Posted on 09/18/2015 1:11:11 PM PDT by Kartographer
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 fault with a federal agency they perceive as having an anti-business agenda.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
NM Ping
Every EPA official who had anything to do with this catastrophe needs to be in jail.
Actually, AP can't help slipping in that it's really the evil Republicans who deserve the blame.
US federal government screws Indians—Again!
Can we start with the New Mexico's top environmental regulator who apparently can't be bothered to test the water himself? Or was every lab in New Mexico (or even portable test kits) disabled by the spill as well?
Because of everything in this spill, likely what I'm least concerned with is people who have the ability to conduct tests themselves weren't spoon fed data from the agency who created the spill.
”..., offered more fodder for congressional Republicans eager to find fault with a federal agency they perceive as having an anti-business agenda [emphasis added]."
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Regardless that the RINO-controlled House has read the Constitution out loud at the beginnings of the last three legislative sessions, please consider the following. House RINOs are wrongly ignoring that the states have never delegated to the feds, expressly via the Constitution, the specific power to regulate intrastate environmental issues.
And even if the states had delegated such power to the feds, the Founding States had made the first numbered clauses in the Constitution, Sections 1-3 of Article I, evidently a good place to hide them from Congress, to clarify that all federal legislative powers are vested in the elected members of Congress, not in the executive or judicial branches, or in non-elected federal bureaucrats like those running the EPA. So Congress has a constitutional “monopoly” on federal legislative powers whether it wants it or not.
So by delegating legislative / regulatory powers to third parties, powers that Congress actually doesn’t have, Congress is wrongly protecting such powers from the wrath of the voters in blatant defiance of Sections 1-3 mentioned above.
The ill-conceived 17th Amendment needs to disappear, and corrupt senators and the unconstitutional federal regulatory agencies like the EPA that the Senate helped to establish along with it.
The states need to take water samples from the mouth of the mine, all the way to the ends of the affected watersheds, and shut the EPA out of the process.
Once the states find out just how nasty this spill was, they should sue the living shit out of the EPA, and kick them out of ALL of the affected states.
They’re worried about Volkswagon firmware causing PPB micro pollution that might kill 1 person over the next hundred years when they just polluted the drinking water supply to most of the southwest with god knows what. Now they won’t even disclose the nature of the pollutants so water districts can deal with them or even ban consumption. Showering in this water may be worse than drinking it. I really hate what our government has become in the age of Obama, Boehner, and McConnell.
My son did an internship doing water quality tests at a wastewater plant; he was testing both stormwater and discharge from the plant. You better believe that these operators take water quality seriously, in part because of the threat of jail from the EPA if they screw it up.
Sauce for the gander; the EPA officials belong in jail.
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