New Mexico official: EPA kept water data secret after spill

The Colorado spill came from a cluster of century-old mines in the San Juan mountains that together discharge an estimated 330 million gallons of toxic wastewater annually, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy testified.

McCarthy said there was no way to anticipate a blowout because the work being conducted at the Gold King Mine near Silverton was meant to prevent such an incident.

A New Mexico official says federal regulators refused to share water quality data for weeks following a blowout of toxic wastewater from a Colorado mine that fouled rivers across the Southwest.

The Environmental Protection Agency was created in 1970 to maintain and enforce national standards in environmental laws across the United States. The agency initially said the amount was, I believe, 1 million gallons and several days later said the surge consisted of 3 million gallons. They’re talking about what needs to be done to avoid disasters like this in the future.

Republicans, though, stuck to the Animas spill and grilled McCarthy during the joint hearing of the Natural Resources Committee and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the latter led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

“There’s no way EPA should have downplayed this. I certainly did not”.

Russell Begaye, president of the Navajo Nation, also testified, and said that he spent his childhood swimming in such contaminated waters, and caught and ate dying fish with his brothers.

The EPA has pulled emergency water tanks from the Navajo Nation and the agency plans to stop providing hay this week. “Given these facts, it is unclear why the EPA and the contractor did not excersie more care when working at the Gold King Site”, Inhofe said. “Don’t you think someone is responsible for the accident that happened?”

The next speaker gave McCarthy one last rebuttal, in which she asserted the forms in no way constituted a final agreement.

“I’m not suggesting this wasn’t a disaster”.

“We had a response team in place”, she said.

McCarthy disputed comments by Republican Sens. Dan Sullivan from Alaska.

“Although the EPA admitted responsibility there is no denying that they caused this spill and that’s entirely unacceptable”, said Bennet.

It’d be impossible for anyone who pays even the slightest attention to national news stories to not have heard at least once over the past month reports about the massive spill from the gold mine in Colorado. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said there is a double standard between the way the EPA treats itself and how it treats private companies.

McCarthy said her staff has already received some claims from rafting companies and other small businesses that say they were harmed by the closure of the river immediately after the spill.

“We are hands-off on this issue”, she said, adding that EPA is “going to live with whatever scope” Interior decides is appropriate.

Well now congress is taking the spill and the EPA’s involvement seriously.

Today, during a hearing of the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the Gold King Mine spill, U.S. Senator Tom Udall pressed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy about the impact on the Navajo Nation and San Juan County.

The sites include three in California, four in Colorado, two in Montana and one in Missouri, according to details obtained by The Associated Press following repeated requests for the information…”We want to take extra caution before we initiate any work”, Stanislaus said of the work suspensions.