4 days.... 96 hours.... 5,760 minutes.... 500 gallons a minute....
That’s 2.88 million gallons of water thus far.
If 0bama fails to order the Corps of Engineers to dam the San Juan before the EPA contamination flows another 150 miles, then the drinking water for Los Angeles will become toxic.
The San Juan River flows into Lake Powell, which empties into the Colorado River, which supplies 5 million acre-feet of fresh water to drought-starved LA.
If it is 500 gpm now it would have been more on the first day because the pressure would have been greater. But nice calculation.
Of course there is no way to determine how much water is in the mine without knowing the dimension or the pressure/flow of the water out of the mine without knowing the height of the vertical column of water above the opening.
They could still try damming the creek to at least stop the flow of the contamination downstream.
You can bet if this had been caused by a profit making business that the EPA would be demanding immediate action to stem the flow down river.
It is surprising that they did not have some kind of plan for just this kind of event.
It pretty common for abandoned mines to fill up with water. They should have determined the status of the water level in the mine before they ever started poking around.