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VIDEO AT LINK................... March 20 (UPI) -- An angler who found a camera in a Colorado river was able to retrieve the photos from the device and discovered it had been underwater for 13 years. Spencer Greiner said he was fishing recently in the Animas River when he spotted a camera at the bottom of the shallow water. "I was walking along and saw it sticking out of the sand," Greiner told KDVR-TV. "It was in rough shape, so I really didn't have any hopes of getting anything off of it, I was just planning to throw it away, and...

Gina McCarthy and Deb Haaland are on Biden’s climate team. This should be interesting given both of their ties to the disastrous Gold King Mine spill of 2015. That year, a mine up near Silverton, Colorado was under clean-up protocols by the EPA. The same EPA that Gina McCarthy was running at the time. Then, the spill happened. The Animas River turned into yellow sludge from southwestern Colorado all the way into and nearly through New Mexico. Who lives in New Mexico and just the year before lost her bid to be NM Lieutenant Governor? Joe Biden’s new choice for...

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans to drill a test well into an inactive mine tunnel in southwestern Colorado to get information for a Superfund cleanup, the agency said Friday. The EPA said it will drill into the American Tunnel next month to measure water levels and investigate how the passage is connected to other shafts. ... The agency designated the Superfund site after it inadvertently ( LOL ) triggered a spill while doing excavation work at the inactive Gold King Mine in August 2015. The spill released 3 million gallons of wastewater, polluting rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and...

Critics fear move will impact upper Animas River aquatic life. Could the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to haul waste from the Gold King Mine to the banks of the upper Animas River put undue stress on a fishery already struggling to survive? ... Three months after the EPA triggered the Gold King Mine blowout in August 2015, the agency built a temporary water-treatment plant, in an area known as Gladstone, 10 miles north of Silverton within the Cement Creek watershed. But for the past year, the EPA has said room is running out at Gladstone to store the waste byproduct...

Like the road to Hell, liberal ideas are usually paved with good intentions. But, as Ronald Reagan once said, "The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn't so." And all that vast “unknowledge” births monster government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Today’s EPA is an agency gone-wild, filled with environmental extremists and deep state holdovers who have little accountability for their actions. They arrogantly create rules like the “Clean Power Plan” which the Institute for Energy Research [IER] said was filled with about as much junk as...

After almost two years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General released its report on the Gold King Mine disaster that dumped over a million pounds of metals into the Animas River, turning dozens of miles of the river orange. While inspectors general are tasked with finding out the truth and holding agencies accountable, this recently released report sheds no more light on the disaster than previous misleading reports. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has inherited not only an environmental mess, but also the mess created by an agency more interested in its narrow self-interests than truth. Pruitt now has...

Republicans and Democrats have criticized the agency’s decision to ignore victims associated with the Gold King Mine spill, which released 3 million gallons of dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and arsenic into the Animas River. Citizens of the Rocky Mountain state are relying on the incoming Trump administration to require that the EPA pay damages in the wake of a massive agency-caused toxic water spill in Colorado. Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, a tribe whose water supply was affected by spill, said he’s hoping Congress and the Trump administration will force the EPA to take responsibility. “There is no reason...

Nearly 540 tons of metals — mostly iron and aluminum — contaminated the Animas River over nine hours during a massive wastewater spill from an abandoned Colorado gold mine, the Environmental Protection Agency said Friday in a new report on the 2015 blowout that turned rivers in three states a sickly yellow. The total amount of metals entering the river system was comparable to levels during one or two days of high spring runoff, although the concentration of metals was significantly higher at the spill’s peak, the report said. […] New Mexico Environment Secretary Butch Tongate accused the EPA of...

A decades-long battle between federal environmental officials and a small Colorado town is about to end in the government’s favor, thanks to the agency-caused Gold King Mine spill disaster ... Residents surrendered to federal demands only after an EPA work-crew turned the nearby Animas River bright yellow for nearly a week by releasing a three-million-gallon flood of acidic mine waste under extremely questionable circumstances in August 2015. Suspended in the flood was 880,000 pounds of toxic metals, including lead and arsenic, that poured into the river that supplies drinking water for people living in three states and the Navajo Nation....

Todd Hennis claims EPA planned mine spill to usher in Superfund. the Environmental Protection Agency-contracted crew's triggered blowout on his property, effectively turning the Animas River into an orange spectacle. He was speechless and horrified, but not surprised ... I have been trying to make everybody aware of the dangers posed by the Sunnyside Mine pool for 14 years .. when I saw the pictures, I just felt my life was over. I just thought, Oh God, what did they do? ... Hennis, for his part, has long maintained increased flows from the Gold King Mine are a result of...

