Drinking water is being hauled to some communities. Bottled water on the Navajo Nation is becoming scarce.
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On Wednesday, some 3 million gallons of water contaminated with zinc, iron, cooper and other heavy metals broke free of a barrier of unconsolidated debris at the abandoned Gold King Mine, dumping the water into Cement Creek.
The waste is expected to reach Lake Powell and then the Colorado River by midweek.
Officials also say that wildlife appears to be unaffected, with no mass die-offs yet noted. “That is just, to me, a disaster of a huge proportion”.
On Sunday night, EPA regional director Shaun McGrath told a town hall meeting in Colorado that the EPA would “hold ourselves to the same standards that we would anyone that would have created this situation”. The Navajo Nation feels even more slighted given its status as a federally recognized tribe and sovereign nation.
“Decades. That is totally, completely unsettling”, Mr Begaye said.
Lead poisoning can create muscle and vision problems for adults, harm development in fetuses and lead to kidney disease, developmental problems and sometimes death in children, the Environmental Protection Agency said.The EPA warned people to stay out of the river and to keep domestic animals from drinking from it. Local officials declared stretches of the river off-limits in Colorado and New Mexico.
Environment: The only thing more outrageous than the EPA’s release of three million gallons of toxic waste into Colorado’s Animas River has been its cavalier response to the disaster in the days since.
“Right now we have people preparing for a lawsuit if that is what we need to do”, she said Tuesday. Experts and federal environmental officials say they expect the river system to dilute the heavy metals before they pose a longer-term threat.
Tests show some of the metals have settled to the bottom and would dissolve only if conditions became acidic, which Cohen said isn’t likely.
According to Ron Cohen, a civil and environmental engineer with the Colorado School of Mines, the best course of action would be to leave those contaminants where they settle.
Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper spent Tuesday visiting a contaminated stretch of river.
Begaye explained that the Navajo are well known for their organic crops and meat, but now with the river contamination, farmers and ranchers are scared they can’t guarantee their consumers that their produce and products are going to be 100 percent organic. The Navajo farming authority has shut down irrigation for the rest of the season because of its concerns over contamination.
Governor Hickenlooper and local officials said they are cautiously optimistic the damage can be contained.
“We hope to work with our sister states to ensure our citizens are protected and whatever remediation is necessary occurs as quickly as possible”, Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said in a statement.
He said the peak cadmium levels were roughly 10 times higher than what would be regarded as safe for humans, while arsenic – especially toxic to people – spiked at 1,000 parts per billion, he said.
In previous press briefings, EPA officials have confirmed that toxic sediment drops out of the plume as it moves, but have declined to speculate on what kind or level of pollution will remain.
Yellow sludge still poured Wednesday from its source at the mine in the Rocky Mountains, where a cleanup crew hastily built a series of four sedimentation ponds by moving small mounds of earth covered in plastic.
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The Gold King Mine has been out of use since 1923, and is one of thousands of abandoned mine sites across the country.
