From the “if a citizen or company did this there would be hell to pay” department:
Guest essay by Emily Zanotti (via Somewhat Reasonable)
The Environmental Protection Agency often justifies its own existence by noting that corporations, who see profit as their goal rather than environmental protection, are ill-equipped (or at least, ill-prioritized) to care for America’s natural resources.
It turns out that, perhaps, the EPA might also be ill-equipped to handle toxic waste when it comes to preventing large-scale pollution of our nation’s waterways. In fact, they may have caused, on its own, one of our nation’s greatest environmental disasters. EPA crews trying to collect and contain waste water in the Gold King mine in Durango, Colorado, loosed 1.1 million gallons of “acidic, yellowish” discharge, causing the pollution – which includes levels of arsenic, lead, cadmium, aluminum and copper – to flow into the Animas River (an early tributary of the Colorado) at a rate of 1200 gallons per minute.
From the Denver Post:
EPA chiefs flew in Friday and acknowledged an inappropriate initial response Wednesday in which they downplayed the severity and failed to anticipate the downstream impacts.
Durango identifies itself as the “River City,” and residents’ lives revolve around fishing, swimming, tubing and entertaining tourists along the Animas River.
Most longtime residents know too well the problem of old mines that leak heavy metals into headwaters — an issue around Colorado and the western United States — but never expected a ruinous onslaught like this.
Holly Jobson, 62, walking at noon along banks where yellow sediment was glomming onto rocks, said Silverton ought to push for a proper federal cleanup around mines. Silverton officials in the past have resisted, fearing the stigma of a federal Superfund cleanup designation and the impact on tourism.
By this morning, the waterflow had decreased to around 580 gallons per minute. Lab testing has not yet begun on site, and the EPA is apologizing for their slow response rate, particularly considering the magnitude of the incident. Durango gets most of its water from the Aminas River and relies on the river’s beauty to bring tourists to the town. The city has already lost $150,000 in revenue this month. 1,000 water wells are presumed contaminated.
The EPA has not only claimed responsibility for the spill, but is claiming responsibility for a slow response as well. The EPA says now that the spill was far faster, and far larger than they initially assumed.
The EPA did not have to be on site, to begin with, it seems. The region has a coalition of local organizations called the Animas River Stakeholders Group who have worked together since 1994 to address pollution coming out of nearby mines. The Gold King mine is widely known to be one of the most polluted, leaking around 50 to 250 gallons of waste water per minute. While the group had pushed to find the source of the leak and stem it from there, the EPA went ahead with the project apart from the group, and seemingly without local expertise.
UPDATE: The EPA has now released new figures, and its now 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater and climbing
Emily Zanotti is researcher and writer for The Heartland Institute, and a blogger and columnist for the The American Spectator. She is a ten-year veteran of political communications and online journalism based out of Chicago, where she runs her own digital media firm. Her work has appeared at her former blog, NakedDC, on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal and across the web.
This isn’t the pollution you are looking for, move along.
They had the balls to post signs in the affected area reading in part, “We ask that citizens stay out of the river water until the discoloration has passed” If this was a private firm, there would be front page headlines claiming the environment will be damaged for 100 years and arguing for more ‘help’ and regulation from the EPA.
They just need a new slogan: “Come to Colorado, where even the rivers run with gold.”
If the EPA is fined, taxpayers pay.
If the EPA is not fined, taxpayers pay.
And if EPA gets hefty raises like IRS and VA, taxpayers also pay.
There seems to be a trend here…
Then how about just deducting the damages from all EPA employees and the Prez or POTUS.
Slywolfe,
And even if EPA-ites [minor functionaries, no doubt, not Richard Windsor!] do prison time – guess – taxpayers pay!
Who would have thought that might eventuate?!
Auto
I’d be willing to cough up the cost a bullet for a summary execution following conviction.
For pete’s sake stop all this complaining. It’s OK to create a little pollution in the name of progress and in a couple of years no body will remember this except the greenies. Nature will fix this just like it has done with the big Gulf oil spill a few years ago. If you want to get pissed ask yourself this: Why didn’t the original operators of the mine clean this up when the mine played out in the first place? Easy to point fingers at the EPA (funded by our tax dollars) instead of the people who created the problem to begin with. Considering the thousands of abandoned mining sites around the country this story will likely be repeated over and over. Turns out there is a program call Self Bonding that lets miners avoid holding reserve funds or insurance to clean up their mines when they close so maybe we should start by repealing Self Bonding rules.
