Posted on 02/15/2008 7:23:04 AM PST by redfish53
DENVER - More than 1 billion gallons of contaminated water — enough to fill 1,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools — is trapped in a tunnel in the mountains above the historic town of Leadville and threatening to blow.
Lake County Commissioners have declared a local state of emergency for fear that this winter's above-average snowpack will melt and cause a catastrophic tidal wave.
The water is backed up in abandoned mine shafts and a 2.1-mile drainage tunnel that is partially collapsed, creating the pooling of water contaminated with heavy metals.
County officials have been nervously monitoring the rising water pressure inside the mine shafts for about two years. An explosion could inundate Leadville and contaminate the Arkansas River.
"It could come out, we just don't know where," county Commissioner Carl Schaefer said. "We're seeing changes and we're very concerned. We're not crying `Chicken Little' here."
State and federal officials agreed Thursday to conduct a risk assessment before taking any action. Critics said something should be done immediately to ease the pressure.
Peter Soeth, a spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation, which acquired the drainage tunnel in 1959, said there was no immediate threat to Leadville's 2,700 residents.
Officials point out that a speaker system to broadcast evacuation notices has already been installed near a mobile home park that has 300 residents near the tunnel's portal.
The tunnel normally drains water that seeps into some of the hundreds of abandoned mine shafts and other mine workings in the mountains east and south of Leadville and deposits it into the East Fork of the Arkansas River about a mile north of town....
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Dam that Global Warming.
--since I lived in Leadville for seventeen years and know a little about the geography and geology of this area, I wonder what they would suggest?
--let me guess that it would involve much taxpayer money---
Why is there always a mobile home park smack dab in the middle of every disaster ?
Another opportunity for Karl Rove.
First three rules of Real Estate:
Location, Location, Location...
The EE said the nervous system was so sophisticated it could only have been designed by an electrical engineer.
The ME said the skeleton and muscle system could only have been designed by a mechanical engineer.
Then the CE took credit and everybody just laughed. "Well," he shouted, "who else would put a sewage discharge pipe so close to a recreational area?"
Many years ago I came up with the idea to mount model mobile homes on sticks and sell them as tornado rods.
Check the record; every tornado story contains at least one graph about the trailer park that got hit. Must be all the aluminum.
In the old days (30-40 years ago)
a trailer was a McMansion in Leadville.
It was a hard working town for a long time.
—’Leadville Drainage Tunnel” on Google Earth will give you the approximate location—you can judge for yourself if the park is in imminent danger. If it does flush into the river we’ll hear the usual “environmental” rot for days-—
Well, I guess they had beter the lead out and get going......
I’ve been to Leadville. Many years ago, I spent a summer in Dillon.
Lot better than a winter.
Sister sold (or tried to) insurence there for a year.
Before it got trendy.
Well, I don’t know about water avalanches, but in the case of tornadoes, they always head straight for the mobile home parks. Something about all that aluminum siding is irresistable to them. ;-)
the easiest and quickest temp-fix is to
1 - locate a temporary alternate location excess water in the tunnel could be placed
2 - get enough generators and pumps
3 - get long enough hoses and/or enough tanker trucks
and
4 - get pumping
certainly a temporary alternate holding area is not geologically or logistically out of the question
why wait, just do it
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