Readers may recall that the EPA disappeared photos of the Gold King mine disaster from their web page. Perhaps they got just a bit burnt from the public backlash to that.
From YouTube, (h/t to Ryan Maue) EPA releases Gold King Mine blowout footage.
Gotta love the comments from the audio such as:
‘Get outta here?!… What do we do now?’
On September 2, 2015 EPA posted the following edited footage filmed by EPA contractors of the Gold King Mine blowout of August 5, 2015.
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This reminds me of the time I was employed by a Govt Dept, in accounts payable. Found a taxi voucher for, $250.00. That then led to multiple vouchers when I investigated, all cashed by the same driver, and where was his regular rank, outside the casino of course, I rang the taxi co and asked if I could contact taxi driver, 999, I wanted to thank him personally for a service done, and where could I find him, quiet happy to tell me. Brought it to the manager of dept attention, who was fired 10 days later. Too many times the whistle blower being at fault rather than the real crim. This smacks of the same, get rid of all the troublemakers, more Idiots in charge of govt depts. Oh by the way my manager at the time now holds an even more senior position.
Not clear who was fired as the whistle blower – you, the manager, or the driver? Please clarify…You said the manager is still employed with a senior position. Weren’t you the whistle blower?
Managers at fault are usually moved sideways (after pocketing a huge sum in compensation for lost earnings), if they work in the public sector that is…
Typically here in the the UK, esp in the NHS or Social Services,the manager is ‘sacked’ then re-employed in a similar post in another area – usually at an increased salary and with no loss of pension benefits.
Lyn, your story reminds me of the time I was picking coffee beans in Guatemala…oh, wait…uh. Never mind.
That was not me, it was Keyser Soze.
Sorry.
It is yellow, it comes from the bowels of the Earth, It is natural.
It is Gaia’s pee.
Don’t fool with Mother Nature, nor gravity (assuming there is such a thing).
And, never, ever, fix something that ain’t broken.
I guess Michelle won’t be taking the two girls skiing in Colorado this winter.
Now that’s an anthropogenic disaster … thanks EPA!
Skywolfe says, “Impeach McCarthy.”
Excerpt from link:
• On February 4, 2015, Administrator McCarthy appeared at a joint hearing before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and made false statements in violation of section 1001 of title 18, United States Code. When answering questions about Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulations, McCarthy stated, “Again, we are not expanding jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act, we are not eliminating any exemptions or exclusions in this proposal, we are in fact narrowing the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act consistent with sound science and the law.” However, information on the EPA’s website states, “a very small number of additional waters — 3.2 percent — will be found jurisdictional and an EPA video released with the final rule claims that “until now 60% over our streams and millions of acres of wetlands all across the country were not protected.”
I see, so now the EPA will protect the other 60% of our streams and wetlands exactly like they protected the Animas river.
Here is a quick primer on the the EPA’s Waters of the United States:
1. Congress intended the federal government to have authority over “navigable” waters.
2. “WOTUS” redefines “waters of the United States” to remove the qualification that they be “navigable,” and in effect brings most every occasionally damp ditch and puddle in the nation under EPA control.
3. Twenty-nine states filed lawsuits asking the federal judiciary to get EPA back under control.
4. At the eleventh hour a federal court ordered an injunction blocking EPA’s onerous water rule.
5. EPA bureaucrats declared they will only halt the rule in the 13 states that requested the injunction.
6. Relief will only extend to Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
As Ron Arnold reports at CFACT.org:
“Each state lawsuit asked a federal judge to declare the WOTUS rule illegal and issue an injunction to prevent the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, co-administrator of the rule, from enforcing it. Each state also asked the judge to order both agencies to draft a new rule that complies with the law and honors state authority.”
REF: all writing by Craig Rucker, CFACT
So, there is a perfectly good earthen dam, and they bring in some big equipment to dig a trench into it. I guess there wasn’t enough of a seep to make a good picture. Most people, if they were going to do this, would at least have a back-up plan, like having a big truckload of sandbags ready to dump into the trench they just made. But no, they were goal-oriented towards getting some good pictures, and then a small leak starts, and they just stand around looking at it. And then it gets worse, and they realize that they can’t cover up the fact that they did this.
