The San Juan then takes the pollution westward through Navajo country, before entering the east branch of Lake Powell, the massive storage reservoir on the Colorado River just upstream from the Grand Canyon.
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Its principal legacy, the New York Times wrote this week, “is a battered landscape of abandoned mines and poisoned streams”.
What many headlines failed to mention is that the Gold King mine is not unique.
Scientists said numerous pollutants will settle to the bottom, where they pose little immediate risk.
“They are not going to get away with this”, Begaye said.
That’s what the EPA was working to address last week, trying to clean up the mess the mining industry left behind long before the agency was created in 1970. People broke their backs to glean their wealth out of the ground in the form of gold, silver or other metals.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency is visiting Farmington, New Mexico, to see how officials are dealing with the fallout from the Colorado mine waste spill that traveled downstream. Mining companies put up some reclamation money through a byzantine jumble of state and federal rules. It had closed on August. 6, a day after federal and contract workers accidentally unleashed the plume of mustard-yellow muck from the idled Gold King Mine.
Unfortunately, reckless mining companies have been doing just that for more than a century. Three other abandoned mines nearby were combining to leak more than 32,000 gallons of wastewater per hour into the river. “That water that is still coming out these mines is loaded with dissolved metals”. Over time, groundwater seeped into the mine, chemically and physically wearing at the underground rock and releasing heavy metals like lead, cadmium, chromium, and arsenic.
Although EPA says water quality returned to pre-spill levels once the plume passed through the area, testing and cleanup of riverbed contamination and related impacts are yet to come. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy has taken full responsibility and promised that the agency will pay for any damage.
Irrigation ditches that draw from the river were being flushed, and farmers were advised to continue to refrain from using that water for crops and livestock.
Absent technological breakthroughs, the EPA expects to be treating water at abandoned mines for generations.
It would be shortsighted if the accidental release of toxic mine waste in Colorado goes no further than another round of bashing the Environmental Protection Agency. The dissolved iron in the water quickly turned the river a frightening orange color. In the 1990s, that effort cost $1 million a year.
As evidence of this conspiracy, proponents point to a Letter to the Editor published shortly before the spill in a regional Colorado newspaper written by a retired geologist which seems to predict that the EPA is up to something nefarious.
While active mines are regulated under existing law, inactive mines like Gold King are not, and viable parties are rarely available to conduct cleanup or provide the necessary resources.
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Why do we have to deal with such rampant pollution? Attorneys general for at least 15 states say they plan to sue over the new carbon restrictions, and such coal-mining backers as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., are urging states to simply ignore new carbon rules from Washington. “It’s time to stop dinking around with the problem and get on with it”.
