From The Farmington Daily Times (Magdalena Wegrzyn , Leigh Black Irvin , Joshua Kellogg and Noel Lyn Smith):

Federal lawmakers, tribal leaders and state and local officials presented a rare unified front today as they vehemently denounced the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s announcement that it will not pay more than $1.2 billion in claims filed against it in response to the Gold King Mine spill.

The EPA said the Federal Tort Claims Act prevents the agency from paying claims that result from “discretionary” government actions. Congress passed the law to allow government agencies — and in this case, contractors working on their behalf — to act “without the fear of paying damages in the event something went wrong while taking the action,” according to a press release from the EPA.

Three federal lawmakers representing New Mexico denounced the news in a joint statement, calling the agency’s reasoning a “shameful legal interpretation of liability.” Meanwhile, Navajo Nation officials questioned who would take responsibility for reimbursing tribal members hurt by the spill, which on Aug. 5, 2015, released more than three million gallons of toxic wastewater into a tributary that feeds the Animas River, which flows into the San Juan River, ultimately emptying into Lake Powell.

The EPA said the work contractors conducted at the mine near Silverton, Colo., is considered a “discretionary function” under the law.

Sens. Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich, New Mexico Democrats, and Rep. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., issued a statement saying they would continue pushing for legislation to hold the EPA accountable. They also said it would be up to the courts to determine whether the EPA’s defense is legitimate.

Heinrich said in a phone interview that he intends to introduce legislation to ensure the EPA pays claims that have already been filed, as well as future claims.

“I’m going to speak to all of the senators from Colorado and Arizona, and we’re going to introduce legislation to do this right,” he said.

An EPA agency official said paying the claims would discourage cleanup efforts — such as the one being conducted at the Gold King Mine when it was breached — in the future…

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said the tribe will continue pursuing its lawsuit against the EPA and several other entities. He said the tribe plans to work with president-elect Donald J. Trump’s administration to address claims tied to the spill.

“It doesn’t stop here,” Begaye said shortly after attending an inauguration ceremony in Shiprock for recently elected Northern Agency chapter officials. “This is one step, and we will continue taking the next step and if we have to, we’ll take it all the way to the Supreme Court.”

[…]

An EPA official said 73 claims related to the mine spill were filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act. Four were from governmental agencies and the rest were from individuals and companies…

Joe Ben Jr. served as the Shiprock Chapter’s farm board member when the spill occurred. Ben, a farmer himself, said he did not file a claim but knows several other farmers who submitted claims for lost crops and revenue…

… collecting compensation doesn’t weigh heavily on [Earl] Yazzie. Instead, the farmer said he’s more concerned about whether to plant crops this spring and if he’ll irrigate with water from the San Juan River…

Included in the $1.2 billion is about $154 million in tort claims that are part of a lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico, according to the EPA official. She said the EPA’s defense will be used in court to deny payment of those claims…

The EPA official acknowledged the announcement was slow in coming, adding “we spent a lot of time trying to see if there was any other way to address this because this is obviously an answer that leaves a lot of people unhappy who have been hurt.”

From the Associated Press (Dan Elliott):

The EPA said the claims could be refiled in federal court, or Congress could authorize payments.

But attorneys for the EPA and the Justice Department concluded the EPA is barred from paying the claims because of sovereign immunity, which prohibits most lawsuits against the government.

“The agency worked hard to find a way in which it could pay individuals for damages due to the incident, but unfortunately, our hands are tied,” EPA spokeswoman Nancy Grantham said.

The EPA said it has spent more than $31.3 million on the spill, including remediation work, water testing and payments to state, local and tribal agencies.

Here’s the release from the Environmental Protection Agency (Christie St. Clair):

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) posted the final fate and transport report for the Gold King Mine (GKM) release. The report focuses on understanding pre-existing river conditions, the movement of metals related to the GKM release through the river system, and the effects of the GKM release on water quality. The research supports EPA’s earlier statements that water quality in the affected river system returned to the levels that existed prior to the GKM release and contamination of metals from the release have moved through the river system to Lake Powell.

“This report is a comprehensive analysis of the effects on water quality from the Gold King Mine release,” said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, EPA’s Science Advisor and Deputy Assistant Administrator of EPA’s Office of Research and Development. “While data indicate that water quality has returned to pre-event conditions, EPA is committed to continue our work with States and Tribes in the river system affected by the Gold King Mine release to ensure the protection of public health and the environment.”

The area affected by the Gold King Mine release consists of complex river systems influenced by decades of historic acid mine drainage. The report shows the total amount of metals, dominated by iron and aluminum, entering the Animas River following the release — which lasted about nine hours on August 5, 2015 –was comparable to four to seven days of ongoing GKM acid mine drainage or the average amount of metals carried by the river in one to two days of high spring runoff. However, the concentrations of some metals in the GKM plume were higher than historical mine drainage. As the yellow plume of metal-laden water traveled downstream after the release, the metal concentrations within the plume decreased as they were diluted by river water and as some of the metals settled to the river bed.

There were no reported fish kills in the affected rivers, and post-release surveys by multiple organizations have found that other aquatic life does not appear to have suffered harmful short-term effects from the GKM plume. The concentrations of metals in well-water samples collected after the plume passed did not exceed federal drinking water standards. No public water system using Lake Powell as a source of drinking water has reported an exceedance of metals standards since the release.

Some metals from the GKM release contributed to exceedances of state and tribal water quality criteria at various times for nine months after the release in some locations. Metals from the GKM release may have contributed to some water quality criteria exceedances during the spring 2016 snow melt. Other exceedances may reflect longstanding contributions of metals from historic mining activities in the region and natural levels of metals in soils and rocks in the area. EPA will continue to work with states and tribes to interpret and respond to these findings.

Results from this analysis will inform future federal, state and tribal decisions on water and sediment monitoring. EPA will continue to work with states and tribes to ensure the protection of public health and the environment in the river system affected by the Gold King Mine release.
Read the final report, “Analysis of the Transport and Fate of Metals Released From the Gold King Mine in the Animas and San Juan Rivers”: https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_file_download.cfm?p_download_id=530074

Read the report’s executive summary: https://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_file_download.cfm?p_download_id=530075

More information on the Fate and Transport analysis: https://www.epa.gov/goldkingmine/fate-transport-analysis

More information on the 2015 Gold King Mine incident: https://www.epa.gov/goldkingmine

From The Durango Herald (Luke Perkins):

The 2015 Gold King Mine spill deposited nearly 540 tons of metals over a 9-hour period into Cement Creek, which feeds into the Animas River, the Environmental Protection Agency said Friday in it final report on the scope and ongoing effects of the spill.

The EPA estimated that roughly one percent of the metals, mostly iron and aluminum, contained in the spill came from the mine, with the rest coming from the waste piles on the hillside below the mine adit and the stream bed of Cement Creek.

The study states “the volume of the GKM release was equivalent to four to seven days of ongoing GKM acid mine drainage,” or “one to two days of high spring runoff.”

But, as indicated in previous tests, the river returned to pre-spill levels.

There have been no reported fish kills or significant impacts on other aquatic life, but the EPA will continue to monitor the waterways impacted by the spill, the agency said Friday in a release.

The study also looked at water quality in the Animas to see if it had returned to pre-event conditions and if the impacts of the spill itself had long-term detrimental ramifications on the river given the history of mining in the region…

“The research supports EPA’s earlier statements that water quality in the affected river system returned to the levels that existed prior to the GKM release and contamination of metals from the release have moved through the river system to Lake Powell,” the release said.

Following Aug. 5, 2015 spill, the concentration of contaminants exceeded water quality standards in multiple locations impacted.

This necessitated the building of an interim water treatment plant at Gladstone that was mandated to operate through November 2016, said Cynthia Peterson, community involvement coordinator for the Bonita Peak Mining District. The EPA concluded a public comment session on Dec. 14 regarding the future of the treatment plant, and will release a final decision by the end of January, Peterson said. But the EPA has a preferred course of action.

“EPA’s preferred plan for the water treatment plant is for its continued operations and to look at additional options in the future as we understand more about the nature and spread of the contamination,” she said.

The agency also is conducting remedial investigation to understand the impact of the 48 sites in the mining district, which was named a Superfund site in September, on river contamination, Peterson said. This represents the first step before clean-up operations can begin.

From the Associated Press (Matthew Daly) via The Farmington Daily Times:

Agency says only 1 percent of the metals came from inside the mine and the rest were “scoured” from waste piles on nearby hills and stream beds

Nearly 540 tons of metals — mostly iron and aluminum — contaminated the Animas River over nine hours during a massive wastewater spill from an abandoned Colorado gold mine, the Environmental Protection Agency said today in a new report on the 2015 blowout that turned rivers in three states a sickly yellow.

The total amount of metals entering the river system was comparable to levels during one or two days of high spring runoff, although the concentration of metals was significantly higher at the spill’s peak, the report said.

In February, the EPA estimated the amount of metals in the release at 440 tons. The agency said additional data and improved analysis resulted in the higher final estimate.

The EPA said its research supports earlier statements that water quality in the affected river system has returned to pre-spill levels…

The EPA said in its report that only 1 percent of the metals came from inside the mine, while 99 percent were “scoured” from waste piles on nearby hills and stream beds. The iron and aluminum reacted with the river water to cause the eye-catching mustard color that was visible for days as the plume traveled down the river system into Lake Powell, the EPA said.

Besides iron and aluminum, the spill released manganese, lead, copper, arsenic, zinc, cadmium and a small amount of mercury into the river, the EPA said…

New Mexico Environment Secretary Butch Tongate accused the EPA of using the taxpayer-funded report to try to defend its actions. The state has sued the agency over the spill.

Colorado officials said they had no comment on the report. Utah officials didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

From The Denver Post (Jesse Paul):

“While data indicate that water quality has returned to pre-event conditions, EPA is committed to continue our work with States and Tribes in the river system affected by the Gold King Mine release to ensure the protection of public health and the environment,” Dr. Thomas A. Burke, EPA’s science adviser and deputy assistant administrator in its office of research and development, said in a statement…

The disaster, which turned the Animas River a toxic-looking yellow-orange, prompted concern and anger downstream, particularly in the Navajo Nation and New Mexico, where officials have been continually complaining about the spill’s water-quality impacts and have filed lawsuits against the EPA. The concentrations of some metals in the Gold King mine plume were higher than historical mine drainage, the EPA said in a news release announcing the report’s findings, but the impacts on water quality were not long lasting as some had worried…

There were no reported fish kills in the Animas or San Juan rivers, and the EPA says surveys have round that other aquatic life does not appear to have suffered any short-term impacts…

Also, the agency says the concentrations of metals in well-water samples collected after the 3 million-gallon spill’s plume passed through areas did not exceed federal drinking water standards. No public water system using Lake Powell as a source of drinking water has reported an exceedance of metals standards since the release, according to the EPA.

“Some metals from the GKM release contributed to exceedances of state and tribal water quality criteria at various times for nine months after the release in some locations,” the release said. “Metals from the GKM release may have contributed to some water quality criteria exceedances during the spring 2016 snow melt.”

However the EPA says other metal-level exceedances may reflect the longstanding mine drainage from the region’s historic sites as well as natural levels of metals in southwest Colorado’s soils and rocks. Silverton and its surroundings are now slated to get a federal cleanup of their leaching, historic mines under the EPA’s Superfund program.

The mines and mining sites in Silverton’s surroundings — including the Gold King — pour an estimated 5.4 million gallons of metal-laden waste into the Animas’ headwaters each day.

“Results from this analysis will inform future federal, state and tribal decisions on water and sediment monitoring,” the EPA release said, though it did not immediately elaborate.