If it wasn’t the EPA, I’d almost feel sorry for them. Just wanted some good pictures to show how bad it was. At least they got their pictures, eh?
It is most regrettable that one of the states asking for an INJUNCTION against the EPA’s new Waters of the United States rules
had such an accident happen to their supplemental irrigation water.
In other words, “Nice river you’ve got there. It’d be too bad if something happened to it.”
“what do we do now ????”
1) Prepare a backup plan, whoops way to late for that….
2) Think quickly and try to minimize the damage, whoops we are too incompetent to pull that off…
3) Touch up our resumes: “Reduced concentration of toxic wastes by dispersing them over a wider geographic area”….
4) Change your name and go into a witness protection plan, yeah, that’s the ticket….
What a totally predictable outcome: stop up some relatively clean free flowing water until it dissolves all the “bad” stuff and breaks free because of the totally unexpected hydrostatic pressure and transports all the “bad” stuff downstream at high velocity. Who knew about hydrostatic pressure ????
Cheers, KevinK
They should have called the President. He can negotiate with the worlds leaders to end dangerous spills. He will be meeting in Paris with other powerful world leaders to decide the correct global climate this fall. All he needs is for everyone to send him five bucks.
********
Organizing for Action
Robert —
Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time. The science is clear, and President Obama has been working his tail off to solve this problem. We have more of a pathway today to solve this problem than we have in years, with clean energy technologies booming, and common-sense limits on carbon pollution from dirty power plants.
So it really steams me to hear that top members of Congress are working to derail progress on this issue. One of them has even had his staff call foreign embassies to tell them that he and his fellow deniers plan to fight the President. If they get their way, America won’t live up to the commitments we’re making to fight climate change.
We’re calling out the deniers trying to undermine real action on climate change. Take a second today to help — chip in $5 or more to fund this work.
It’s one thing to speak out opposing President Obama or his policies, or to use every tactic in the congressional playbook to stall, delay, and gridlock-to-death any attempt at progress.
But going behind the President’s back to undercut negotiations on climate with foreign powers is taking it to another level.
Later this year, countries around the world are going to meet in Paris to hammer out a global agreement that could put us on track to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
International cooperation to tackle climate change may be climate change deniers’ worst nightmare. But we can’t let them get away with trying to derail it.
And we’re the right team for the job — we may not be able to convince the cynics in Congress, but we can sure out-organize them.
Join the fight — chip in today:
https://my.barackobama.com/Chip-In-To-Fight-Climate-Change
No doubt dozens of practical folks have already noted this above, but: If the EPA had had ONE competent engineer on that job, he’d have known to determine the surface level of the mine water before releasing a contractor to go digging around the adit portal.
All those lawyers and ‘scientists’ and industry-punishers on staff, and not one with a first-year understanding of hydrostatics. If that’s not criminal negligence by EPA, nothing is.
This whole discussion about blocking the flow with the CAT I think is likely un-realistic. First I will say, “I was not there”, so I do not know first-hand. However, from my experience (geologist by schooling and career) and reading what I can find, it would appear that once the flow started they were doomed.
First the mine portal (i.e. the opening) has been estimated at 10 feet wide and 15 feet high and based on historic mine records (which you can find online) it is likely that the adit leading from the portal sloped upwards and that behind the earthen plug stood a 15 foot high wall of fluid. So in other words the 15 foot tall portal was full from top to bottom and it is possible and probable that the elevation of the top of the fluid was well above the top elevation of the portal (i.e. the fluid was back-up by the plug).
So, at the very beginning of the video as you see the fluid first starts to escape, this is the very top of the portal (i.e. the roof). I don’t know the timing but my guess is that within less than a minute the fluid flowing from the top of the portal over the top of the earthen plug eroded down ~15 feet through the extent of the plug to the floor of the portal, disgorging the entirety of the portal. At this point there is no hope.
