No health risks to wildlife after Colorado mine spill, but impact to

The Environmental Protection Agency says wastewater continues to drain from an abandoned mine in southwestern Colorado at a rate of about 550 gallons per minute.

The rate of discharge Saturday was down from about 740 gallons per minute on Friday.

By Friday, the main plume of the spill had traveled some 75 miles south to the New Mexico border, prompting utilities in the towns of Aztec and Farmington to shut off their intakes from the Animas as well, local authorities said.

The EPA said it has built two retention ponds to begin trapping and screening out the yellow contaminants.

The mine has been inactive since 1923. “It’s significant and when that’s your livelihood and there are many on our ditch who are farmers and that’s their livelihood”, said Danene Sherwood, a San Juan County, New Mexico resident.

EPA officials said in the teleconference that water quality experts have been deployed to Shiprock and are encouraging people there to take advantage of water quality sampling.

An unspecified number of residents living downstream of the spill who draw their drinking supplies from their private wells have reported water discoloration, but there has been no immediate evidence of harm to human health, livestock or wildlife, EPA officials told reporters in a telephone conference call. The EPA said they would not know until at least Sunday if the river contains arsenic.

No health hazard has been detected yet.

La Plata County and the city of Durango have declared a state of emergency Sunday in wake of a mine waste spill that has turned the Animas River orange.

In addition to New Mexico, wastewater from the mine was also inching toward Utah.

The history of the Gold King and its neighboring mines is also an example of the difficulty in cleaning up old waste.

Ordinarily, this river runs with deep blue and green waters, the type of which could be still be observed in the adjacent waters of the San Juan River upstream of the point just outside town where the Animas empties into it.

“This action has been taken due to the serious nature of the incident and to convey the grave concerns that local elected officials have to ensure that all appropriate levels of state and federal resources are brought to bear to assist our community not only in actively managing this tragic incident but also to recover from it”, said La Plata County Manager Joe Kerby.

Beneath the western United States lie thousands of old mining tunnels filled with the same toxic stew that spilled into a Colorado river last week, turning it into a nauseating yellow concoction and stoking alarm about contamination of drinking water.

The Mountain Studies Institute research center in Silverton said small insects in the river near Durango were still alive 20 hours after exposure to the sediment and heavy metals, a sign that the short-term impact on aquatic life may not be as damaging as feared.

When the spill happened, the EPA-supervised crew was trying to enter the mine to pump out and treat the water, EPA spokeswoman Lisa McClain-Vanderpool said.