After river disaster, is it time to re-evaluate EPA?

Not the Animas. How could this be? Particularly given that the heavy metals will increasingly drop into the lake floor as the water slows down, impacts to the Grand Canyon and downstream water users should be minimal.

And it’s true that the EPA won’t face fines the way BP was fined for its Deepwater Horizon Spill for example, because the government doesn’t fine itself.

Inhofe will hold a hearing on the incident and the EPA’s response when Congress returns, his spokeswoman Donelle Harder said.

As an environmentalist, I hear in this disaster an urgent wake-up call: It’s time to get serious about cleaning up abandoned mines and the unsafe pollution building up inside them. As they began moving the unstable debris, it collapsed and the pressurized, filth-laden water spewed out and down into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas.

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.

“Abandoned mines sites are sitting out there in the tens of thousands, just in the West”, noted Professor Ronald Cohen of the Colorado School of Mines, “and a significant component of them are releasing this acid mine drainage to receiving waters”.

Virtually the entire stretch of the San Juan from Farmington to Lake Powell is designated endangered species habitat for two of the four endangered native fish species in the Colorado Basin, the Razorback Sucker (Xyrauchen Texanus) and the Colorado Pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus Lucius).

This is why environmental regulators downstream are intent on determining where the contamination settles. “We’re working closely with state and local partners and with tribal nations as our efforts progress”. Today EPA provided the following updates:The Last 24 HoursNew Mexico announced its determination that private domestic water well use along the Animas River can resume based on water quality sampling results collected by both New Mexico Environment Department and the EPA. He visited farms and delivered water for livestock.

Officials said Friday that concentrations of metals including lead, thallium, silver and antimony had increased since 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater spilled last week from an inactive mine near Silverton.

The full ramifications of the spill will obviously take time to uncover and assess.

“These millions of gallons of toxic sludge… not only threaten the integrity of Arizonans’ limited drinking water resources, but also surrounding farmland and ecosystems, including the world-renowned Grand Canyon”, he wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy.

It will take many years and millions of dollars to remediate Gold King Mine and the tragedy it unleashed. But he cautioned that the agency’s actions in the days following the spill are critical to its liability. The Gold King mine closed in 1923, leaving no clearly responsible party.

Abandoned mines “are incorrectly portrayed as being our dirty pictures, when they in fact represent historic practices typically 50 to 150 years old implemented by companies no longer in existence and/or persons no longer alive, and are reflective of societal values at that time”, Laura Skaer, executive director of the Northwest Mining Association, testified to Congress. The 1872 Mining Law, signed by Ulysses S. Grant, is one of the most antiquated and environmentally destructive laws on the books. It is home to new species of bacteria that have grown in the toxic soup, which resulted when a massive copper mine turned off its pumps in 1982.

EPA has been looking for years at designating the mines as Superfund sites, McCarthy said.

A good place to start would be to make mining companies pay to mitigate the hazards left from past operations, as well as to strengthen regulations on new mines to avoid the creation of new threats. The millions of gallons in the Gold King mine accumulated over time. She is co-creator of Change the Course, the national freshwater conservation and restoration campaign being piloted in the Colorado River Basin.