Water has a viscosity and so if you could have walked into the adit as the flow was occurring you would find that the distance between the top of the flow and the top of the adit would be getting smaller the farther you entered (i.e. a wedge of fluid).
In the video you see what appears to be a few feet of fluid issuing from the portal. However this does not reveal the extent of the upward sloping wedge of fluid within the adit. So surly if the CAT plowed into the portal in an attempted to stem the flow, the blade would have been over-run within seconds, having no significant effect.
This is basically subsurface mining 101.
Another way of looking at this, is as if this was an active subsurface mine, in which case men would have died ! ! !
It is not uncommon in current subsurface mine operations to encounter historic adits, shafts, drifts, etc., particularly in western mining. In many cases because of good historic records these earlier mining activities are expected and planned for. No miner worth his or her salt would blindly drift into a historic mine without considering the consequences. These consequences include in addition to fluids: explosive/poisonous gases, collapses, improperly disposed waste materials and explosives.
The bottom line is that the same procedures that today’s subsurface miner would use during the entry of a historic section of mine (i.e. so as not to kill miners and destroy the mine) should have been use by our EPA.
They did not.
Cheers,
Mark
********************
The EPA belongs to the executive branch of our government, and the current executive is the dumbest ass in the history of bi-peds ever to sh*t between two feet.
I did some digging through news stories . In 2014 the EPA got permission from the current owner, San Juan Corp,to investigate and determine where the water in the mine was coming from. At the time water flow was about 250GPM the work ran behind schedule and the EPA decided to plug the opening in 2014 for the winter. The EPA had a long term plan to install a drain pipe to feed the water to a treatment plant before allowing to the water to enter the river.
When the crews returned this year They just started digging down to the mine and hit water 20 feet above the mine entrance. 8 minutes later the road was washed out It happened to fast for any attempt to plug the leak.
The king gold mine didn’t always have water issues. The mine was first opened in about 1880 and then closed in about 1922. Then later in the 90’s it was reopened. However the new owners went bankrupt and the mine was repossessed . At the time water flow out of the mine was 7GPM. However a few years ago another mine Sunnyside received permission to plug a tunnel that was producing excessive amount of water of polluted water. The Sunnyside mine (now closed) is owned by . Kinross Gold, a Canada-based multinational mining giant.Since then the water flow from King Gold mine has been increasing. One week after the spill the water flow out of King Gold mine was 610GPM. It appears San Juan Corp is pointing the finger at Kinross Gold which is denying any responsibility.
I have a feeling this will wind up in court and that sunnyside will need to be drained.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/13/us/colorado-epa-animas-river-spill-owner/
If Sunnyside needs to be drained, we already ave an EPA crew with experience, and they can get right on that.
My favorite part is that they built the road up to the dig site exactly where the spill will go. Like cutting of a tree branch while standing on the leafy side.
Several of the postings above say that the EPA should have drilled a test bore in order to determine the water levels and pressures; as opposed to doing what they did do.
Had this been done, would this test bore not have caused the same outcome we see now?
Ie: the bore hole would have been the route for water to exit, and in so doing would have washed out a continuously growing channel. In other words, the same erosive catastrophe we we observe in this film clip.
Am I right in thinking this?
You drill from higher up in the rock and farther into the mine. One could also sample and assay the water. Putting a slurry of lime in would precipitate most of the heavy metals, too. The hundred gallons a minute of long term seepage could also have been been channeled to a pond for liming before passage into the environment and the remaining would be taken care of by dilution along the way.
” Had this been done, would this test bore not have caused the same outcome we see now?”
No Ideally you drill into the flooded are from above but even if that is not possible you can close a valve in the discharge pipe. What happened at Gold King is the equivalent of punching a hole in a earthen dam instead of letting it out through a pipe or a concrete spillway.
“Ie: the bore hole would have been the route for water to exit, and in so doing would have washed out a continuously growing channel. In other words, the same erosive catastrophe we we observe in this film clip.
Am I right in thinking this?”