Well, the problem is that this is heavy metal contamination. You can’t treat metals. You can just remove them and put them somewhere forever. The original owner fulfilled their obligation by putting the metals in the mine, and their efforts and the result were approved by the agency. Then, years later, a small leak developed and the agency went in with a half-baked plan that gave catastrophic results.
Maybe we should dig up the bones of the original operators and interrogate them. The history of the mines is an interesting read…http://www.miningartifacts.org/Colorado-Mines.html
This disaster is all about the EPA. If the government wants to see good results, then they should award the task to private industry. I would much rather see the several tens of billions of dollars a year, which are now committed to CAGW, go to take care of environmental problems from our mining past.
If the government wants to see good results, then they should award the task to private industry.
=================
exactly. why didn’t the EPA contract this out? they have a conflict of interest if they are both measuring contamination and cleaning it up. there is a temptation for the EPA to fudge the figures if they do the cleanup. the EPA managers will order their employees to find the EPA did a wonderful job.
Reading comments of some who obviously know a good deal about mines, the consensus amongst them was that the EPA had failed at what should have been a mining 101 problem. Drill a hole in the plug to ascertain the height of the water in the tunnel, before attempting to open that tunnel. That sounds to me like a very practical common sense procedure. Evidently, the EPA has a hard time dealing with common sense problems.
no matter how bad a job the EPA does, will the EPA write a report saying they did a bad job?
Exactly Goldminor. This mine closed in the 1920s.
People commenting should at least get the bare bones before opining on who is to blame.
Actually, the mine was last worked in 1991 by the Sunnyside Mining group. They are the ones who dug the American Tunnel, which is the one that the EPA broke into. Sunnyside set up a water treatment plant after they closed the mine. They then set up and funded another company to manage the treatment plant, and that also allowed them to end their cleanup obligations to the mine. In further reading, it is said that the treatment plant was successful at improving downstream, stream and river conditions over the years of operation, until they ran out of money to maintain the plant. To my mind here is where the government lets everyone down. Why wouldn’t the government come to the aid of the treatment plant to have kept it functioning? Downstream conditions worsened again after the closing of the treatment plant. Where was the EPA back then?
Dude the mine closed in 1923. What regs governed cleanup?
“For pete’s sake stop all this complaining. It’s OK to create a little pollution in the name of progress and in a couple of years no body will remember this except the greenies. Nature will fix this just like it has done with the big Gulf oil spill a few years ago”
Is it possible for a person to be as clueless as you are making yourself out to be?
A few facts:
– BP and an army of cleanup experts and volunteers worked for years to clean up oil and tar balls, everywhere from the bottom of the Gulf to the beaches hundreds of miles away. This included skimmers, booms to contain and absorb oil, dispersants and detergents to help the natural degradation process, etc.
Oil has a large fraction which can be readily digested by microorganisms in the gulf, and a portion of the oil will simply evaporate.
The amount spent to clean up and mitigate the damage is in the multiple billions and counting.
To state that nature fixed it is really unbelievable.
-Oil is oil. It is a mixture of organic compounds, many of which are volatile and all of which can be degraded by chemical and biological processes. None of these things are true of heavy metal pollution.
heavy metal contamination is bad enough when contained, or drifting slowly through groundwater or old mine shafts and tunnels.
Let loose into a river which is teaming with fish and other wildlife, is a source of drinking and irrigation water for a significant portion of the population of the entire country, and which is a popular recreational destination besides, makes this a disaster which will just keep giving.
Stop complaining?
Are you insane?
That BP oil spill could have been capped in 3 weeks. In fact, when I saw the ridiculous “top hat” apparatus, I was amazed. But when I saw a submersible cutting pipe away from the defective blow-out preventer, I had to tell someone what the solution was. I emailed Neil Cavuto at Fox News and suggested that if the submersible can cut pipe, Obviously it can take the bolts out of the flange visible in the video and bolt on something appropriate. Three weeks later a primitive arrangement (without proper venting valves) called “top hat 2” was bolted on. This BP disaster was possibly engineered.
At one time, the EPA helped us clean up real pollution. Today’s corrupted EPA is more concerned with a power grab and other agenda that is counter to it’s reason for existence. They continue to impose unjustified, harmful regulations with impunity in many realms, making their own rules.
