Rivers in Utah, New Mexico Reopened After Mine Spill

Anyone who follows mining, oil spill and power plant accidents knows the EPA, Obama White House and Big Green environmentalist rhetoric: There is no safe threshold for chemicals.

On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy gave a policy speech about the new carbon-reduction program at an event in Washington. “It was appalling stupidity that this incident happened….”

“I’m afraid of the EPA”.

Scientists said numerous pollutants will settle to the bottom, where they pose little immediate risk. “There’s suspicion on my part that now the EPA is sitting judge and jury to decide the outcome of a fate that is a result of their negligence”.

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

Wheeling says they are taking it slowly when it comes to returning to using the river for irrigation purposes and will be looking for a variety of indicators before they do. “I don’t blame the EPA”.

The Gold King mine that polluted the Animas is one of some 500,000 abandoned mines pocking the landscape of the American West, some 23,000 in Colorado alone.

In all, 3 million gallons of heavy metal filled wastewater spilled into the Animas River on August 5 when a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency crew accidentally caused a leak at the dormant Gold King Mine near Durango.

The Animas River is now open.

And now the small summer tourist town in the San Juan Mountains is under siege.

If levels are above 430 micrograms per liter, the CDPHE said, the water should not be used in making baby formula.

“The hotels are full”, she said Thursday. Many thousands of these mines were shuttered and left behind decades before the Clean Water Act and other national safeguards were put in place to protect our rivers and streams.

“My concern is, can people still eat these fish?” he said.

Get involved with current and future BLM planning processes.

Mining can be hazardous to people living downstream, too.

Martinez toured the spill by helicopter Friday for the second time in less than a week.

Gold King was hardly the only offender. “He might as well stick 15 cigarettes in his mouth and light them all at the same time and take a picture about how that’s good for you”, said the state’s Environmental Department Secretary Ryan Flynn. “We’re going to see this through and get it right”. Another five died in an avalanche, reports Scott Fetchenhier, a local historian and San Juan County commissioner.

Thus, the disaster has struck at the three essential pillars that support Silverton’s image of itself: its mining history, its pristine drinking water and its tourism dollars.

Best known is a proposal to build the largest copper and gold mine in North America at the headwaters of the world’s greatest wild salmon fishery, in southwest Alaska, which produces 30 million to 50 million fish each year. The Southern Ute Tribe declared a state of local disaster.

“It’s the real “Northern Exposure” up here”, said Mark Esper, editor of the Silverton Standard & the Miner newspaper. Esper was forced to leave his office last week because the cacophony of phone calls from media and bloggers about the letter to the editor was preventing him from getting any work done.

“We take responsibility for the spill”, she wrote. Mining activity has contaminated the headwaters of more than 40 percent of watersheds in the West, according to the EPA.