No the bore hole would be a metal or plastic pipe. Water flowing through the pipe would not erode the the surrounding soil that plugged the mine. Adding a valve to the end of the pipe would also allow for control of the water discharge. Many earthen dams (which is what the EPA used to plug the mine) are built with drain lines at the base. In fact they should have installed the pipe before they plugged up the mine.
The EPA – Making a crisis out of a drama.
Fed up with EPA, LePage retaliates with threat
http://www.centralmaine.com/2015/09/11/fed-up-with-epa-lepage-retaliates-with-threat/
Citing ‘overreach’ in regulating tribal waters, he contemplates an unprecedented step: yielding the state’s Clean Water Act powers.
A threat by Gov. Paul LePage to give key regulatory powers back to the federal government would likely result in lengthy water permitting delays, an official for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.
LePage, frustrated with “aggressive regulatory overreach” by the EPA over Maine’s tribal waters, has threatened to relinquish key powers granted to the state under the federal Clean Water Act and return them to the EPA. The threat was outlined in a letter to Maine’s congressional delegation Aug. 31 and repeated by Patricia Aho, the outgoing environmental protection commissioner, in a letter sent the same day to the EPA.
“You cannot understand my frustration and the frustration of the (Department of Environmental Protection) as we continue to try to exercise our delegated authority under the Clean Water Act,” LePage wrote Maine’s delegation. “I am … seriously considering relinquishing some or all of Maine’s delegated authority under this act.”
If carried out, Maine would be the first state to give such powers back to the federal government, surrendering its authority to issue federal permits to factories and wastewater plants, and to monitor and enforce the provisions of the Clean Water Act, the landmark legislation championed by U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, a former governor of Maine.
The unprecedented action would turn water quality permitting over to the EPA’s New England regional office in Boston, where there is already a backlog. Forty-six states enforce the Clean Water Act themselves, but of the four that do not – Idaho, New Mexico, New Hampshire and Massachusetts – two are in New England, creating ample work for the Boston staff.
I don’t suppose anyone has been FIRED for this completely foreseen and predictable disaster?
I would be shocked if anyone were fired from a government job for malfeasance or incompetence under the current administration. On the other hand, if you are a whistle blower or you have a disagreement with the administration policies, well THEN you can kiss your career goodbye.
Nice way to fix a perceived trickle of pollution. Plug it up, wait for a massive back up, unplug it, let er rip and dump it all in the river. A successful purge?
The EPA says it is all over with so what difference does it matter now? 🙂
EPA did some good in the days of heavy smog and polluted rivers and, how much they did vs states and private industry I don;t know but the title Environmental.Protection.Agency fit. Today a more appropriate Title may be EDA which stands for Environmentally.Dangerous.Arrogance. Environmental.Dumb.Asses works too.
There are still thousands of these mines in Colorado waiting to “blow up”. I suspect this one did because of record late snowfall and spring rains. http://ski.curbed.com/archives/2015/06/may-precipitation-record-wettest-ever.php See also, the “blue state” in graphic http://ski.curbed.com/archives/2015/06/the-current-snowpack-in-colorado-is-off-the-charts.php
Blame for acid mine leakage of course traces back to miners who dug the mines in the first place, then lit out after they had taken what they could, or when gold and silver prices collapsed, as they have many times over the centuries. They left tailing mounds on hillsides above the headwaters of key watersheds, where they could do the most damage; and “sealing” a mine meant blocking the entrance to keep intruders out – not keeping toxic waters inside. But blaming the ’49-ers’ or their descendants is a pointless exercise unless it is meant to be “instructive” to future mining operatives. The big mines have the engineering wherewithal to prevent these kinds of disasters in the future. Let them use it – not because the EPA told them to do it, but because it is their responsibility. Meanwhile…
Today’s order of business is to rewrite clauses in the EPA’s Clean Water Act. First enacted as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1948, the environmental legislation did what it was supposed to do – force factories to clean up their effluents. It was not meant to address leaking acid mines. But by 1972, new and misguided mandates under the newly-dubbed Clean Water Act (CWA) forced anyone who tried to fix a point source of pollution to take full responsibility for the mess in perpetuity,. In this perversion of the “pottery shop rule”, you don’t have to break something to buy it; merely stepping up to someone else’s problem makes you liable for its cause forevermore. In 1993, for example, the East Bay Municipal Utility District was held liable for reclaiming to pristine condition the leaking Penn Mine at a cost of 10 million dollars merely because they initiating a clean-up of one of their own reservoirs which was being polluted by the leaking mine above them. They were sued by a group of environmentalists and fishermen, and could only extricate themselves by meeting the onerous conditions of the CWA.