Environmental Protection Agency officials require contractors to sign secrecy pledges that in the case of the Gold King Mine spill kept the public in the dark earlier this year about a Colorado mining disaster that turned waters yellow as they flowed through two states and the Navajo Nation. ... these secrecy clauses are typical with the EPA - the same government agency whose former administrator, Lisa Jackson, used an alias email address to avoid public scrutiny. ... the EPA controls the flow of information by circumventing federal regulations that dictate when an agency can use non-disclosure clauses by including secrecy...

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials refused for weeks to share water-quality data with their state counterparts following a blowout of toxic wastewater from a Colorado mine that fouled rivers across the Southwest, New Mexico's top environmental regulator testified Thursday. The move by federal agencies aimed to downplay the severity of the spill, hobbling the state's response to the high levels of arsenic, lead and other contaminants involved in the spill, New Mexico Secretary of Environment Ryan Flynn said. His criticisms, aired before a U.S. House committee investigating the Aug. 5 accident, offered more fodder for congressional Republicans eager to find...

It was a dirty river before, it’s a dirtier river now, we’re moving on. That sums up the attitude of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who testified before two Senate committees today. Democratic lawmakers made excuses for the agency while Republicans hammered at McCarthy to take responsibility for the rusty contaminated sludge her agency unleashed on the Animas River and across three states. ... Has anyone been fired for …? ... Colorado’s Sen. Cory Gardner attended both hearings, and drilled McCarthy on the agency’s appalling lack of telephone etiquette – downstream users weren’t notified until days after the incident. When Gardner...

Gold King Mine toxic waste spill into the Animas River After the August 5, 2015 Gold King Mine toxic waste spill into the Animas River and downstream watercourses that was caused by EPA incompetence (or intention, depending on the perspective), there was some misunderstanding about how claims for damages should be handled. Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo nation, was strong in cautioning members to hold off submitting Standard Form 95 that EPA employees were distributing on the reservation. The assumption was that claimants must sign the form supplying a final amount for restitution that cannot be amended, barring all...

Soon after it released 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into Colorado's Animas River, the Environmental Protection Agency tried to downplay the damage.

DENVER—Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s big gulp of water from the formerly orange Animas River wasn’t just icky, it was “reckless and irresponsible,” said New Mexico’s top environmental official. New Mexico environment department secretary Ryan Flynn said Mr. Hickenlooper’s decision to fill up his water bottle from the site of the EPA’s 3-million-gallon wastewater spill in Durango, Colorado, sends the wrong message. “If it’s true, it’s a reckless and irresponsible act by a public official,” said Mr. Flynn in the Farmington (N.M.) Daily Times. “He might as well stick 15 cigarettes in his mouth and light them all at the same...

A week before The EPA disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, this letter to the editor was published in The Silverton Standard & The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist detailing verbatim, how EPA would foul the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money...

DENVER — Unlike BP, which was fined $5.5 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the EPA will pay nothing in fines for unleashing the Animas River spill. “Sovereign immunity. The government doesn’t fine itself,” said Thomas L. Sansonetti, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s division of environment and natural resource. New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and other lawmakers have called on the EPA to hold itself to the same standards as it would a private company in the aftermath of Wednesday’s accident, in which an EPA-led crew uncorked a 3 million-gallon spill of orange wastewater from the...

Tribal officials with the Navajo Nation declared an emergency as a massive plume of contaminated wastewater from an abandoned Colorado mine flowed down the San Juan River on Monday toward Lake Powell in Utah, which supplies much of the water to the Southwest. Some drinking water systems on the Navajo Nation, which spans parts of New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, have shut down their intake systems and stopped diverting water from the river. Drinking water is being hauled to some communities.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Anger was mounting Monday at the federal Environmental Protection Agency over the massive spill of millions of gallons of toxic sludge from a Colorado gold mine that has already fouled three major waterways and may be three times bigger than originally reported. An 80-mile length of mustard-colored water -- laden with arsenic, lead, copper, aluminum and cadmium -- is working its way south toward New Mexico and Utah, following Wednesday's accidental release from the Gold King Mine, near Durango, when an EPA cleanup crew destabilized a dam of loose rock lodged in the mine. The crew was...