EPA’s McCarthy: Contaminated water from Colorado mine will spread

The New Mexico Environment Department’s Water Quality Bureau released results Tuesday that showed the plume of toxic mine waste caused little to no change in the Animas and San Juan rivers’ pH levels. The plume has since passed through parts of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and the Navajo Nation. “It pains me to no end”, she lamented as reported in Seattle Times.

“We had lots of trips booked”.

The 3 million gallons of mine waste included high concentrations of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals.

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking full responsibility for the release of three million gallons of mine waste into a southwest Colorado river, calling it a “tragic and unfortunate accident”. The contaminants have been settling to the ground, the EPA says.

McCarthy is expected to face tough questions regarding what the agency did or did not do and what it plans to do long term.

Inside their Escondido operations center control room, every drop of imported water is monitored and controlled around the clock, officials say.

Speaking with reporters at the scene of the spill on Tuesday morning, August 11, EPA representative Hayes Griswold said an EPA cleanup team was attempting to remove material from the roof of the Gold King Mine on August 5 in order to stick a pipe into the top for drainage, according to USA Today.

Tests show some of the metals have settled to the bottom of the rivers and would dissolve only if conditions became acidic, which experts say isn’t likely.

The best course for the EPA would be to leave the metals where they settle, he said, noting that next spring’s mountain snowmelt would help dilute the contaminants further and flush them downstream. It washed down the river and is believed to have passed into Utah, but it’s hard to detect because it’s been diluted. Federal officials say all but one of a test batch of fingerling trout deliberately exposed to the water survived over the weekend. Boaters and fishing groups have been told to avoid affected stretches of the Animas and San Juan rivers, which are crowded with rafters and anglers during the summer. Hickenlooper on Monday declared the Animas spill a disaster area, freeing up $500,000 in emergency state funding.

The EPA has not said how long cleanup efforts will take.

In Cedar Hill, New Mexico, a family farm that serves as many as 3,000 customers in the Four Corners region has been forced to stop irrigating dozens of acres of crops.

The mine owners and their wealthy cohorts are no doubt basking in luxury somewhere, far from the flowing rivers, unconcerned about the effects on those living there, not to mention the growing threats to planet Earth itself.

“We came out here together, and we looked at the river and we cried”, said Rosemary Hart in neighboring New Mexico. “It’s something we sincerely regret”. But the EPA says no information has been released yet.

That’s not an option at the Grand Canyon, but businesses that rely on the park for tourist dollars said they have not seen any fallout, despite widely broadcast images of the spill. “Right now we’re just cancelling by the day”, Drew Beezley, co-owner of a whitewater rafting company in Durango, Colorado, told the Daily Mail.

“This is a summertime business, huge river rafting”.

“They are not going to get away with this”, Begaye said.

The agency accidentally unleashed the contaminated wastewater last week as federal and contract workers inspected the abandoned mine near Silverton, Colorado.