From The Albuquerque Journal (Ollie Reed Jr.):

“Too many local families are losing money because they lost their crops,” San Juan County Commissioner Margaret McDaniel said. “They are afraid to water their crops. There are some wells along here people are afraid to drink from.”

Kirtland Mayor Mark Duncan said some farmers could not sell hay they had raised because potential buyers feared it might have been poisoned by mine-spill contaminated water used to irrigate the crop.

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas presided over the news conference, which also included other state officials and elected municipal and county officials in northwest New Mexico. The Journal took part via conference phone call.

Balderas said the state is committed to a long-standing litigation strategy ensuring that the people of New Mexico are fully compensated for the mine spill that dumped 3 million gallons of water laced with heavy metals, including lead and arsenic, into a Colorado creek on Aug. 5, 2015. That creek flowed into the Animas River, which took the tainted water into New Mexico and into the San Juan River near Farmington and through the Navajo Nation.

From the Associated Press via The Indian Express:

US prosecutors have declined to pursue criminal charges against an employee of the Environmental Protection Agency over a massive mine wastewater spill that fouled rivers in three states, a federal watchdog agency said. The EPA’s Office of Inspector General disclosed Wednesday that it recently presented evidence to prosecutors that the unnamed employee may have violated the Clean Water Act and given false statements. However, office spokesman Jeffrey Lagda said the US Attorney’s Office in Colorado declined to pursue a case against the employee. In lieu of prosecution, an investigative report will be sent to senior EPA management for review, Lagda said.

EPA spokeswoman Nancy Grantham said agency personnel would review the investigative report, but she offered no further comment. Members of Congress had pressed for a criminal investigation into the EPA’s role in the disaster. A review of the accident completed last year by the US Interior Department determined the cleanup crew could have avoided the spill but rushed the work. Several Republican lawmakers on Wednesday said the lack of a prosecution gives the “appearance of hypocrisy” in light of the Justice Department’s record of pursuit of criminal charges in other cases referred by the EPA.

US Attorney spokesman Jeff Dorschner declined to comment, citing the office’s longstanding practice of not discussing cases where prosecution is declined. The apparent end of the government’s criminal probe comes after the Inspector General’s Office in July said it had suspended a separate examination of the EPA cleanup program pending the outcome of the investigation. That separate examination will now resume, the office said. No timeline for completion was provided.

From the Associated Press (Matthew Brown and Sadie Gurman) via The Colorado Springs Gazette:

The apparent end of the government’s criminal probe comes after the Inspector General’s Office in July said it had suspended a separate examination of the EPA cleanup program pending the outcome of the investigation.

That separate examination will now resume, the office said. No timeline for completion was provided.

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

After a yearlong investigation, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, having been presented the facts of the incident by the Office of Inspector General, decided on Oct. 6 to not prosecute “the EPA employee.”

The release did not name the employee.

The EPA’s temporary on-scene coordinator, Hays Griswold, was in charge Aug. 5, 2015, when a contract crew released an estimated 3 million gallons of mine waste tainted with heavy metals into the Animas and San Juan rivers.

Immediately after the announcement was sent, the Office of Inspector General’s spokesman Jeffrey Lagda posted that the would be out of the office until 2:30 p.m. Thursday. He later said in an email that he “cannot comment on the investigation at this stage.”

The announcement said in lieu of criminal prosecution, “the OIG will prepare a Report of Investigation (ROI) for submission to EPA’s senior management for review. The EPA is required to report to the OIG any administrative action taken as a result of the ROI.”

After the announcement, U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and House Oversight and Government Reform Interior Subcommittee Chairwoman Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyoming, demanded the Department of Justice explain its decision to not pursue criminal charges.

In a Wednesday statement, several congressional members said the Office of Inspector General had found evidence of criminal wrongdoing, including providing false statements and violating the Clean Water Act.

“By not taking up the case, the Department of Justice looks like it is going easy on its colleagues in EPA,” the statement said. “Its lack of action on these charges gives the appearance of hypocrisy, and seems to indicate that there is one set of rules for private citizens and another for the federal government. The EPA disaster deserves the same level of accountability to which private citizens are held.”

The committees asked for a briefing on the decision no later than Oct. 26.

Multiple local representatives did not respond to requests for comment late Wednesday.

Republican Congressman Scott Tipton wrote in an emailed response, “This disaster and the EPA’s response or lack of response is bigger than any one employee and was the result of numerous failures at multiple levels at the EPA.

“I will continue to work to make sure responsible parties are held accountable and affected communities are compensated and made whole,” he wrote.

From The Denver Post (Bruce Finley):

Instead of a criminal prosecution, the EPA’s internal investigators “will submit a report of an investigation to the agency that details the findings of our investigation,” OIG spokesman Jeff Lagda said in response to queries.

“The agency, not the OIG, will then determine what administrative action they may take against the employee based on that report,” Lagda said. “The EPA will have to report to the OIG what administrative action the EPA will undertake.”

The EPA’s quasi-independent OIG launched an investigation into the Gold King disaster more than a year ago. Federal officials later, driven by members of Congress, began a criminal probe.

The OIG is part of the EPA and investigates agency activities.

The OIG investigators “presented facts to the U.S. Attorney’s Office” in Denver “about whether an EPA employee may have violated” the Clean Water Act and the statute prohibiting false statements, according to a statement Lagda issued Wednesday afternoon…

EPA investigators now will return to completing work requested by Congress related to the Gold King Mine spill, Lagda said.

Sens. John McCain of Arizona and John Barrasso of Wyoming, members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in May sent a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging a criminal probe.

Other federal agencies also have reviewed EPA conduct linked to the Gold King Mine. An Interior Department report issued last fall deemed the Gold King disaster preventable, the result of errors over many years in handling toxic discharges from inactive mines.

Click here to take a stroll back in time through the Coyote Gulch Animas River category.

From The Farmington Daily Times (Noel Lyn Smith):

A half dozen U.S. senators are backing an amendment to expedite federal reimbursements to states, tribes, local governments and individuals for expenses incurred during the Gold King Mine spill.

Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., led the effort on Monday with senators Tom Udall, D-N.M., Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Michael Bennet, D-Colo., Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and John McCain, R-Ariz., in introducing an amendment to a Senate bill for the Water Resources Development Act.

In addition, the amendment calls on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to work with states, tribes and local governments to develop and implement a water quality program to monitor the rivers contaminated by the Aug. 5, 2015 spill…

The water quality program would be responsible for collecting water samples and sediment data, and releasing that information online for the public’s review, according to the amendment.

In a joint press release on Monday, the senators said they support holding the EPA accountable for the spill, and they emphasized that reimbursements to government entities and individuals are needed.

Udall said reimbursements to state and tribal governments “have taken far too long,” and the amendment will start the reimbursement process.

“It also takes important steps to help rebuild confidence in the quality of the water in the San Juan and Animas rivers through long-term monitoring,” Udall said.

Heinrich called the rate to repay individuals “unacceptable.” He also called for action to reform “outdated policies” to clean up contaminated mines in the West and on tribal lands.

“Western communities deserve full and complete protection of their water, land and livelihoods,” Heinrich said.

The bipartisan effort received support on Wednesday from Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, who continued his calls for reimbursing Navajo farmers.

Begaye said in a press release that funds received as a result of the amendment would be used to build a laboratory in Shiprock that would be used to study the water quality of the San Juan River.

“This amendment sets forth funds to be provided for monitoring of the San Juan River and irrigation canals. We need for our farmers to be confident that the water quality is irrigable,” the tribal president said.

Here’s the release from the Environmental Protection Agency (Laura Jenkins):

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will add the Bonita Peak Mining District (BPMD) site in San Juan County, Colo., to the National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites on September 9, 2016. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites to protect public health and the environment.

“Listing the Bonita Peak Mining District on the National Priorities List is an important step that enables EPA to secure the necessary resources to investigate and address contamination concerns of San Juan and La Plata Counties, as well as other downstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation,” said Shaun McGrath, EPA’s Regional Administrator. “We look forward to continuing our efforts with the State of Colorado, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S Forest Service, Tribal governments, and our community partners to address the impacts of acid mine drainage on the Animas River.”

EPA proposed the BPMD site for addition to the NPL on April 7, 2016, and conducted a 68-day public comment period on the proposal. After reviewing and responding to all comments in a responsiveness summary, EPA has added the site to the NPL. To view the responsiveness summary (Support Document) and other documents related to the addition of the Bonita Peak Mining District to the National Priorities List, please visit: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/current-npl-updates-new-proposed-npl-sites-and-new-npl-sites.

The Bonita Peak Mining District site consists of historic and ongoing releases from mining operations in three drainages: Mineral Creek, Cement Creek and Upper Animas; which converge into the Animas River near Silverton, Colorado. Mining began in the area in the 1860s and both large- and small-scale mining operations continued into the 1990s, with the last mine ceasing production in 1991. The site includes 35 mines, seven tunnels, four tailings impoundments, and two study areas where additional information is needed to evaluate environmental concerns.
Water quality in the BPMD has been impaired by acid mine drainage for decades. Since 1998, Colorado has designated portions of the Animas River downstream from Cement Creek as impaired for heavy metals, including lead, iron and aluminum. EPA has waste quantity data on 32 of Bonita Peak’s 48 sources. These 32 sources have waste rock and water discharging out of mining adits at a combined rate of 5.4 million gallons per day. Cadmium, copper, manganese and zinc are the known contaminants associated with these discharges.

“Listing the Bonita Peak Mining District is critical to addressing historic mining impacts in San Juan County and our downstream communities,” said Martha Rudolph, director of environmental programs for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “We are committed to working closely with our Federal and state partners to achieve an effective cleanup, while ensuring that all our affected communities have a voice in the process as this moves forward.”

The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), the law establishing the Superfund program, requires EPA to update the NPL at least annually and clean up hazardous waste sites to protect human health with the goal of returning them to productive use. A site’s listing neither imposes a financial obligation on EPA nor assigns liability to any party. Updates to the NPL do, however, provide policymakers with a list of high-priority sites, serving to identify the size and nature of the nation’s cleanup challenges.

The Superfund program has provided important benefits for people and the environment since Congress established the program in 1980. Those benefits are both direct and indirect, and include reduction of threats to human health and ecological systems in the vicinity of Superfund sites, improvement of the economic conditions and quality of life in communities affected by hazardous waste sites, prevention of future releases of hazardous substances, and advances in science and technology.

For more information on the Bonita Peak Mining District site please visit: http://www.epa.gov/superfund/bonita-peak

From the Associated Press (Dan Elliott) via The Farmington Daily Times:

A Colorado mine that spewed 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater into rivers in three Western states was designated a Superfund site Wednesday, clearing the way for a multimillion-dollar federal cleanup.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added the inactive Gold King Mine and 47 other nearby sites to the Superfund list…

The Colorado Superfund designation is the beginning of a years-long effort to clean up the wreckage of a once-booming mining industry in the San Juan Mountains in the southwestern corner of the state. Abandoned mining sites send millions of gallons of acidic wastewater to creeks and rivers every year…

The spill triggered a storm of criticism of the EPA and at least three lawsuits.

New Mexico has sued both the EPA and Colorado over the spill, while the Navajo Nation sued the federal government. Utah officials say they also plan to sue…

An investigation last year by the Interior Department, which is independent of the EPA, said the cleanup crew could have avoided the spill but rushed its work.

Interior officials said they found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. A separate criminal investigation is still underway, along with an internal EPA inquiry.

Congress has conducted multiple hearings on the spill and is considering several bills to address hundreds of old, leaking mines nationwide.

The EPA said Wednesday it’s too early to say how long the cleanup will take and what it will cost.

Authorities will first gather data including water and sediment samples and assessments of fish and wildlife habitat and other information. That process will probably end next year, said Rebecca Thomas, EPA’s manager for the project, known as the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund Site.

