Animas River, drinking-water systems reopened after tests

Large areas of both the Animas and the San Juan rivers suffered from the spill. That’s 24 hours farmers were irrigating with tainted water, cities were pumping dirty water for municipal uses, and kayakers and anglers were literally standing or floating in the toxic brew.

Members of the Navajo Nation meet with utter despair over the spill. In it he stood in front of the still-leaking mine.

Timothy Coleman, whose expansive farmland along the river has been in his family for years, said he is trying to figure out how he will cope. Any of these chemicals or metals alone, or combined as they were in the waters in the Gold King Mine, could be unsafe, but only if a person were exposed to them in particular ways and in sufficient amounts. “Yet Thomas Jefferson warned us “…in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution…”

His agency estimates the wastewater will make it out of Lake Powell in about two weeks amid extra testing to monitor the contaminants.

In its controversial “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated annual clean water benefits of $338 million to $349 million.

“Under my administration, you wouldn’t have to sue the EPA, because I would get rid of all the old people and bring in people who understand the Constitution”, Carson told the enthusiastic crowd.

But that changed earlier this month.

“Your average soccer mom is going to be scared off”, he said, adding that nervous rafters will probably just pick another river. “The water’s still contaminated and it’s embedded in the mud and the rocks and the tree branches along the river”.

Accidents happen, but the federal response to a disaster caused by a federal agency has been devoid of urgency, intergovernmental communication and courtesy to burdened residents, businesses and farms. The EPA has only started in the last seven years to clean up those mines.

At an EPA meeting at the Shiprock Chapter House last week, a farmer spoke angrily to EPA representatives.

Shirley Dodge, peddling squash and corn from the back of her auto Saturday at the Bengaye Flea Market, said that although the food they grow serves as supplemental income, losing any of that money would hurt. “They’re connected to the land”. As they attempted to move some of the debris to insert a valved pipe, the barrier crumbled – and unleashed a flood of orange water. We can’t be compensated for that. Investigations will commence. And once again Republicans will dump all over the EPA, arguing that it oversteps its authority, mucks around in business affairs and sets regulations that industry finds onerous.

Carson’s pitch to voters appears to be working, and his decision to focus on EPA’s incompetence, lack of transparency, and coercive behavior is one theme he is likely to repeat throughout his campaign. “At least the immediate impacts are much less then I think a lot of people anticipated, but nobody knows what the long-term impacts will be”.

Apparently, I am not the only one who feels this way.

Unsurprisingly, residents affected by the spill aren’t buying it. Officials from New Mexico, Utah and the Navajo Nation have joined in the effort to contain the damage they now have to deal-damage that is entirely derived from the EPA’s carelessness.