From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):
Todd Hennis, owner of the Gold King Mine, was vacationing at a remote lake in upstate New York when a friend sent him images of the Environmental Protection Agency-contracted crew’s triggered blowout on his property, effectively turning the Animas River into an orange spectacle. He was speechless and horrified, but not surprised…
Hennis, for his part, has long maintained increased flows from the Gold King Mine are a result of groundwater seeping from the vast, adjacent Sunnyside Mine network after it was plugged, first in 1996.
“I went up to the Sunnyside offices that were in Gladstone at that point and said, ‘I’d like to talk about the discharge,’” he said. “They denied everything, and have been denying it ever since.”[…]
He acquired his first mine in a back-taxes sale in 1995 – the Mogul, which he estimates still holds 5 million tons of ore. In 2005, he picked up Gold King Mine and a few other scatterings of claims throughout the district. And just this past September, he closed on a sale of the old Howardsville Mill site.
When all was said and done, Hennis had an appealing mining package for anyone interested in the still-mineral-rich Silverton caldera. He has never mined the property, and said he never had that intention.
Historically “dry” mines – both the Mogul and Gold King – began discharging shortly after the state and Sunnyside agreed to bulkhead the American Tunnel in the late 1990s. And in 2014, the EPA decided pollution had gotten so bad, the agency began its own remediation project in the district.
“(The EPA) decided it was too big a job for that year, so they piled many, many tons of earth and rock on the portal to, quote, prevent a blowout during the winter,” he said. “In doing so, they created the blowout conditions this year.”
In the aftermath of the Aug. 5 blowout, Hennis said he gave the EPA the keys to his land for an immediate cleanup response. But since, he claims the federal agency has enforced a complete takeover of his property.