The EPA will then study different cleanup methods, choose a preferred option and ask for public comment. Work would then start on designing and implementing the cleanup.

Fixes could include water treatment plants for acidic waste draining from the site, plugging abandoned mines that are leaking and moving mine waste piles away from streams, Thomas said.

The Superfund listing marks a dramatic shift in public sentiment in Silverton and surrounding San Juan County, where many residents first feared the designation would stamp the area with a stigma and hurt its vital tourism industry. The EPA does not designate Superfund sites without local support…

Esper said Silverton could become a research center for cleaning up leaking mines across the nation. The Government Accountability Office estimates that at least 33,000 abandoned mines across the West and in Alaska are contaminating water or causing other environmental problems.

The cleanup might also improve the town’s finances, which have been in decline since a mine and mill closed in 1991, Esper said.

From The Silverton Standard (Mark Esper):

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will add the Bonita Peak Mining District (BPMD) site in San Juan County, Colo., to the National Priorities List (NPL) of Superfund sites on September 9, 2016. Superfund is the federal program that investigates and cleans up the most complex, uncontrolled or abandoned hazardous waste sites to protect public health and the environment.

“Listing the Bonita Peak Mining District on the National Priorities List is an important step that enables EPA to secure the necessary resources to investigate and address contamination concerns of San Juan and La Plata Counties, as well as other downstream communities in New Mexico, Utah, and the Navajo Nation,” said Shaun McGrath, EPA’s Regional Administrator. “We look forward to continuing our efforts with the State of Colorado, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S Forest Service, Tribal governments, and our community partners to address the impacts of acid mine drainage on the Animas River.”

EPA proposed the BPMD site for addition to the NPL on April 7, 2016, and conducted a 68-day public comment period on the proposal. After reviewing and responding to all comments in a responsiveness summary, EPA has added the site to the NPL. The responsiveness summary can be found here: https://www.regulations.gov/docket?D=EPA-HQ-OLEM-2016-01522

Location map for abandoned mine near Silverton. The Silver Wing is in the upper right corner of the aerial.

Click here to read the first Coyote Gulch post about the spill.

Click here to view a video retrospective from the The Durango Herald.

Here’s a photo gallery from The Denver Post.

Ann Butler’s article in The Durango Herald explains that the, “Gold King Mine spill recovery better in some areas than others.” Here’s an excerpt:

The full impact of the Gold King Mine spill on Aug. 5, 2015, may not be known for years on any front, and recovery is far from over. And some of that isn’t environmental, governmental or economic – it’s healing invisible trauma in the people and communities affected…

“If there’s good news to a bad news story, awareness of the river, the river basins and how it all works is through the roof,” said Bob Kunkel, executive director of the Durango Area Tourism Office. “Not only from a local level or a Colorado level, but the whole western U.S. level. That is really going to pay some dividends because none of us understood the spillage was ongoing.”

[…]

Real-life lessons
If there was another silver lining to the spill, it was the material it provided for teachers and professors. Several Durango School District 9-R schools, including Durango and Big Picture high schools and Escalante Middle School, Animas High and Mountain Middle charter schools and Fort Lewis College incorporated the spill in science, math and humanities courses.

“As an educator, the event of it inspired me to localize my curriculum, and it was more meaningful to them,” said Jessica McCallum, junior humanities teacher at Animas High. “The students, on reflection, said, ‘Wow, this is really complex.’ Some students are very deeply affected still.”

McCallum’s students interviewed more than 70 people, including second-graders, decision makers and tourism employees, about the spill for Story Corps and met with high school students in Silverton to understand the spill from a different point of view. The interviews are available online, and they tell the story from many perspectives.

Some common themes were: Distrust of and anger at the Environmental Protection Agency, whose workers caused the spill; fear, whether it’s financial, safety or concern for other community members; and, as Kunkel put it, an awareness of the river and the watershed in a bigger picture way.

‘Technological’ disaster
Sad. Betrayed. Devastated. Scared. Grief. Blame. Anger. Hostility.

“There’s a uniqueness to what happened in Durango, but there’s also a pattern,” Fort Lewis College sociology associate professor Rebecca Clausen said. “My experience after the Exxon (Valdez) spill (in Alaska) gave me a good context for not seeing this as an isolated event.”

Social science has identified two kinds of disasters: natural – such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornados, and technological or environmental – and human-made disasters such as Chernobyl, the BP Deepwater Horizon rig oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the Gold King Mine spill, Clausen said. Communities tend to pull together and heal more quickly from the “acts of God,” she said, but technological disasters can rip them apart and have impacts that last generations…

A group of volunteers, including Clausen and hydrologist Jack Turner, without funding from any governmental agency or nonprofit, took on the task of addressing the mental health stresses on the communities impacted by the spill. Calling themselves the Animas Community Listening and Empowerment Project, they held listening sessions in Durango and Farmington.

“People tend not to go seek out a counselor for this kind of grief or anxiety,” Clausen said. “They’re hesitant to talk about it at the supermarket. We gave them an opportunity and permission to talk.”

[…]

River businesses
“From a tourism standpoint, it’s over,” Kunkel said. “For tourists, it ended like somebody pulled the shade down as soon as the river reopened. They essentially said, ‘All I want to do is get my family on the river, I don’t care about your local hooha.’”

The most affected, Kunkel said, were the river rafting companies.

“We’ll have a better answer in a year or so about how much it impacted us,” said Alex Mickel, owner of Mild to Wild Rafting and Jeep. “I expect it to have an impact for three to five years before it’s totally gone from people’s consciousness, but not catastrophic, not enough to put us out of business, and probably quite small in the third year.”

Two factors helped his rafting business get through, Mickel said, adding that his business is up slightly in June and up in July this year over 2015.

“We were having a really good season before the spill,” he said. “And I’m glad we have a clean and safe river to recreate in this summer, not just for the business but because our kids play in the river, and it’s just part of our lives.”

The big question is what would this summer’s business have been without the spill?

“We’ve had people call and not go because of it or cancel because of it,” Mickel said about this year’s bookings, with tourists concerned about the safety of the river. “But the hardest number to pin down is the people who are not calling. Our business really ties into how the state’s tourism goes, and Colorado is having a banner year. How much of that growth have we missed because of this?”

One indicator is how many people stayed in Durango’s hotels and motels during August 2015. Lodgers tax declined by about 5 percent, but the drop may not be attributable to the spill, Tim Walsworth of the Durango Business Improvement District said when the numbers came out in October 2015. Some of that was because the Labor Day weekend, one of the biggest of the year for visitors, fell totally in September.

Lodgers tax numbers for this summer will not be available until fall, but it has been a good season, Kunkel said…

Ongoing monitoring
Many organizations continue to monitor the river for water quality and health of fish and insects that call it home.

Nonprofit Mountain Studies Institute is collaborating with the city of Durango on Animas River monitoring. One big concern was whether spring runoff would re-suspend the sediment lining the riverbed.

“Our monitoring program aims to understand whether water quality this spring is any different than previous years,” said Marcie Bidwell, institute director, “and if metal concentrations in the river pose any threat to human health, agriculture or aquatic life. Results from the spring samples are encouraging.”

At least twice during the spring runoff, concentrations of manganese and lead, some of the metals contained in the spill sediment still lining the riverbed, surpassed the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment water-quality standards of the Animas River as a source for domestic drinking water. All other results for all other purposes fell below screening levels.

The science is one part of the puzzle, Turner said. Another, individual use of the river, is something unmeasureable, but he believes it is down significantly.

“To see the river like that was piercing, and it made me feel insignificant, really small and helpless, in shock,” he said. “I’m waiting to see the river go down to see if the yellow ‘bathtub’ stain is still there. I don’t know if I’ve put my feet in the river yet, and I keep asking what’s happening to this community if we’re not going to the river?”

The EPA has proposed the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site in the aftermath of the spill and superfund status is warranted according the EPA project manager. From The Durango Herald:

Rebecca Thomas told more than 100 participants at the 2016 San Juan Mining Conference that she expects the Superfund designation to be finalized by this fall.

The sixth annual mining conference, which brings together people involved in mining in the Animas, Rio Grande, San Miguel and Uncompahgre watersheds, was held at the DoubleTree Hotel in Durango

The events of the Aug. 5, 2015, Gold King spill, in which an Environmental Protection Agency-contracted crew caused a release of 3 million gallons of mine wastewater into the Animas River, dominated the discussions.

“Just 363 days ago we were bracing ourselves for a river disaster with a lot of concern,” said La Plata County Commissioner Gwen Lachelt in her opening statements. “The color orange now has a whole new meaning for me. Yes, it was a lesson about our mining legacy, but it was also a lesson about our river’s health.”

Durango Mayor Christina Rinderle, too, acknowledged that the anniversary of the spill was a fitting backdrop to the conference, and a chance to provide insight on how communities affected by the event responded…

Speaking around noon, the EPA’s Thomas made the case for Superfund.

Thomas, based in Denver, said she worked in the highly-mineralized mountains around San Juan County about a week each month this summer, with crews sampling on a regular basis.

“Even though the (Superfund) site is just proposed, that hasn’t stopped us from beginning our work,” she said.

Thomas said that although there was resistance to federal intervention for years, she believes the only viable step toward improved water quality in the Animas River is through a Superfund designation.

She argued the federal listing would allow potentially responsible parties, such as mining companies, to be held financially liable for cleanup, and given the scope of the project, only the EPA could provide the funds necessary.

Thomas tried to quell frustrations that it can take more than 20 years for a Superfund to finish.

“This process … is one of the main criticisms of Superfund,” she said. “But we don’t want to wait 20 years to see improved water quality in the Animas, and we’ll take every opportunity we can to fast-track some of this stuff.”

The conference also showed how the spill affected communities around the region, all with a legacy of mining.

Randy Barnes with the San Miguel Watershed Coalition said the EPA recently steered away from remediating a draining mine near Ophir.

“They are not super enthusiastic about going and poking fingers into mines right now,” he said.

Barnes added that the project led by Griswold, which would clean up a mill tailings pile beneath the mine entrance, was canceled for undisclosed reasons.

From the Associated Press (Dan Elliott):

Silverton is staging “Super FunDays” this weekend, a play on the Superfund cleanup expected to get underway in the distant future.

It includes “Environmental Pork Agency” sandwiches and a locally brewed India pale ale — or IPA — called EPA IPA.

Here’s where things stand in the aftermath of the spill:

SILVERTON’S PARTY

Bars and restaurants are serving up “EPA Fungi” ravioli, “Orange Creek-sicle” fruit smoothies and other specials for Super FunDays.

Silverton’s Golden Block Brewery brewed 10 gallons of spill-colored EPA IPA.

“It’s unclarified, so it looks kind of muddy, and we added a tiny bit of blood orange,” brewery co-owner Molly Barela said.

A fun run and community party are also planned.

Asked about the jovial tone, town spokeswoman Blair Runion said Silverton went through a long and serious debate before endorsing a Superfund cleanup.

“We need to turn it into something positive that we can embrace,” she said.

The EPA declined to comment, but it will have an information booth at the party Saturday.

Shane Benjamin (The Durango Herald) asks the question, “Who profited from the Gold King Mine Spill? Here’s an excerpt:

…the environmental mishap wasn’t all bad news for La Plata County businesses; in fact, several companies, including motels and restaurants, profited as government agencies opened their pocketbooks to help manage the disaster.

In the two months after the spill, La Plata County government spent $115,000 on goods and services related to the spill, much of which went to local businesses, according to receipts obtained through an open records request.

Several other agencies spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, including the Environmental Protection Agency, which has authorized $23.3 million in spending as of July 15, including reimbursement to local communities but not including payroll or travel expenses. The agency, which triggered the spill, was not able to provide a detailed accounting of its expenses in time for this story, but county expenses provide a snapshot of how local businesses profited during the spill.

