BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Investigators are blaming the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for a 3 million-gallon wastewater spill from a Colorado gold mine, saying an agency cleanup crew rushed its work, failed to consider the complex engineering involved and ended up triggering the very blowout it hoped to avoid.
Members of Congress seized on the results of the two-month Interior Department investigation to slam EPA’s handling of a spill that fouled rivers in three states.
The Aug. 5 accident has revived a long-simmering debate over the unresolved fate of hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines across the U.S, offering ammunition to both sides.
Whereas Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, focused their ire solely on the EPA, U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, also of Colorado and a Democrat, coupled his criticism of the agency with a call for reforms that could speed mine cleanups.
The Colorado spill would have been avoided had the EPA team checked on water levels inside the inactive Gold King Mine before digging into its collapsed and leaking entrance, a team of engineers from Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation concluded in a 132-page report released Thursday.
Abandoned hard-rock underground mines are not subject to the same federal and state safety requirements other mining operations must follow, and “experience indicates that they should be,” the report concluded.
“A collapsed flooded mine is in effect a dam, and failure must be prevented by routine monitoring, maintenance, and in some cases remediation,” the engineers wrote. “However, there appears to be a general absence of knowledge of the risks associated with these facilities.”
The findings have implications across the United States: Similar disasters could lurk among the many abandoned mines that have yet to be cleaned up.
The total cost of containing this mining industry mess could top $50 billion, according to government estimates.
The root causes of the Colorado accident trace back decades, when mining companies altered the flow of underground water through a series of interconnected tunnels in the extensively mined Upper Animas River watershed, the report said.
EPA documents show its officials knew of the potential for a major blowout from Gold King, located north of Silverton, Colorado as early as June 2014. After the spill, EPA officials described the blowout as “likely inevitable” because millions of gallons of pressurized water had been bottling up inside the mine.
The Interior report directly refuted that assertion. It said the cleanup team could have used a drill rig to bore into the mine tunnel from above and safely gauge the danger of a blowout.
Instead, the EPA crew, with the agreement of Colorado mining officials, assumed the mine was only partially inundated.
“This error resulted in development of a plan to open the mine in a manner that appeared to guard against blowout, but instead led directly to the failure,” the Bureau of Reclamation engineers wrote.
EPA spokeswoman Nancy Grantham said the agency did not use a drill rig to bore into the mine because of difficult conditions at the site high in the San Juan Mountains. An internal EPA review “identified technical challenges, safety, timing, and cost as factors in considering this technique,” she said.
EPA officials pointed out that Gold King’s entrance already was leaking and could have eventually blown out anyway. The Interior report acknowledged that was possible.
The blowout tainted rivers in Colorado, Utah, New Mexico — and on the Navajo Nation — with dangerous heavy metals including arsenic and lead. It temporarily shut down drinking water supplies and cropland irrigation.
On Thursday, Navajo President Russell Begaye said the Obama administration had denied a request for an emergency declaration for the tribe over economic damage caused by the spill.
Begaye said the Interior report exposed the EPA’s “gross negligence” and repeated his call for federal assistance.
The Interior report stopped short of assigning fault to any individuals, despite prior claims from EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy that it would determine fault and any negligence.
U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton, a Republican whose district includes the Gold King, called the report disturbing in part because it revealed the EPA lacked the technical expertise to address the complexity of the mine. “Obviously a glaring weakness,” Tipton said.
With abandoned coal mines, monitoring and cleanups are funded in part by a fee companies pay. No such arrangements exist for inoperative hard-rock mines, and that’s a national problem, the report noted.
Given industry opposition to efforts to hold mine owners accountable, the cleanup on hard-rock mines such as Gold King has been left to a scattering of federal and state agencies, without common standards or even lists of the most problematic mines.
___
Elliott reported from Denver.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
And remember, this IS Obama’s fault.
Stop running that picture as the rivers no longer look like that. While heavy metals are still contaminating the section of the river closest to the mine, little of that made it that far down stream precisely because they are relatively heavy sediment.
I can’t believe how this story is playing out! The mining industry gets rich by planting hundreds of thousands of environmental bombs all over the country over decades. And it’s a scandal when the EPA steps in and tries to defuse one??
That photo summarizes PRECISELY the color of the river in front of my home in August, and the remaining high water mud ooze now. It is iconic, and shows the extent of the damage. It also, interestingly, represents less than 1% of poisons discharged into this watershed yearly by the mines upstream (well over 300 million gallons per year). So, while the river may not look as dramatic now, it’s long term health is just as impaired, year in, year out. It’s time money was putting into a river that feeds and waters hundreds of thousands of people.
“And remember, this IS Obama’s fault.”
Uh, other than “The Buck stops here”, how, exactly. is it “Obama’s fault”?
Why not actually READ the independent assessment board report?
If you did that, you’d become aware of the CONTEXT, being the history underlying the decision to attempt to address the toxic nature of the (presumably sealed) mine’s contents.
You’d learn that the EPA was not just AWARE of the risk of the blow-out that occurred, in fact the EPA FULLY INFORMED the local and state authorities and RECOMMENDED that the risk of blow-out potential was so high that the local environmental authorities SHOULD make a pro forma request for Superfund designation, to seal off the area for full assessment of the extent of the identified risk - which the EPA noted that it would NOT BE ABLE to assess without.
IOW the REASON the EPA was put into the position of having to GUESS at the extent of risk, and, critically, whether any plan to address the problem would be complicated and the risk of blow-out EXACERBATED by the SOURCE already-existing toxic leak being fed by MORE THAN ONE CLOSED MINE was because the local authority DECIDED to to turn down the EPA’s recommendation to request Superfund status out of concern for … wait for it … effects on the local tourism industry.
AND if you’d read that report you’d find also that the additional feed risk for the mine was itself a closed mine that COULD NOT BE ASSESSED by the EPA for the very same reason - that is, without the Superfund designation, the EPA had no authority, including it lack court-enforceable authority, to assess whether and to what exptent the other mine was feeding acidic mining op waste into the mine that ended up in blow out.
AND if you’d read that report you’d find that the MAIN SOURCE OF LOCAL COMPLAINT upheld by the independent assessor was tht the EPA failed to inform local and state land control authorities that, following and connected to the EPA’s efforts to deal with the already-existing hazard, a blow-out happened, for just over 24 hours after the blow-out occurred.
AND you’d have learned that even the authors of the independent report express lack of certainty as to what, IF ANYTHING, local and state authorities could have done to alleviate the situation from earler notice.
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY, you’d learn that the real focus of the criticsm on the EPA is that the EPA was criticized for failing to REITERATE its recommendation that the local authority seek Superfund status prior to EPA’s beginning any remedial action, once the EPA had decided on the course of action it undertook to address the problem - a problem, again, that the EPA was DENIED the ability to perform a full risk assessment on by the very local authorities that declined to follow the EPA’s recommendation.
There’s lots of blame to go around for this one. But heaping it on Obama is just ignorant and wrong.
You’d discover, for example, that the independent report reflects therat th
He was being sarcastic. Chill.