National challenge of leaking mines dwarfs Colorado spill

New Mexico’s top environmental official is accusing Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper of a “reckless and irresponsible act” for swigging water straight from the contaminated Animas River.

The spill led two Colorado municipalities, including Durango, and the New Mexico towns of Aztec and Farmington, to shut off their river intakes. Navajo leaders this week claimed that EPA officials were trying to make Navajos sign waivers of claims for damages spill.

The agency said Wednesday that the ponds were reducing acidity and dissolved metals and that the runoff is now cleaner than it was before the spill. August. 17 is the earliest date the EPA said it would recommend reopening stretches of the river that have been closed for drinking water, recreation and other uses, according to an AP report.

Federal authorities first suggested a treatment plant for Gold King more than a decade ago, but local officials and owners of a nearby mine were reluctant to embrace a federally sponsored cleanup. Bottled water on the Navajo Nation is becoming scarce.

And because the federal government inadvertently triggered it, the agency has vowed to pay the bills, which could take years to tally.

Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman said Wednesday it was “too soon to know” if the states affected by the spill – Colorado, Utah and New Mexico – will pursue litigation against the EPA.

In Colorado alone, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of abandoned mines discharging acid rock drainage, Jamison said.

“We are going to be fully accountable for this in a transparent way”, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy said at a news conference.

“Whatever was inside the mine after years of looking for gold, whatever chemicals they left behind, that’s all in our water now”, he said. The workers dislodged some material, turning the steady flow of contaminated water into a torrent.

As an ever-more-diluted plume of toxic mine waste made its way down the San Juan River toward Lake Powell Thursday, some of the tension between federal, state and tribal authorities seemed to be dissipating as well.

“I’m from the school, ‘Trust, but verify.’ And we will have a parallel set of data for every one of these tests”, Hickenlooper said. That’s at the root of a lot of worry for farmers in Shiprock, who fear the worst for their crops.

“EPA is in it for the long haul”, she said.

“But even under normal conditions, we would never advise members of the public to drink untreated water directly out of any Arizona river or stream”, he said.

But the Gold King Mine is not the only mine that is leaking.

The EPA determined in March 2013 the century-old mine was discharging approximately 300 gallons per minute of acidic water containing high concentrations of aluminum, cadmium, iron, lead, manganese and zinc, the records state.

EPA has estimated the cost of cleaning up abandoned mines nationwide, not including coal mines, at between $20 billion and $54 billion. The Summitville gold mine in southern Colorado became a Superfund site after the Summitville Consolidated Mining Co. declared bankruptcy.

“The data show levels of contamination are below what would be a concern for human health during typical recreational exposure”, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said. And next week the U.S. Geological Survey will set up its own monitors at the San Juan delta in Lake Powell. She said the wastewater would fill fewer than five Olympic-size swimming pools a tiny factor for a reservoir that could fill about 6.4 million similar pools. A dam holding millions of gallons of waste with the acidity of beer burst open last Wednesday during an attempted remediation by employees and contractors, part of a larger project to stop toxic leakage from the nearby Red and Bonita mines.

This is why environmental regulators downstream are intent on determining where the contamination settles. “That’s really the question that we’ll need to answer in the long term”.

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.