The county has received reimbursement for some expenses and is seeking compensation for others.

The county’s first expense occurred on Aug. 6, 2015 – the same day the mustard-yellow water snaked its way through the county – to purchase a case of copy paper for $27.65 from Office Depot. The county made several return trips that month to Office Depot, purchasing $2,020 worth of supplies, including six easels, 12 easel pads, sticky notes, ink cartridges, a wall clock and much more. The county is seeking reimbursement from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The county also purchased hundreds of meals for government employees. They were fed at at least a dozen different restaurants, including Macho’s, J. Bo’s, Carvers, Doughworks, Steamworks, Raider Ridge Café, Serious Texas Bar-B-Q, Rice Monkeys and Hot Tomatoes Café, to name a few. Many of the purchases fed dozens of people, including tabs for $305 at Domino’s Pizza, $517 at Serious Texas Bar-B-Q, $325 at Raider Ridge Café, $400 at Schlotsky’s, and $1,309 for a “thank you lunch” for city of Durango and La Plata County employees catered by Zia Taqueria. The county is seeking reimbursement for the food, including the thank you lunch, from the EPA.

Dozens of snacks and meals were purchased from area grocery stores, including Albertsons, Walmart, City Market and Nature’s Oasis. Receipts suggest some less-than-healthy eating habits, including large quantities of Lays potato chips, candy, doughnuts and soda pop.

The county also picked up several hotel bills, but it appears most employees sought reimbursement from their individual agencies rather than the county, because the county paid only $4,533 to house eight people, according to the open records request. The bills range from $79 a night at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Silverton to $720 for six nights at the Super 8 in Durango.

Several other businesses profited as a result of the Gold King Mine blowout, including:

• Fast Signs, which charged about $1,125 to make vinyl signs used to close the river.
• Best Cleaning, which billed $2,522 to clean the La Plata County Fairgrounds after the EPA used it as a headquarters.
• Durango Party Rental, which charged $746 for a temporary room divider.
• Durango Joe’s, which charged $45.75 to serve 45 people coffee.
• But the company that profited the most is Wright Water Engineers, which raked in about $70,000 to provide consulting and water sampling on behalf of the county.

Overall, charges appear to be fairly well spread out between businesses, without a preference for specific vendors, restaurants or grocery stores.

Assistant County Manager Joanne Spina said that is a good thing, but it’s likely a result of luck, preference and necessity rather than policy. Most people don’t want to eat the same meal every day, she noted, so multiple restaurants were visited.

“This was an emergency situation, so I think those decisions were made in the moment by the folks who were needing to acquire whatever the goods or services were,” Spina said.

This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]

The “Bonita Peak Mining District” superfund site. Map via the Environmental Protection Agency

Cement Creek remains lined with orange sediment after the Gold King Mine spill. The Environmental Protection Agency accidentally triggered the release of orange wastewater laced with heavy metals into Cement Creek on Aug. 5. The creek flows into the Animas River at Silverton, and eventually crosses into New Mexico and Utah

Gold King mine treatment pond via Eric Vance/EPA and the Colorado Independent

The Environmental Protection Agency’s temporary water-treatment facility at Gold King Mine, October 2015, via Steve Lewis/The Durango Herald.

Gold King Mine circa 1899 via The Silverton Standard

Gold King Mine access road August 2015 via the EPA/Twitter

Silverton, Colo., lies an at elevation of 9,300 feet in San Juan County, and the Gold King Mine is more than 1,000 feet higher in the valley at the left side of the photo. Photo/Allen Best

Settling ponds used to precipitate iron oxide and other suspended materials at the Red and Bonita mine drainage near Gold King mine, shown Aug. 14, 2015. (Photo by Eric Vance/EPA)

The Animas flows orange through Durango on Aug. 7, 2015, two days after the Gold King Mine spill. (Photo by Esm Cadiente http://www.terraprojectdiaries.com)

Gold King mine entrance August 2015 via the EPA

Wastewater continued to stream out of the Gold King Mine on Tuesday [August 11, 2015] near Silverton, several days after a rush of 3 million gallons of it flooded Cement Creek and the Animas River. At the top of the photo is the mine’s opening, where an Environmental Protection Agency cleanup team was working with heavy machinery Aug. 5 and hit an earthen wall that had millions of gallons of water built up behind it

Gold King mine spill Animas River August 2015 photo — Nancy Fisher via The Colorado Independent

New settlement ponds at Gold King Mine August 2015

The confluence of Cement Creek, at right, and the Animas River, left, as seen September 2015 in Silverton, Colo. This is where the plume of contaminated water from the Gold King Mine entered the Animas River. (Jon Austria — The Daily Times)

Acid mind drainage Cement Creek watershed

Gold King Mine entrance after blowout August 2015

Emergency detention ponds Gold Hill Mine spill August 2015 via Bruce Finley

Gold King Mine via Blog.YourColoradoWater.org

“Water is life; water is sacred,” said Southern Ute Sun Dance Chief Kenny Frost, who led a ceremony to heal the Animas River on Sunday at sunrise at Santa Rita Park in Durango

A “get well soon” balloon floats in the contaminated waters of the Animas River flowing through Durango on Monday afternoon August 10, 2015 — photo The Durango Herald, Shane Benjamin

Bottom of Animas River at Durango August 8, 2015 via Twitter and The Durango Herald

Animas River through Durango August 9, 2015, after the Gold King Mine spill. Photo credit Grace Hood

Confluence of Cement Creek and the Animas River from the Coyote Gulch archives (11/21/2010)

Animas River

Tubing the Animas River via Flipkey.com

Location map for abandoned mine near Silverton. The Silver Wing is in the upper right corner of the aerial.

Bonita Mine acid mine drainage. Photo via the Animas River Stakeholders Group.

Cement Creek photo via the @USGS Twitter feed

The EPA’s wastewater treatment plant near Silverton, Colorado, on Thursday, Oct. 16, 2015 — photo via Grace Hood Colorado Public Radio

Cement Creek aerial photo — Jonathan Thompson via Twitter

Cement Creek August 8, 2015 — Bruce Finley via Twitter

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

On Friday, Sunnyside – now owned by international mining conglomerate Kinross Gold Corp. – called for New Mexico’s lawsuit over the Gold King Mine spill’s impact to the state to be dismissed.

“We see no basis for us even being named in this litigation,” Sunnyside spokesman Larry Perino wrote in an email.

In May, the state of New Mexico, seeking compensation for environmental and economic damages, filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in New Mexico, naming the Environmental Protection Agency and its contractor, as well as Sunnyside and its parent company, as responsible parties for the Aug. 5, 2015, mine blowout.

In the complaint, New Mexico state officials claim the “root cause” of the disaster dates back more than 20 years to Sunnyside’s attempt to block waste water drainage by building bulkheads in tunnels below the vast Sunnyside Mine network north of Silverton…

In its July 29 motion to dismiss, Sunnyside argued that installing the American Tunnel bulkhead was done at the direction of the state of Colorado, and that New Mexico officials “point to no facts to support that historic discharges from the Sunnyside Mine pool in Colorado, unrelated to the Gold King Mine blowout, somehow impacted New Mexico.”

The motion further alleges New Mexico has no personal jurisdiction over Sunnyside; the state of Colorado is a required party in the case and is not named (Colorado was sued by New Mexico in the U.S. Supreme Court); and New Mexico is not entitled to punitive damages.

Sunnyside has long dismissed claims that water backed up behind the American Tunnel has seeped to other mine workings, though most experts in the region suspected the opposite.

Regardless, as a result of the proposed Superfund listing, the EPA plans to enter the mine and investigate, which should provide clarity, EPA officials previously said. It is unclear if those efforts have started this summer.

And Sunnyside’s involvement does not end with the New Mexico lawsuit, as the company has emerged high atop the list of potentially responsible parties that the EPA would seek financial costs from should a Superfund be declared.

Though Sunnyside claims an agreement with the state of Colorado to install three bulkheads in the 1990s would release the company of further liability for pollution in the district, officials familiar with the Superfund process say otherwise.

“It’s a different law,” Doug Jamison, of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said in a previous interview. “(Sunnyside) was relieved of their liability from a discharge permit under the Clean Water Act. It has nothing to do with Superfund liability.”

It’s been a convoluted, and expensive, quarter century since the company last hauled gold, silver, copper and other precious metals from the highly mineralized mountains surrounding San Juan County.

After the mine shut down in 1991, a number of remedial efforts began, with Perino estimating about $15 million has been directed to cleaning up sites around the basin.

Still, ever since Sunnyside’s water treatment plant shut down in 2004 (a result of a sale to local Steve Fearn, who was evicted by current Gold King Mine owner Todd Hennis), water quality in the Animas River has degraded.

The town, too, felt the departure.

“It was a wrenching time,” Silverton native Bev Rich said.

Rich said nearly 150 workers lost high paying jobs. The only school in the small mountain hamlet of about 600 full-time residents went from 150 students to about 50, and San Juan County lost $300,000 – about one third – of its annual budget.

Meanwhile the U.S. Attorney General’s office has launched a criminal investigation into the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill. Here’s a report from Jesse Paul writing for The Denver Post. Here’s an excerpt:

Federal authorities have confirmed for the first time that a criminal investigation into the 2015 Gold King Mine spill is underway, saying their probe involves the U.S. Attorney’s Office and came at the request of members of Congress.

The announcement Monday came from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) as it released letters sent to lawmakers about the status of its work to analyze the disaster. Documents reviewed by The Denver Post on Monday indicate the probe has been in progress for nearly a year.

Jeffrey Lagda, spokesman for the inspector general’s office, said the OIG is working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the criminal investigation. It was “based on requests from several members of the House and Senate,” he added…

In a June 29 letter to Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, the inspector general’s office said a number of investigations into the spill “have been underway.”

Gardner said Monday in a statement that he appreciates the criminal review and urged the expedited release of a full report on the disaster. He added: “I look forward to a response to my questions surrounding EPA’s insufficient and untimely recovery efforts immediately following the spill.”

In recent letters to members of Congress, the OIG wrote: “There is investigative material that we cannot reveal in any report about our program evaluation until the investigation reaches a point where the U.S. Department of Justice and the EPA’s OIG’s Office of Investigations inform us that we may do so. Many of your questions to us, including those that go to the heart of what you asked us to address, directly implicate and will have to be answered in part by investigative results that are not currently releasable.”

[…]

Also Monday, the EPA released a 23-page retrospective report on the Gold King and its efforts since the incident to restore and protect impacted communities.

The agency said that as of July 15 it has dedicated $29 million in response efforts and for continued water quality monitoring. Officials say they are also evaluating more incident-related expenses and that they are working to expedite the distribution of those funds.

“We have been responsive in terms of doing the cleanup and demonstrating how we’ve done the cleanup,” Mathy Stanislaus, EPA’s assistant administrator, told The Post in an interview Monday.

He added that 68 claims that have been filed against the EPA, which include a mixture of individuals, businesses and local and state governments, are pending review…

The National Wildlife Federation on Monday proclaimed “no meaningful effort has been made” since the Gold King spill to address the ongoing threats from hundreds of mines across the country. Jim Lyon, the federation’s vice president of conservation policy, called for legislation to stop the clock from ticking toward another similar catastrophe.

Stanislaus said the universal problem is broader than the EPA and is being examined from many federal levels.

“I think the EPA can only take on an extremely small subset of the abandoned mine situation,” Stanislaus said. “We only get involved in the highest risk situations where you have this high risk (to) ecological and public health.”

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

In a July 22 interview with the Telluride Daily Planet, Hays Griswold, speaking of a cleanup project set to begin at a mine near Ophir, cautioned residents there that work might cause some discoloration in the Howard Fork of the San Miguel River.