Many good Samaritans have expressed willingness to clean up abandoned acid mines: local and state governments, industries dependent on clean water, private citizens, environmental groups, fishermen, and, yes, mining interests, who with their engineers and equipment, are best suited to tackling the job. All of these agencies fear stepping up because the EPA’s Clean Water Act allows them to be held entirely financially responsible for any further spills or leaks in the future. One recent proposal suggests each state maintain its own fund for clean-up and auction off the mine reclamation jobs to mining firms who can promise the best result: the level of purity of water downstream will determine the size of their remuneration.
Whoever the contractors are, they need to be protected under a “safe harbor” amendment to the EPA’s CWA. This will allow consortia of state-controlled businesses and private organizations, clubs, agriculture groups, and all downstream interests, to step up to the problem of abandoned acid mines and mitigate leakage. These “good Samaritans” should suffer no financial liabilities after they have carried out their work to some agreed-upon specification. Fixes will be costly, and that is why most of these mines have been sitting for hundreds of years. They are all leaking metal sulfides to some degree. So the temptation to return to the status quo should be avoided.
The Gold King Mine spill into the Animus suggests that a much more active role is called for by all parties. The EPA needs to get out of the way and let Colorado and other states find a way to get it done.
Cleaning Up Abandoned Hardrock Mines in the West; Prospecting for a Better Future
http://www.centerwest.org/publications/pdf/mines.pdf
Amazing video!
Bill,
Excellent points. In my opinion, the EPA has morphed since its inception, from an organization which cleaned up the environment to one which mostly lines the pockets of trial attorneys by given them convenient targets for lawsuits. I will take this further and ask who benefits from a lawsuit? Since most of these cases (if not all) are handled on a contingency fee basis, the attorneys take 30, 40, 50% or sometimes more of the verdict. The balance of the funds go to the plaintiffs to use as they see fit. Since these are typically environmental NGOs, they use the new funds to lobby the EPA and other governmental agencies to create more rules which allow the NGOs to file more lawsuits to line the pockets of more trial attorneys.
The follow up question is “How does this clean up the environment? The companies which were sued have less money with which to fix things because their insurance rates skyrocket. Furthermore the insurance for other companies policies also go up since the insurance companies rightly fear that they will have to pay out more lawsuit plaintiffs and their attorneys. This increases the costs for the companies’ products or services and we all end up paying for this mess.
Back to the follow up question: “How does this clean up the environment?”
idiots, the EPA would fry a miner who didn’t have coffer dams in place, Colorado DEQ should fine the contractor and EPA
WoW! They have all that equipment ready and do nothing…..
The river at our cabin on Lake Superior sometimes gets completely plugged by beach sand this time of year (from storms) and the water backs up for a few days into a marsh and water level gradually rises until it overflows over the sand . A trickle over the sand turns into a great torrent of water in about an hour. Then 4 to 5 days of backed up water is released in 45 minutes. It’s quite a sight. A head of one or two feet is all it takes for massive release of water in a short time. It looks exactly like the mine water release video.
Sometimes we dig a little ditch by hand to hurry-up the process. We’ve done this a couple dozen times over the years. The flow can be easily stopped at the beginning … in the first few minutes … but when the water starts flowing hard forget it the sheer momentum of the water washes away any attempt to re-plug it with shovels of sand. I think they could have plugged this right away but they were afraid a big blast of water was about to shoot out.