Posted on 08/11/2015 5:18:40 PM PDT by Nachum
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy said Tuesday that the EPA is “taking responsibility” following the inadvertent release by an EPA cleanup team of millions of gallons of toxic chemicals from an abandoned gold mine in Colorado that flooded into the Animas and San Juan River valleys. A reporter pointed out to McCarthy that if this damage had been done by a “private polluter,” a public apology would have already been issued by the CEO or other leadership speaking for the offender.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Tell it to the judge.
Right. Leaving it alone is never an option for the government. “Meddle In Everything” is their motto.
Try not to laugh too hard:
SIERRA CLUB RESPONDS TO TOXIC SPILL IN ANIMAS RIVER
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Contact:
Trey Pollard, 202-495-3058 or trey.pollard@sierraclub.org
Durango, CO — Approximately 3 million gallons of water contaminated with dangerous metal pollution from an abandoned gold mine has poured into the Animas River as the result of a botched Environmental Protection Agency clean-up effort. The Animas empties into the San Juan River which eventually routes to in Lake Powell.
The E.P.A. had originally estimated the size of the spill to be 1 million gallons, however, that number was revised yesterday to be approximately three million gallons of contaminated water.
In response, Robert Tohe, Sierra Club Organizing Representative in New Mexico Released the following statement:
“Our thoughts are with the families in Colorado and New Mexico who now have to worry about whether their drinking water is clean or their jobs are threatened because of this needless disaster. The Animas River was sadly already contaminated due to the legacy of toxic mining practices. The company that owns this mine has apparently allowed dangerous conditions to fester for years, and the mishandling of clean-up efforts by the EPA have only made a bad situation much worse. As we continue to learn what exactly happened, it’s time that the mine owners be held accountable for creating this toxic mess and we urge the EPA to act quickly to take all the steps necessary to ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again.”
hang her
Leaving the abandoned mine alone was likely not an option. I suspect the state’s Mine Inspector figured out it was a “ticking bomb” and asked the EPA to help, because it was way beyond his resources.
Making it more interesting is that they were afraid it would dump into a different creek, called Cement Creek, instead of where it actually dumped. This might have meant the worst of all possible worlds, a lot of liquid and *under pressure*. It might have already been leaking in that direction.
A lot of liquid implies more liquid is entering.
What it *could* have done is about anything. It might have fractured “up”, making all the ground above it dangerously unstable. It could collapse the walls in any direction. It could even burst “down” pumping all that waste into the water table.
A mining expert I knew described it as “the stick of dynamite in the latrine” scenario.
The Silverton district has 400 closed or abandoned mines. Almost all have some water where dissolved chemicals native to the strata can corrosively migrate.
This mine was plugged in accordance with an EPA plan.
In many places, plugging a mine is not a bad idea. It’s mostly done to limit collapses and to keep idiots from venturing into abandoned mines. Arizona has a program to locate and do this for all its abandoned mines.
https://www.earthworksaction.org/files/publications/AZ_AML_303d.pdf
https://www.earthworksaction.org/files/publications/CO_AML_303d.pdf
However, this was an exception. I suspect this was too much water to be trickle down from precipitation.
Interesting, I hadn’t seen this.
The only thing I could say in possible mitigation is the Occam’s razor that incompetence is usually more likely than conspiracy.
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