“You may see some yellow water. Don’t get excited like they do in Durango,” Griswold said.

EPA press secretary Melissa Harrison wrote in an emailed response that Griswold’s comments do not reflect the views of the agency. Requests for an interview with Griswold were ignored, and independent attempts to reach him Thursday were unsuccessful…

Griswold last August was charged with taking over cleanup efforts at the Gold King Mine north of Silverton while the EPA’s permanent on-scene coordinator, Steve Way, was on vacation.

Just days into his command, Griswold gave the EPA’s contracted crews orders to dig into the loose pile of dirt and rock that covered the entrance to the mine – despite clear instructions left by Way to postpone any such work due to the inherit risk of a blowout…

Griswold is now tasked with cleaning up 15,000 cubic yards of mill tailings at the Carribeau Mine, west of Ophir, according to the Telluride Daily Planet. He will not, however, be touching the mine’s adit, which is leaking anywhere from 600 to 800 gallons of mine drainage a minute.

The EPA’s Harrison wrote that the remediation plan for Carribeau Mine is under review by the regional office, and no final decisions have been made about the work.

The EPA’s efforts in the Silverton mining district, now proposed for Superfund listing as the Bonita Peak Mining District, are under the direction of Rebecca Thomas, remedial project manager.

From Reuters (Keith Coffman):

At the urging of congressional leaders, the EPA’s Office of Inspector General is investigating the rupture from the Gold King Mine above Silverton, Colorado, that fouled waterways in three states and Native American lands, the agency said in a statement.

“Based on requests from several members of the House and Senate, the OIG is conducting both a program evaluation and a criminal investigation of the Gold King Mine spill,” the EPA said in a statement.

The OIG is an independent office that audits, investigates and evaluates the agency’s activities, the EPA statement said…

Jeffrey Lagda, a spokesman for the EPA’s Inspector General, told Reuters that the probe has been ongoing for some time, and that investigators are working with prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver.

From The Durango Herald (Kate Magill):

Senators Cory Gardner, R-Colorado, and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, on Thursday called for a hearing on a bill that would expedite reimbursements to communities impacted by last year’s Gold King Mine spill.

In a letter to senators Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the pair called for a hearing on Gold King Mine Accountability and Compensation for Taxpayers legislation that they introduced in May.

The bill would require the EPA to fully reimburse communities for expenses caused by the spill. It would also expedite the payout of emergency response costs for tribes, local and state governments. The letter asks for the “swift consideration” of the bill.

It is one of several pieces of legislation pending approval in Congress concerning the spill, as well as good Samaritan legislation for mine reclamation. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado, introduced a similar EPA reimbursement bill in September last year that would also require the EPA to compensate those affected by the spill.

Here’s the release from US Senator Gardner’s office.

From the Associated Press via CBS Denver:

The Navajo Nation has formally endorsed a Superfund cleanup of southwestern Colorado mines, including one that released millions of gallons of wastewater into a river on Navajo land.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which is considering a Superfund designation for the Gold King Mine and other sites, released the letter Monday…

A Superfund designation could release millions of dollars for a cleanup. The EPA says a decision could come as early as this fall.

From Earth Magazine (Sara Pratt):

Not much happened around the Silverton Caldera in southwestern Colorado between 26 million years ago — when hydrothermal alteration of the caldera’s fractured granitic rocks left behind extensive veins of metal-rich ores — and 1871, when those deposits were discovered by prospectors. That’s when Silverton really started to boom. From 1871 to 1991 — when the Sunnyside Mine on the east side of Bonita Peak, the largest of dozens in the area, closed — an estimated $530 million worth of gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc were extracted from the Silverton Caldera. Most of the prospectors and mining companies that extracted that wealth are long gone, but a legacy of widespread environmental impacts remains…

A map of the results of the water and sediment sampling published by the Arizona Geological Survey indicates that only a handful of samples, mostly in the upper reaches of the watershed in the early days of the spill, had pollutant levels that exceeded maximums established for drinking water standards. While the Animas and San Juan rivers remained closed to use for irrigation, drinking water and recreation for about 10 days, the impact to agriculture along the banks of the river was minimal although future crop yields could suffer from the shutdown of irrigation, according to the University of Arizona researchers, led by Karletta Chief, a hydrologist and tribal extension specialist in the Department of Soil, Water and Environmental Science.

The report also put the 3-million-gallon spill into perspective. Each year, Silverton mines collectively discharge more than 330 million gallons of acid mine drainage into the Animas River watershed — more than 100 times the volume of the Gold King spill. In other words, the Animas River is experiencing a Gold King-sized spill, albeit less concentrated, roughly every three days.

After more than a century of largely unmitigated mining in the West, Gold King is just the latest example of the slow-motion environmental problem that has been unfolding in hundreds of mines and along thousands of kilometers of waterways. The EPA’s involvement in this particular spill, however, is an unusual twist that has brought controversy and attention, but at least, researchers say, it is shining a light on the larger problem of abandoned mine lands and the complexities surrounding their regulation and remediation.

In recent decades, the movement to remediate abandoned mine lands has gained momentum, and geoscientists from many different fields, from environmental scientists and hydrologists to geologists and mining engineers, are bringing their expertise to bear in characterizing abandoned mine sites, monitoring their environmental impacts, and assessing and prioritizing them for reclamation. But regulatory, legislative and funding issues remain — and a looming geoscience workforce crisis may leave future cleanup projects in the lurch.

The Impacts of Abandoned Mine Lands

Today, the U.S. has an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 abandoned mine sites mostly concentrated in eastern coal mining regions, like Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and western hardrock and coal mining regions like Colorado and Wyoming.

“Abandoned mines” are those abandoned before 1977 by owners who pulled up stakes when the veins tapped out or market economics changed, making the mine no longer profitable to work. Prior to 1977, when the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA) established the national Abandoned Mine Land Reclamation Program, few regulations held former mine owners accountable for the environmental consequences of abandoning a mine. SMCRA assesses fees on active coal mining operations to pay for remediation of abandoned coal mine sites. There is, however, no similar program for hardrock abandoned mines.

Abandoned mines can range from small prospect pits that merely pock the surface, to deep underground mines with kilometer upon kilometer of adits, shafts, drifts, stopes and tunnels. Such underground cavities often intersected the water table — the surface, or top, of water stored underground — requiring drainage tunnels or pumping during active mining. When mines were abandoned, however, the pumping often stopped, and drainage tunnels — which were graded to allow water, as well as loaded ore cars, to passively flow downslope — continued to drain.

Seeping groundwater can then pool in the mine and possibly escape into the surrounding environment, potentially leading to the most prominent and far-reaching of the many health, safety and environmental dangers posed by abandoned mines: the degradation of water resources by acid mine drainage.

Acid rock drainage can occur naturally, without mining, when rocks containing gold, silver, copper and other valuable metals — which also usually contain pyrite, an iron sulfide that, when exposed to air and water, creates sulfuric acid that further leaches metals from the rock — are exposed via weathering and erosion, fractures or exhumation. But mining accelerates and scales up this natural weathering, exposing vast amounts of fresh rock surfaces both inside and outside the mine to oxygen and water.

Until the 1930s, it was common practice to dump mine tailings directly into streams. When acid mine drainage flows into creeks or streams, it can impact reaches of a watershed far downstream, often leaving trails of iron-hydroxide deposits — “yellow boy” in mining terminology — that stain rocks and riverbanks red, yellow and orange. Today, tens of thousands of kilometers of U.S. rivers and streams are still affected by acid mine drainage.

In addition to water-quality impacts, other hazards that also require mitigation include spoils and tailings piles, open portals and shafts, underground fires, ground subsidence, explosive gases and rusting equipment, just to name a few.

In addition to Gold King, Colorado alone has more than 23,000 other abandoned mines posing varying degrees of threats. More than 6,000 have been remediated by the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety in cooperation with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — but $66 million worth of unfunded projects remain listed on the national database of abandoned mine lands. Other states have similar backlogs.

In Pennsylvania, the state most impacted by acid mine drainage and with a long history of remediating it, abandoned mines discharge 300 million gallons of acid mine drainage per day, affecting more than 8,800 kilometers of streams, says Eric Cavazza, director of the state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation and past president of the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs.

The Watershed Approach

The problem may seem vast and intractable, but the science of acid mine drainage is well understood. And, over the last few decades, a well-stocked toolbox of mitigation techniques has been developed, including treating acid mine drainage waters with lime (calcium carbonate) to buffer the water’s pH to normal levels and channeling mine discharges through settling ponds to allow metals to precipitate.

The bigger challenge is determining where and how to allocate limited resources, says Geoffrey Plumlee, a geochemist with USGS in Denver who testified before Congress in November 2015 on the role geoscientists can play in assessing and prioritizing remediation of abandoned mines.

In his testimony, Plumlee emphasized the importance of involving geoscience expertise at every stage: identifying and assessing sites, determining remediation options, and prioritizing projects based on the potential return. The task is figuring out which sites pose the greatest hazard and possess the greatest potential for improvement, he says.

Plumlee cites the example of Colorado’s Summitville Mine, a hardrock gold mine about 100 kilometers southeast of Silverton, where mining had occurred on and off since the late 1800s. In the 1980s, open-pit mining began using a new cyanide-leaching technique to dissolve gold from lower-grade ores. Almost from the beginning, heavy-metal discharges, pH levels lower than 3, and cyanide leakage plagued the operation.

In 1992, the mining company declared bankruptcy and was unable to meet its remediation responsibilities. In 1994, to prevent a major spill into the Alamosa River, the state of Colorado asked the EPA to designate it a Superfund site and take over cleanup, the cost of which has since exceeded $100 million.

The ore geology at Summitville — massive sulfide-rich volcanic deposits, with no underlying carbonates to help buffer and neutralize acidity — “was basically a geologic recipe for extreme acid rock drainage,” Plumlee says. Meanwhile, the ore geology at other mines can result in discharges near drinking-water quality. Although not all mine drainage is acidic, it can still carry substantial amounts of toxic elements.

“Not all mine drainage is created equal,” Plumlee says. “This is why understanding the geology of the deposits is so important to helping predict mine drainage chemistry.” That is just one way geoscientists can help prioritize different sites for cleanup. Another example of how geoscience may be brought to bear is the interdisciplinary “watershed approach,” exemplified in a 10-year pilot study of the effects of more than a century of historical mining in two watersheds: Boulder Creek in Montana and the Animas River in Colorado, which includes Gold King. In the comprehensive study, which ran from 1997 to 2007, researchers examined “the geology and geochemistry of rock and sediment, the hydrology and water chemistry of streams and groundwater, and the diversity and health of aquatic and terrestrial organisms” in each watershed.

In the study, undertaken when the USGS implemented a new program in cooperation with federal land-management agencies called the Abandoned Mine Lands Initiative, researchers inventoried mine sites, analyzed an array of water, rock and mine waste samples, and characterized the geologic conditions controlling acidity and the release of toxic metals.

The results of the study, published in a 2007 report edited by USGS scientists Stanley E. Church, Paul von Guerard and Susan E. Finger, demonstrated the full potential of a comprehensive geotechnical assessment of watersheds impacted by mining, Plumlee says. Eight years later, that report became a vital resource for the teams investigating the Gold King Mine spill, helping to establish both pre-spill and pre-mining conditions.

Determining the natural conditions that existed in an environment prior to mining is important, Plumlee says, because it provides a baseline for the conditions that are technically feasible to achieve with remediation. This, in turn, can help planners set realistic goals for reclamation plans.