This is what they did to photosynthesis, Instead of:
Sunshine +H2O +CO2 +Minerals = O2 +Sugars(food) according to the EPA, we have:
Sunshine +H20 +Pollution +Minerals = O2 +Sugars(food)
http://patriotpost.us/posts/35663
http://junkscience.com/2012/03/04/epa-science-advisors-not-so-independent/
Where are the drones and newsroom helicopter shots and CNN live coverage?
Obviously a disaster. I am not trying to down play the significance. Has anyone seen an analysis of the down stream effects? As the contamination is deluted as it moves down stream, how far will the toxin levels be hazardous?
I think you mean how deep as in sediment, because that is where it goes.
And what about the long term effects off all this acid and heavy metals on the aquatic and other life? How will it spread into the eco system? What a great opportunity for eco researchers to get more grants from the government
The EPA has tested the water, but they won’t release the numbers until they’re good and ready. From the Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/environment/ci_28608746/epas-colorado-mine-disaster-plume-flows-west-toward):
Environmental Protection Agency regional chief Shaun McGrath on Saturday conceded that federal officials know the levels of the heavy metals in Cement Creek and the Animas River but would not reveal early testing results. “Those data sheets have not been finalized by the scientists,” McGrath said. “As soon as we are able to release them, we will.”
Adjustments in process
Just in… “Gov. Hickenlooper declares disaster emergency for Gold King Mine release”
And EPA has been giving the Navajos a hard time in recent years. Geez
There are whole square miles of that orange colored rock/clay in the San Juans. They just flushed it down the rivers all at once.
What you are looking at is NOT orange clay. See comment downthread.
Dump a large load of lime at the source first and precipitate the metals as insoluble hydroxides. Then liming the river just enough to make the pH~7 – there is wild life in and along the river to consider so too much might do more harm. The mine area should be grouted off and the water table drawn down by pumping into a lined, lime treatment pond. 4M gallons is 15,000cu m; 1200gpm is 270cu m/hr. Knowing the stream flow rate, the right amount of lime could be added to the river at the source of contamination but job one is to stop the contamination asap.
Re: downstream, if there is enough water in the system, it will be pretty diluted. Precautionary liming before the next town or two should be done NOW and of course, quick turnaround water assay sampling. I hope they aren’t planning to hold a meeting tomorrow to discuss it first.
Good thinking. I was having the same thought…it is easier to neutralize these materials while they are still concentrated, and doing it sooner minimizes the affected area. If mitigation and neutralization is not being done, the big question has got to be…why the hell not?
These are people who never lift a pencil before doing an impact study…unfortunately, by the time anything can be studied, it will be too late to do anything except study the contamination and damage.
What about cheating agents? Is it too dilute for those to help?
Is it possible to precipitate such materials in such volume is moving water?
Lime is fairly innocuous stuff, they should be doing it if it will help even a little.
The mine area should be grouted off and the water table drawn down by pumping into a lined, lime treatment pond.
Yes, but only with wind powered or solar powered pumps. Anything else would make climate change worse,
Feel badly for the people and wildlife involved, but couldn’t help make that one sarcastic comment. Cleanups of this kind of mess can only be accomplished at all because we have access to fossil fuel powered machinery.
A polluted river will be a thing of the past. Our children will not know what a polluted river looks like
Too bad it’s not a flammable river, but then EPA is working on it.
Flammable would be easy. We can treat oil. Fire and biology can break down oil.
There’s much less that you can do with heavy metals.
Maybe if the EPA would focus on real pollution instead of taking their eye off the ball for the CO2 boogeyman, they would be focused enough not to cause a tragedy of this magnitude. This will make its way thru Lake Mead with only a final stop into the ocean. There will be no accountability, just scapegoats.
This will make it into Lake Mead and then the Las Vegas water supply, but probably no one in Vegas will notice, sounds sarcastic but I actually mean it, an awful lot of people in Vegas are just dense.
An awful lot of people outside of Las Vegas are just dense, sounds sarcastic but I actually mean it.
It has to get past Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam before it gets to the Grand Canyon and then to Lake Mead (and then on to Lake Mohave and Lake Havasu).
A Lot of people within a 2000 mile radius of Vegas are dense It’s your EPA you are all responsible. What are you going to do about it? nothing I bet, sometimes you get what you deserve.
