era mine near Durango, Colorado, and the backhoe digging out the collapsed cave entrance breached a retaining wall. The blowout spilled the contaminated sludge that had accumulated for nearly a century in the mine’s tunnels into a creek that is a tributary of the Animas River, flowing at a rate of 740 gallons a minute.

The plume of lead, arsenic, mercury, copper, cadmium and other heavy metals turned the water a memorable shade of yellow-orange chrome. The sludge is so acidic that it stings upon touch. Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Indian reservation have declared states of emergency as the contamination empties into Lake Powell in Utah and the San Juan River in New Mexico.

The ecological ramifications are uncertain, though the San Juan is designated as “critical habitat” for the Colorado Pike Minnow and Razorback Sucker fish. The regional economy that depends on recreational tourism like rafting, kayaking and fly fishing has been damaged. Drinking water is potable only because utilities closed their intake gates, but pollution in the water table has deprived farmers and rural residents of a source for wells, livestock and crop irrigation.

For 24 hours the EPA failed to warn state and local officials, who learned about the fiasco when they saw their river become yellow curry. The EPA’s initial estimate of the leakage was exposed by the U.S. Geologic Service as three times below the real rate. The agency hasn’t explained the cause of the accident.

Yet the demands for reparations and the media outrage are notably muted. President Obama hasn’t budged from his vacation golf rounds. Imagine how the EPA and the green lobby would be reacting if this spill had been committed by a private company. BP BP 0.42 % could have used this political forbearance after it failed to cork a busted oil well a mile below the sea after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Naturally, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act of 1980, known as the Superfund law, gives EPA clean-up crews immunity from the trial bar when they are negligent. Yet the Durango blowout was entirely avoidable.
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Here's the saddest part:
In an Aug. 8 “incident report,” the EPA notes that “the intent of the investigation was to create access to the mine, assess on-going water releases from the mine to treat mine water, and assess the feasibility of further mine remediation.” In other words, the mine was plugged, and the EPA was excavating in search of some notional make-work problem to solve.
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Here's some other perspective/color on that "Superfund would stop tourism" editorializing, because we all know designating a site Superfund will make everything better:
Low levels of mining waste seep from thousands of used-up 19th-century projects beneath the Western states, but the counties around Durango have resisted declaration as Superfund sites. Perhaps they recall the polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB) saga in New York, where the EPA forced General Electric GE -0.21 % to dredge the Hudson River. The operation increased PCB pollution that was long deposited in sediment and had been harmless.
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