In establishing those conditions, it is important to remember that nature is not always pristine when left to its own devices. In Colorado, for example, the first European settlers gave streams names like Iron Creek, Alum Creek and Bitter Creek: names that alluded to natural acid rock drainage. In 1875, prior to intensive mining, the topographer of the Hayden Expedition noted the “iron-sulfate” waters of Cement Creek and Mineral Creek were not fit for drinking.

In 2011, the Colorado Geological Survey released a study identifying a number of streams whose headwaters, lying at elevations high above where mining impacts are felt, were acidic with high metals concentrations due to the hydrothermally altered metal-sulfide rocks in the surrounding geology. “Natural acid rock drainage has been active in Colorado for thousands, possibly millions of years,” the authors wrote.

In addition to understanding surface geology, knowing a site’s underground history is also crucial for remediation decision-making. Pairing historic documents with modern geoscientific technologies can help uncover that history.

Tools & Technologies

If the Gold King spill did nothing else, it raised awareness that a better understanding of a mine’s underground structure and hydrologic conduits and connections, both man-made and natural, is needed to make effective remediation decisions.

Gold King was part of a complex of mines including the large Sunnyside Mine. During the decommissioning of the Sunnyside Mine in the 1990s, 12 bulkheads — bunker-like structures made of steel and concrete — were installed to seal off the mine. Like plugging a bathtub drain, the bulkheading prevented acid mine drainage from flowing out at the lowest levels of the mine. After bulkheading, the local water table rose 300 meters, flooding the mine.

Although it might seem like flooding a mine would exacerbate the aquatic chemical reactions that result in acid mine drainage, sometimes water is part of the solution.“The idea behind the bulkheads is to raise the groundwater table back to pre-mining levels and remove oxygen from the acid mine drainage equation,” says Kirstin Brown, a geologist with the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety.

Soon after Sunnyside was bulkheaded and the water table rose, however, acid mine drainage at nearby mines — including the Red and Bonita, Mogul, and Gold King, each of which had previously been dry or discharging minimally — began flowing again. The renewed flows of acid mine drainage into Upper Cement Creek and the Animas River were at first actively treated to raise the pH. However, in 2003 and 2004, treatment ceased when disputes among the mine companies over who was responsible for its cost led to litigation, and streamwater quality again declined.

In 2010, in an effort to better understand the flow of mine drainage into Upper Cement Creek, the Bureau of Land Management, the Animas River Stakeholders Group and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment contacted the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety about creating a three-dimensional model of how the mine workings might be intersecting the water table.

The task fell to Brown, who worked with the U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, to learn and use EarthVision software to create the model, which drew on data from historic mine maps, some of which the researchers had to track down and “dig out of people’s basements in Silverton,” she says.

After scanning and georeferencing the old maps, groundwater data was then overlaid on the workings. Researchers can’t see the groundwater surface underground, but they can see where it flows out on the surface. If a mine portal, spring or stream is flowing at the ground surface, it shows researchers a fixed point on the surface of the groundwater table. Researchers also can check groundwater head pressures on some bulkhead gauges to see the current pressure and depth of the water table.

The result was a model that can be manipulated in three dimensions that gives officials the ability to “better visualize and understand the groundwater in the mountain and to help communicate the problem [of acid mine drainage] to the public,” Brown says. The model could also “help make predictions for the best practices for remediation.”

Understanding the hydrology at work in a mine can also allow for the most potent remediation technique: controlling the water at its source to prevent contamination in the first place. Sealing off mine entries with bulkheads can help prevent water from entering mine workings, and the flow of water inside the mountain can be manipulated to direct acid water away from clean water sources, Brown says.

Remediation teams employ other tools and technologies to investigate what’s going on belowground. Salt and dye tracer solutions can be introduced into mine waters to follow the hydrological connections among the workings. Drilling boreholes to send cameras, sensors or other instruments down into a mine is another common technique, often used to check the pressure and depth of a mine pool prior to beginning work.

“We do a lot of mine pool evaluations and mine pool monitoring, which is what didn’t happen at Gold King that resulted in uncontrolled releases of mine water,” Cavazza says. “Before we open up an abandoned underground mine, we almost always drill and put in monitoring wells so we have a good understanding of exactly how large [the mine pool] is, what the volume is, and how to contain and control it if we decide to open it.”

Another way to figure out what’s going on is to go underground with an engineering team, says Brown, adding that this is only done after ground conditions have been assessed, stabilized and deemed safe. Once underground, teams can map faults and fractures, collect information about water quality and water sources underground, and assess how to control those sources, for example, by determining where to place bulkheads.

But, it turns out, it is getting harder and harder these days to find engineers trained to work in mines.

Mining Engineers: A Depleted Resource

Since 1982, the number of accredited mining engineering schools has shrunk from 25 to 14 and for the last decade they have produced fewer than 200 graduates a year.

“Here in Pennsylvania, we have had a very difficult time recruiting new mining engineers to replace our mining engineers who are reaching retirement age,” Cavazza says. “There are fewer mining engineers being trained nationally, and there is probably going to be a continued need for them into the future.”

Last fall, in response to the Gold King spill, three bills were introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources chaired by Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.), who noted in his opening remarks the importance of having mining engineers on staff at agencies tasked with acid mine drainage cleanup.

“In the Committee’s investigation of the Gold King Mine spill, we discovered that, out of 15,326 employees, [the EPA] has no mining engineers and only 68 geologists, two of [whom] are assigned to [EPA] Region 8 where the spill occurred,” Lamborn said.

One bill, H.R. 3734, the Mining Schools Enhancement Act, would require the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement to direct 70 percent of its research funding to mining schools to help train the next generation of mining engineers.

In addition to mining engineers working on abandoned mine lands cleanup, it is “crucial to have economic and structural geologists who can help the mining engineers interpret and address the complexities of the geology, and hydrologists who can develop the detailed hydrologic models for groundwater flow,” Plumlee adds.

Legislative Will

The other two bills introduced last fall, H.R. 3843 and H.R. 3844, propose to assess a maintenance fee on mineral claims for the next seven years, establish a federal “Good Samaritan” law, and establish a foundation that would oversee private gifts and bequests to fund abandoned mine lands remediation projects.

The bills are not the sweeping legislation that has been called for to replace the current law governing hardrock mining — the General Mining Act of 1872. Signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant to promote the settling of the West, it was enacted a century before the environmental movement took hold and made no provision for funding or regulation of remediation. “It’s never been updated, which is a very long time for an environmental law to be on the books,” Cavazza says. But, he says, “some people don’t want it updated.”

The most recent legislation proposing to update the 1872 mining act, H.R. 963, the Hardrock Mining Reform and Reclamation Act of 2015, was referred to subcommittee, where it remains. It would have, among other things, assessed reclamation fees to establish a fund for future cleanups and established a federal Good Samaritan law to waive some liability for private citizens, groups or companies who want to become involved in mine cleanup projects. Opponents contend that while domestic coal producers can pass the additional cost of reclamation fees onto consumers, U.S. mineral producers competing in a global market would suffer a competitive disadvantage if additional fees were imposed.

“There’s really never been the legislative will in Congress to enact a hardrock abandoned mine lands program,” Cavazza says.

Thus, hardrock abandoned mine lands are instead overseen by an alphabet soup of local, state and federal agencies, each with its own rules and guidelines. And funding to remediate a particular site may come from a hodge-podge of sources, including federal, state, and private partners who, in turn, get funding from a variety of sources, including SMCRA, Superfund, and the Clean Water Act Grant Program.

“Currently, no single source of funding, whether it be federal, state, tribal or private, is adequate on its own to address the magnitude of the problem that exists,” the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) reported in 2007. As of 2011, according to a General Accounting Office report, BLM, USFS, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement had spent at least $2.6 billion to reclaim abandoned hardrock mines on federal, state, tribal and private lands.

Good Samaritans

Some of the private funding comes from corporations or groups — like Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit organization dedicated to conserving trout fisheries — that have a vested interest in cleaning up their local waterways. However, under certain laws anyone involved with mine cleanup in any way over the years can potentially be held responsible for environmental damage, even that which preceded their involvement with cleanup, and be liable for legal damages and cleanup costs.

Thus, Good Samaritan laws offer permits to waive or reduce the liability of private parties that want to participate in environmental cleanup projects. For example, if a group helped remediate a polluted stream that was previously unable to support aquatic life to the point that fish could survive in it, but not necessarily to the point that the water met the standards of the Clean Water Act, Good Samaritan laws might exempt the company from the more stringent requirement.

South Dakota and Pennsylvania are currently the only states with “Good Sam” laws. In Pennsylvania, Cavazza says, the 1999 law increased the number of private parties participating in acid mine drainage cleanup projects. But, he says, he suspects that many potential corporate partners are still dissuaded by legal teams who do not want to risk federal liability.

“I don’t know why you would want to discourage anybody from going in to try to clean something up that they had nothing to do with creating, that they are not in any way liable for, and for which they are providing their own resources,” says Cavazza, who last fall testified in his capacity as past president of the National Association of Abandoned Mine Land Programs (not in his role as a state official) to the benefits of Good Sam laws before the House subcommittee.

The Legacy of Gold King

Whether the Gold King spill will provide the impetus to create a national program for hardrock abandoned mine lands remains to be seen. The case of Gold King is currently mired in litigation and hearings. At the site, the EPA has set up a temporary water treatment plant in the nearby ghost town of Gladstone to treat Gold King discharge before it reaches Cement Creek. Downstream, state and federal public health agencies and other researchers continue to monitor the Animas watershed, especially during spring runoff and high-water events that may mobilize sediments laden with heavy metals.

“Although there appear to be no short-term effects to health or the environment following the Gold King Mine spill,” the University of Arizona researchers wrote last November, “we will not understand the long-term impacts of this highly concentrated release of metals into our environment for quite some time.”

In April, in response to a request from Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and towns, counties and tribes in the Animas and San Juan watersheds, the EPA proposed listing 48 historic mine sites in the Silverton Caldera as a Superfund site. Some residents of Silverton had long resisted the designation, despite the fact that it would bring additional federal resources for remediation, because it was thought that associating the town’s name with Superfund, often synonymous with hazardous waste, could threaten tourism. But after seeing the Animas run orange, many changed their minds.

If approved, the Superfund site will be called the Bonita Peak Mining District.

From The Durango Herald (Jessica Pace):

Environmental Protection Agency officials said Wednesday they are deciding where to haul sludge from the temporary water-treatment plant for Gold King Mine wastewater.

The EPA periodically has updated the communities of San Juan and La Plata counties in recent months as a Superfund proposal moves forward, and most aspects of the agency’s work has been in the evaluation stages thus far.

On Wednesday, the EPA told La Plata County commissioners that the agency is considering whether to dispose of nontoxic sludge produced by the temporary treatment plant at a mining district site or a landfill.

La Plata County Commissioner Brad Blake said he opts for the least expensive option.

“It’s not toxic waste, so it can go anywhere,” he said.

Commissioners inquired about the life of the plant, which is supposed to end this fall.

“It was designed and constructed to be an interim measure,” Superfund project manager Rebecca Thomas said. “We’ll continue to evaluate options, but we’ll come up with a comprehensive remedy for the entire mining district.”

Thomas said for now, the temporary plant is operating as usual, and a long-term solution could include a permanent water-treatment facility.

The EPA also is evaluating what Superfund designation will mean for private property owners, officials said Wednesday.

From The Salt Lake Tribune (Emma Penrod):

State regulators are calling for more study of Lake Powell and sections of the San Juan River in light of unusual test results that may or may not be tied to last summer’s Gold King Mine spill.

Two sections of the San Juan River were added to the state’s list of “impaired” waters in the latest state water quality report. Those portions of the river were found to have concentrations of aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lead and mercury that exceeded state water quality standards on at least two occasions last fall.