Ah people Lake Powell is near full.
http://lakepowell.water-data.com/
and just for fun
http://www.glencanyon.org/media_center/gci-news
let the finger pointing begin.
michael
Mike, your link says the reservoir is 87 feet below full pool, or less then 60 percent of capacity.
Lake Powell is a long, long way from full pool of 3700 feet. It still has 85 vertical feet to reach full pool. It will take 3-4 more years of well above ave rainfall/snowpack to get there.
A better link to Lake Powell historical levels.
http://graphs.water-data.com/lakepowell/
July 29 2015 is only a few feet higher than it was this time last year and almost 50 feet lower than Sept 2011.
“Maybe if the EPA would focus on real pollution instead of taking their eye off the ball for the CO2 boogeyman,”
This is exactly what I cannot stop thinking about.
While they wail and gnash teeth over a fictional problem, they are inept in the extreme in dealing with real issues, or even understanding the actual science of the imaginary problem.
It’s easy to pile on the EPA here for making a bad mistake, but what is being missed is that the EPA was trying to fix a mess that was left behind by irresponsible mine owners of the past, albeit probably going about it in the wrong way. Good comments on linked Denver Post article.
Colorado is has many abandoned mines leaking contanminated water into creeks, streams, and other waterways.
“Wednesday’s blowout, at the Gold King Mine in mountains above Silverton, showed the enormity of the problem of leaking old mines in Colorado and the West. Colorado natural resources officials overseeing old mines told The Denver Post they know of several hundred around the state leaking acid discharges into river headwaters. Cleanup has been done at about 9,000 abandoned mines, but the status of about 14,000 remains uncertain, said Bruce Stover, director of Colorado’s inactive mine reclamation program.”
–Denver Post
The mine has been closed since 1923. What would’ve been the appropriate “responsible” action from the mine owners?
They weren’t “fixing” anything…they were doing an investigation. Underestimating the spill by a factor of about 3, being slow with test results, proclaiming “nothing to see here,” etc, are big reasons to pile-on.
The EPA could have taken a page from the Dark Ages by exhuming the remains of the perpetrators, having them burned, and then reburied, a la John Wycliffe.
“We have got to tackle these eventually,” Stover said. “(Gold King) is one of the mines we’ve been struggling with for years. We’re trying to figure out what is going on and how to fix it. This is a vexing problem. … Not everybody is on the same page.
[…]
EPA mine sight coordinator Hays Griswold, one of four workers at Gold King when an estimated 1 million or more gallons of orange acid water blew through a loose dirt barrier, said he had been working to install a pipe to drain rising water in the mine. That project, he said after the disaster, “couldn’t have worked. … Nobody expected the water to be that high.”
”
–Denver Post
Are there any official records or studies showing that this mine waste has harmed a person? It might look ugly, it might taste ugly, but does it really affect the health of people as the concentrations they will ingest?
The mines of the world, discovered or to be discovered, all have potential to add their load to Nature.
Is there an example of this Natural effluent ever harming anyone?
It’s not really “natural” if you dig tunnels through rock layers and create conduits for concentrated materials to bypass natural filtration or containment.
That aside, you also have the distinction between chronic (low-dose/long time) and acute (high-dose/short time) exposure. Acute is pretty rare, particularly with adequate monitoring.
what is being missed is that the EPA was trying to fix a mess that was left behind by irresponsible mine owners of the past
Don’t buy into that red herring. Past irresponsibility doesn’t trump the massive irresponsibility of the EPA minions who bought full responsibility by their mindless excavation without first determining the static elevation of the contained minewater. They broke it, and they bought it.
Trouble with a Capital T.
“If the President does it … it’s OK.” [the Nixon Rule]
Queue the Music Man:
Ha ha
Trouble, oh we got trouble,
Right here in River City!
With a capital “T”
That rhymes with “P”
And that stands for Pollution!
The EPA has passed its sell-by date. Time to let the states handle it.
Call in BP for help.