The state also added portions of Lake Powell to the list — a move that greatly increased the overall percentage of freshwater lake acreage deemed as impaired, said Walt Baker, director of the Utah Division of Water Quality (DWQ). In the state report, released this week, 71 percent of Utah’s freshwater lakes did not meet the water quality standards for their designated uses, which include providing drinking water, recreation or wildlife habitat.

The overages in the San Juan River were detected by the Environmental Protection Agency while the feds were sampling the river to evaluate the fallout from the Gold King Mine blowout upriver, and are possibly related to the Aug. 5 incident, said Erica Gaddis, assistant director of the DWQ.

Gaddis said the department had feared this spring’s runoff could dislodge even more contamination and flush it downstream, but so far, the division hasn’t found evidence of that. And though portions of Lake Powell are listed as impaired, it’s unlikely that it’s related to the Gold King Mine, Gaddis said.

Water directly downstream of the mine saw decreased pH levels — becoming more acidic — immediately following the Gold King spill in August, but Lake Powell has had unusually high pH readings — a situation that itself is a mystery.

Now, the division’s scientists are also wondering where the estimated 880,000 pounds of heavy metals released during the August 2016 Gold King Mine incident ended up.

The common thought, Gaddis said, is that the metals were deposited in sediment somewhere upstream, on the Animas River in Colorado — and that they remained there, waiting for high river flows to flush them out.

It’s possible that those metals are already making their way downstream, she said, and increased river flow could be diluting the metals so that concentrations remain below the state’s screening values.

The potential for further contamination pushed the state to develop a long-term monitoring plan for the San Juan and Lake Powell, the likely final resting place for all that sediment, should it make its way farther down the river.

As part of that plan, the state has installed devices on the river capable of measuring the amount of sediment in the water in real-time. That data is available to the public at water data.usgs.gov.

It’s not yet clear how the amount of mobilized sediment correlates to the concentration of metals in the river. Gaddis said it could take another year for the DWQ to create a working model that will be used to issuing warnings when the river may be contaminated…

The primary concern, Gaddis said, is aquatic life. The state is also watching aquatic life in the region to determine whether metals in the river, or in the river’s sediment, are potentially harming fish or other creatures that live in the river. Gaddis said the DWQ has yet to see direct evidence of metals poisoning.

The long-term monitoring plan is anticipated to cost $1.2 million altogether, Gaddis said. So far the EPA has offered Utah $645,000 related to the Gold King Mine spill. Gaddis said the state intends to apply all of that money to its monitoring initiatives.

The state also intends to sue the EPA for its role in the Gold King Mine incident. Wade Fairway, an assistant Utah attorney general, told lawmakers during a Tuesday interim legislative meeting that his office was still in the process of hiring outside legal counsel to assist with the suit.

Meanwhile, Gaddis said, the DWQ has begun to turn its attention to the chronic effect of mining in the Bonita Peak Mining District in Colorado and on the San Juan River and its tributaries. The Gold King Mine alone, she said, could have released between 500 million and 850 million gallons of contaminated water over the past decade, and it’s just one of 48 old mines in the Bonita district.

The EPA proposed making the entire Bonita district a superfund site this past April.

From the Associated Press via The Fort Collins Coloradoan:

Time is up for people to comment on a proposed Superfund cleanup for leaking mines in southwestern Colorado, and not many have spoken up.

A few hours before the Monday deadline, 34 people had submitted comments

to the Environmental Protection Agency on the planned Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site.

The site would include the Gold King Mine north of Silverton, which released 3 million gallons of acidic waste into Colorado, New Mexico and Utah rivers last August.

A finally tally on comments is expected later Tuesday.

The low number of comments came as a surprise after years of controversy over a Superfund site. Some worried it would hurt the region’s tourist economy or give the federal government too much power over local affairs.

From The High Country News (Jonathan Thompson):

“Corn are thirsty and dying, damn the EPA, damn the government, damn the industry!”

— Duane “Chili” Yazzie, Navajo farmer, activist and President of the Shiprock Chapter, from his poem “Yellow River”

On May 23, the State of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the owners of the Sunnyside Mine near Silverton, Colorado, over damages caused by last year’s Gold King mine blowout. It’s likely just the first volley in what could be a long legal fracas emerging from both the spill and the impending Superfund listing for the Gold King and surrounding mines.

The action was hardly a surprise: New Mexico had expressed its intention to take legal action when the impacted rivers — the Animas and the San Juan — were still orange from the spill of 3 million gallons of acid mine drainage and iron oxide sludge. Initially, however, the state was targeting not just the EPA, but also the State of Colorado, the owner of the Gold King Mine and others. The only defendants in the actual complaint are: the EPA and its administrator Gina McCarthy; the contractor working on the mine when it blew out; and Sunnyside owner Kinross, a Canada-based global mining company, and its subsidiary Sunnyside Gold Corp.

While the EPA has accepted blame for inadvertently causing the spill, Sunnyside’s culpability in the matter is murky. After being almost dry for years, the Gold King mine started draining water in the late 1990s or early 2000s, most likely a result of water backing up behind one or more of the three bulkheads that Sunnyside installed in the American Tunnel, below the Gold King. Yet still unknown is which bulkhead, in particular, is causing the drainage, and whether Gold King water is just being returned to its historic course, or Sunnyside mine water is somehow infiltrating the Gold King. (See our extensive, interactive timeline, which clearly helped inform the New Mexico complaint, for details.)

The complaint alleges that the “garish yellow cloud of contamination wrought environmental and economic damage throughout the Animas and San Juan Rivers” and that it deposited sediment that could be re-mobilized during spring runoff, causing a potential repeat. Perhaps more damaging than the metals contained in the plume and sediment was the psychological impact, and the “uncertainty and anxiety generated by widely-circulated images of a sickly yellow river.” The state seeks reimbursement of all of its costs related to the spill, which it says exceed $100 million.

At a recent regional water quality conference in Farmington, New Mexico, one speaker noted that the “river would never be the same” after the spill. Yet water sampling and fish counts conducted since the spill have shown that things haven’t changed significantly. At the conference, a presentation by Jim White, aquatic biologist with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, noted that fish counts showed “no discernible changes in species composition, biomass, and/or quality of trout or native fishes POST Gold King Mine spill.” And an analysis conducted by the Mountain Studies Institute in Durango this spring showed that metal concentrations in the Animas River have increased during spring runoff, but not noticeably more than in past years.

From The Denver Post (Bruce Finley):

New Mexico launched a legal fight against the EPA and owners of a Colorado gold mine Monday, demanding action, contending the Gold King disaster caused catastrophic harm to downriver people, aquatic insects and fish.

“Not only is this an environmental crisis, but it is a crisis in poor governance. … Governments need to be accountable to neighboring communities as well as their own community,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said after filing a lawsuit in federal court.

The lawsuit does not specify monetary damages, but state attorneys said New Mexico is entitled to at least $7 million to reimburse communities for emergency expenditures after the disaster and for independent, third-party monitoring of water quality. In addition, the attorneys estimated New Mexico suffered economic harm of $140 million.

It spares Colorado, for now. Balderas said he’s “having a conversation” with Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman and hopes legal issues between the states can be resolved.

EPA officials declined to comment on the lawsuit, but agency officials said the EPA has paid $1.3 million to help New Mexico cover costs related to the disaster. Coffman declined to comment.

The lawsuit contends New Mexico, tribes and Utah suffered catastrophic damage from the EPA-triggered Aug. 5 spill into Animas River headwaters, a “sickly yellow plume of contamination” that flowed out of southwestern Colorado into New Mexico, the Navajo Nation, Utah and eventually Lake Powell atop the Grand Canyon.The spill damaged water that is the lifeblood of downriver communities’ economy and culture with devastating impact, the lawsuit said.

It demands tougher water-quality testing — using “the highest testing standards that the EPA would impose in any other state in the nation” — by someone outside the EPA.

Compensation would go for remediation and to help agricultural and cultural communities that depend on the river for irrigation and drinking water. “They must be properly compensated and there must be appropriate independent monitoring to prevent future dangers to public health and the economy,” the lawsuit said.

New Mexico blames the plugging of the Sunnyside Mine, currently owned by Kinross Corp., as the root cause of the Gold King disaster because this action backed up acidic, metals-laden water, causing water levels to spread to nearby mines, including the Gold King Mine. The lawsuit also targets Environmental Restoration, the EPA’s contractor, involved in work to try to drain the Gold King when workers accidentally caused a blowout.

From The Farmington Daily Times (Noel Lyn Smith):

New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas filed the complaint today on behalf of the New Mexico Environment Department in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque.

The EPA has admitted responsibility for the Aug. 5 mine blowout. Employees of an EPA contractor, Environmental Restoration, released millions of gallons of mine waste laced with heavy metals into the Animas and San Juan rivers during a cleanup operation. The plume carried more than 880,000 pounds of toxic metals including lead, cadmium, copper, mercury and zinc through state and tribal lands.

In addition to the EPA, the lawsuit names EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Environmental Restoration, Kinross Gold Corp., Kinross Gold USA Inc. and Sunnyside Gold Corp.

New Mexico is demanding the defendants “abate the imminent and substantial threats” from the Sunnyside Mine network and remediate residual contamination from mine releases. The state is also seeking compensation for environmental and economic damages.

The complaint alleges the state is experiencing “enormous economic losses” because of the spill.

“The indelible images of a mustard-hewed toxic plume meandering downstream – into the habitat of several endangered species and superb sport fishing and recreational grounds – will linger long after the visible impacts of the release have vanished,” the complaint states.

The “lingering stigma” will result in reduced economic activity and a decline in taxes, fees and income because of lost tourism, fishing and land use, according to the complaint.

State Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn said the federal Tort claim notice filed this month included an estimate the state has suffered and will suffer $130 million in lost income, taxes, fees and revenues.

In a telephone interview Monday, Flynn said the department tried to work with the EPA to address ongoing concerns — including monitoring heavy metals levels in the river — but were unable to resolve those matters.

“We tried over seven months to pursue a diplomatic path forward,” he said adding the agency has to be accountable for its promises to address the spill and its aftermath.

A press release from the attorney general’s office states New Mexico and the EPA have been unable to “mutually agree” on a monitoring plan that “appropriately protects” state and tribal lands.

“It is inappropriate for the EPA to impose weak testing standards in New Mexico and I am demanding the highest testing standards that the EPA would impose in any other state in the nation to protect the health and well-being of our citizens,” Balderas said in the release.

In a statement emailed to The Daily Times Monday, EPA Region 6 spokesman David Gray said the agency takes responsibility for the cleanup and has been working to reimburse response costs and provide funding for monitoring plans developed by state and tribal governments.

“EPA’s longstanding practice has been not to comment on pending litigation filed by external parties,” Gray said.

He added the EPA has paid approximately $1.3 million in reimbursements and monitoring costs for New Mexico. Other funding has been distributed to Colorado, Utah, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, the Navajo Nation and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe.

Louie Diaz, spokesman for Kinross, said in an email Monday that Kinross and Sunnyside Gold were not involved and have no responsibility regarding the mine spill.

The complaint names Kinross Gold Corp., through its subsidiary Kinross Gold USA, as owner of the Sunnyside Mine and neighboring properties near Silverton, Colo.

“Kinross and Sunnyside never owned or operated the Gold King Mine. We will vigorously defend ourselves from this legal action,” Diaz said.

The 51-page complaint asks the federal court to declare the defendants liable under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act for all costs incurred by New Mexico for its response to the releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances from the Gold King Mine and two additional locations, which are also mine sites in the mountains above Silverton.

The court is being asked to declare the named mining companies and EPA contractor in violation of the “imminent and substantial endangerment” provision in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

The contractor, Environmental Restoration, did not return calls seeking comment today.