There are two contamination problems. One is heavy metal bearing sediment, rock flour and the like. But hard rock metal mine waters are usually very acidic (e.g. from oxidative dissolution of iron pyrite and other sulfides, which creates sulfuric acid, which leaches any other metals present into solution). The downstream water discoloration is not yellow sediment. It is ‘yellow boy’. The main component is usually iron sulfide, which precipitates back out of solution as very fine nano particles when acid mine water pH is raised above 3. Iron pyrite’s finely precipitated color is yellow ‘fools gold’ without the pyrite glitter. The water is also full of completely dissolved other heavy metals, probably as both oxides and sulfides. Arsenic oxide dissolved in water is a deep orange, commonly discoloring acid mine seeps. Cadmium sulfide dissolved in water is bright yellow. Acid hard rock mine water (not just gold mines) is well studied, and a big problem. I just spent two hours studying up before commenting.
Take another look at the color and turbidity of the water. That is not sediment like in the muddy Mississippi. It is much, much worse–yellow boy. And the local Durango folks tested the mine seepage before the EPA ever got involved. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, some aluminum, and copper in addition to iron.
ristvan,
Thank you. I had just finished with a comment down thread questioning as to the possibility of the mine’s rock and/or water infiltration could contain/be naturally acidic.
Hopefully we can gain knowledge here at WUWT so as to be ready for the likely onslaught from the enviro’s and the media.
TY. WUWT and CE are supposed to be science sites. I would like to keep them that way, so practice my own ‘The Arts of Truth’ ebook before commenting. Wonderful to now know about ‘yellow boy’. Still don’t know where the ‘boy’ part came from. Understand completely the yellow part. You can even find Google images of the main oxides/sulfides in water.
Perhaps will research ‘boy’ after a glass or two of wine with dinner. Probably beats television.
ristvan,
Please ID TY and CE.
Thanks in advance.
TY – Thank You
CE – Climate Etc
I listened to an interview on this yesterday and yes, there are many “natural” seeps in the area as well as the mine seeps. I have seen similar seeps in the Canadian Rockies often.
There would still be fine clay particles in the assemblage and that is the main byproduct of the rock decay in acidic waters along with the metal oxides.
Checked. You are correct. Non-weathered clays, from the acidity. Obviously, I should have spent 3 hours on self education rather than 2. Learned yet another something new today. Sincere thanks.
Environmental Pollution Agency
I feel a name change is in the offing.
How many EPA employees were actually out hiking?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gold+King+Mine,+Colorado+81433/@37.896724,-107.634323,3a,75y,180h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1snVT9OVTXG50AAAQXQhPkbQ!2e0!3e11!6s%2F%2Fgeo1.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DnVT9OVTXG50AAAQXQhPkbQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D163%26pitch%3D0!7i9728!8i4864!4m2!3m1!1s0x873ee0cc9036c0cd:0x63bb9dd03a926ec3?hl=en
Out hiking? These folks sit in front of a computer screen and look at the natural world using the same technology as your link.
I hike.
Well not much anymore. I now work on trails with wta dot org.
“Natural world”? Is that what you call it?
Noting the bare slopes, especially to the southeast.
Any idea why some of these entire hills seem devoid of vegetation?
Back in the mining days the trees were stripped from the slopes for exploration and mining timbers, as well as for general usage. Much of that area is also above the tree line at high altitude.
Don’t worry a bit !!
The EPA will find a way to blame everyone else.
The lame stream media is already trying to blame the locals because they didn’t want to make the area a superfund site:
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/kyle-drennen/2015/08/10/msnbc-tries-blame-locals-not-epa-river-pollution
The pH level is 3.74 in Cement Creek. It’s worse than ocean acidification.
The mine has been inactive/closed since 1923. Regulations in 1923?
If the water in the mine has a pH of less than 3.74 would it be fair to say that the make-up of the mine’s rock of groundwater may be somewhat acidic?
It’s worse than we thought. CO2 what done it. All rivers will be like this by 2025 if we don’t stop carbon pollution now. We only have 4 more months to change our ways.
The regulation in 1923 is to leave everything in the mine, no fuss, no problem. Many companies didn’t even do that.
The problem is that the mines fill up with water, and all the disturbed rock leaches out metals at much higher rates than solid rock or dirt. That leads to extremely toxic water as every heavy metal in the region builds up to it’s maximum solubility.
It’s Bush’s fault.
Sort of what the Left will now claim with the usual funding trope.
“If the EPA had only been given more funding…..”
you know the rest. The Left loves to make shit up and blame a lack of money for bad things from government.
The EPA union will never allow the idiots responsible to be punished. The collective bargaining agreement is prime..