In addition, it requests EPA Administrator McCarthy to find a way to moderate pollution from inactive and abandoned mines in Colorado that discharge acid mine waste water into the Animas River.

New Mexico is asking the court to declare the mine owners and EPA contractor “negligent, grossly negligent or both” and award the state compensatory, consequential and punitive damages.

The complaint comes months after the state announced its intent to sue the EPA, the owners of the Gold King and Sunnyside mines, and the state of Colorado, which was not named in Monday’s complaint.

James Hallinan, spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said the state is still attempting to resolve issues with Colorado. Letters obtained by The Daily Times sent by Balderas to the EPA and the Colorado attorney general last week detailed some of the state’s problems with responses to the spill.

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said the tribe will support New Mexico in its action and the tribe will closely monitor the lawsuit.

The president added the economic and environmental impacts and losses related to the spill, including abandoned crops, “heavily affect” the tribe, and the EPA has yet to reimburse those Navajo farmers and ranchers.

“The U.S. EPA has yet to provide significant clean-up along the river banks and in the river beds. The Navajo Nation is still very concerned that the contaminants will continue to migrate down river, particularly when there is a spike in the flow of the river,” Begaye said.

From the Associated Press (Susan Montoya Bryan) via The Columbian:

The federal lawsuit says the environmental effects of the August 2015 spill are far worse than claimed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. New Mexico wants to be paid back for its immediate response to the disaster and receive funding for long-term monitoring, lost revenue and a marketing campaign to undo the stigma left behind by the bright-yellow plume of arsenic, lead and other heavy metals that fouled rivers in three Western states.

“The liability is crystal clear. The facts speak for themselves, and EPA for whatever reason is unwilling to resolve this outside of court,” New Mexico Environment Secretary Ryan Flynn told The Associated Press. “We’re going to do what we need to do to make sure New Mexicans are protected and compensated for the harm caused.”

[…]

Balderas said the spill has had a devastating effect on communities and that the federal agency should be held to the same standards it would impose on private interests accused of polluting.

“Remediation and compensation dollars have been far too minimal for these very special agricultural and cultural communities who depend on this precious water source for irrigation and drinking water,” Balderas said. “They must be properly compensated and there must be appropriate independent monitoring to prevent future dangers to public health and the economy.”

The EPA typically declines to comment about pending litigation but a spokeswoman said last week that the agency was taking responsibility for the cleanup…

A notice sent this month to the EPA outlined the damage and argued that heavy metals in the Animas and San Juan rivers remain at levels that “present unacceptable risks to health and the environment.”

Attorneys for New Mexico argue that the spill was preventable and that the EPA had been warned about a potential blowout nearly a year before the incident.

The state also contends its offers to lead a regional long-term monitoring project to better understand the damage and the prospects of future contamination flowing down the river system have been repeatedly rebuffed by the EPA.

The agency offered $2 million to states and tribes affected by the spill for monitoring, but New Mexico officials say that’s only a fraction of the more than $6 million that would be needed for adequate monitoring in the state.

New Mexico also estimates the spill is costing the state $130 million in lost income taxes, fees and revenue. Officials have pointed to reduced tourism, fishing and land use throughout the region.

From Colorado Public Radio (Grace Hood):

The state sued the Environmental Protection Agency, contractor Environmental Restoration LLC, and owners of the Gold King Mine as defendants. It’s the first state to take this kind of legal action…

New Mexico officials say that about $130 million would go toward economic damages, $17 million would be spent on a marketing fund to promote the state’s image, and $6 million would be spent on long-term water quality monitoring. About $1 million would help recoup emergency response costs at the time of the spill.

New Mexico isn’t the only state struggling with covering costs associated with the spill. La Plata County, in Colorado, reports a deficit of nearly $185,849 spent on wages, benefits and water quality monitoring since the spill. San Juan County reports that it’s seeking reimbursement for $357,363 for spill-related expenses through Feb. 29, 2016.

From The Albuquerque Journal (Ollie Reed Jr.):

In a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court, Attorney General Hector Balderas and the New Mexico Environment Department cite economic setbacks and environmental damage suffered by the state after more than 3 million gallons of toxic waste was dumped into the river.

It demands reimbursement of $889,327 for short-term emergency-response costs paid by the state, more than $6 million to pay for long-term monitoring of the Animas and San Juan rivers and $130 million for lost income, taxes, fees and revenues suffered by the state because of the spill.

“The river only flows one way,” said Ryan Flynn, New Mexico environment secretary. “Trouble could still be coming for New Mexico. We have been pushing for a monitoring effort since October. Our concept is $6 million plus and five years of comprehensive monitoring that would give us a firm grasp of what is happening in the watershed. All EPA has said is we will give you is $465,000. That just doesn’t cut it.”

[…]

Flynn said efforts to resolve issues with the EPA outside of court have proved fruitless.

“I couldn’t tell you what EPA is thinking,” Flynn said. “EPA seems totally unwilling to resolve this in a collaborative manner.”

Among the major impasses between New Mexico and the EPA has been appropriate screening levels for contaminant metals such as lead.

Flynn said the EPA wants to impose a recreational standard that would be safe for hikers and campers, but New Mexico believes the much more strict residential standard should be applied because people live along the affected rivers in New Mexico.

“There are a lot of people whose homes are right on the river or who use the river for a lot more than kayaking,” Flynn said.

Balderas agrees.

“It is inappropriate for the EPA to impose weak testing standards in New Mexico, and I am demanding the highest testing standards that the EPA would impose in any other state in the nation to protect the health and well being of our citizens,” Balderas said. “Additionally, remediation and compensation dollars have been far too minimal for these very special agricultural and cultural communities who depend on this precious water source for irrigation and drinking water. They must be properly compensated, and there must be appropriate independent monitoring to prevent future dangers to public health and economy.”

The EPA does not comment on pending litigation filed by outside parties. But in a statement released Monday, the EPA said the agency takes responsibility for the mine spill cleanup and has been working to reimburse response costs and fund tribal and state monitoring plans as well as conduct its own monitoring of the Animas and San Juan rivers.

“EPA has funded about $1.3 million in reimbursements and monitoring cost for New Mexico to date,” the EPA statement said. “We continue to review documentation and applications for different entities in the state and will expedite payments. New Mexico has $7.1 million available in unallocated federal funds – of which $108,000 has already been approved – to fund real-time monitors in the river.”

[…]

Flynn said the EPA has paid back more than $700,000 of the emergency-response money New Mexico shelled out dealing with the spill, but that the state is seeking another $800,000-plus from the federal agency to cover those costs.

New Mexico also wants $130 million to pay for economic losses it attributes to the mine spill.

“We asked our analyst to be as conservative as possible,” Flynn said. “But there is stigma associated with this region due to the yellow river.”

He said that stigma had hurt New Mexico in revenue lost because kayakers, fishermen, hikers and other outdoorsmen have sought other places to enjoy outdoor recreation, tourists have selected other vacation destinations and consumers of agricultural products have looked elsewhere for their purchases.

“The facts speak for themselves,” Flynn said. “They (EPA) are clearly at fault. At the end of the day the law is on our side. EPA is now on the other side of the law it has been fighting to enforce for so many years.”

From The Durango Herald (Sue McMillin):

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in New Mexico, names the EPA and its administrator, Gina McCarthy, Environmental Restoration, LLC, Kinross Gold Corp., Kinross Gold U.S.A. Inc., and Sunnyside Gold Corp. as defendants. Kinross is the parent company of Sunnyside.

Along with seeking compensation for environmental and economic damages related to the Aug. 5, 2015, Gold King Mine spill, the lawsuit “demands that the Defendants abate the imminent and substantial threats emanating from the mines in Colorado, and remediate residual contamination from the Gold King Mine releases in New Mexico’s surface waters and sediments.”

James Hallinan, communications director for the New Mexico Office of the Attorney General, said he could not comment on open litigation, but the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office is in “ongoing communication” with the state of Colorado over the Gold King spill. The state of Colorado and the owner of the Gold King Mine were not named in the lawsuit filed Monday, although in March the New Mexico Environment Department filed notice of its intent to sue those parties as well.

Colorado Attorney General Office spokeswoman Erin Lamb declined to comment on the lawsuit.

A spokesman with Kinross Gold Corp. responded in an email to a request for comment: “Kinross Gold and Sunnyside Gold were not involved and have no responsibility regarding the incident on August 5th, 2015 and Kinross and Sunnyside never owned or operated the Gold King Mine. We will vigorously defend ourselves from this legal action.”

The lawsuit claims the “root cause” of the disaster dates back more than 20 years to Sunnyside Gold’s attempt to block acid mine drainage by building bulkheads in drainage tunnels below the mine. The owners of the Gold King and Sunnyside mines have disputed the source of the wastewater buildup.

“These bulkheads impounded possibly billions of gallons of acid mine drainage and wastewater in Bonita Peak Mountain and caused the water to flood several adjacent mines,” the complaint says. It accuses Sunnyside Gold of using the mountain to store its waste rather than properly treating it.

From The Durango Herald (Mary Shinn):

A federal grant will fund an economic development coordinator to help Silverton and San Juan County businesses during the potential Superfund cleanup of historic mines.

“They are totally reliant on tourism, and we don’t know how that will be impacted,” said Laura Lewis Marchino, the deputy director of the Region 9 Economic Development District.

The U.S. Economic Development Administration is providing about $115,600 to pay a coordinator for two years and cover expenses such as marketing materials and travel, Marchino said.

The coordinator will be focused on supporting existing businesses through the federal cleanup of the Bonita Peak Mining District, which could include 48 mine-related sites.

The mining district was recommended for a Superfund listing in April following the Aug. 5 mine blowout, and the proposed designation is nearing the end of a 60-day comment period.

Easing the housing shortage when Superfund workers come to town will likely be another priority for the coordinator, she said.

During the construction of the temporary water-treatment plant near the Gold King Mine, there was not enough housing, she said.

The town needs more rentals so that hotel and motel rooms aren’t used as permanent housing.

The five-member San Juan Development Association Board that includes representatives from the town of Silverton, San Juan County, the Silverton Chamber of Commerce and Region 9 will hire the new coordinator.

Region 9 will manage the two-year grant, and Marchino would like to have the position filled by late summer.

“We needed to do what we could to help,” she said.

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

On the second and final day of a mining conference in Farmington, a question borne out of mounting frustration was raised by a New Mexico representative: “Are we going to benefit from Colorado’s Superfund designation? And if not, do we have to apply?”

The inquiry, posed by Rich Dembowski, chairman of the New Mexico Gold King Mine Citizen’s Advisory Committee, stems from lingering resentment that as the Environmental Protection Agency and Colorado pursue the federal hazardous cleanup program, New Mexico, and its concerns, are being ignored.

Dennis McQuillan, chief scientist of New Mexico’s Environmental Department, said requests for an informational meeting about the Superfund listing in New Mexico have gone unanswered by the federal agency.

Yet when New Mexico officials see EPA hearings scheduled in Silverton, Durango and Ignacio, McQuillan said it feels like an outright slight toward downstream interests.

“It’s a reoccurring theme – we’re not treated like stakeholders down here because we’re not in Colorado,” he said. “We’re basically forgotten. But we are stakeholders. Our people use the water.”

For two days, researchers from New Mexico and Native American tribes pored over the science behind the spill, the highly mineralized Silverton mining district, and the possible short and long-term effects of sediment loading in the Animas and San Juan rivers.

McQuillan said the conference was a bit of an attempt to play catch-up to years of research well-known in Southwest Colorado through groups such as the Animas River Stakeholders Group. He hopes next year’s conference will have more data to compare.

“I think the Gold King spill brought a lot of attention to the existing situation down here,” he said.

“We have this shocking visual of yellow river, and yet the issue’s been around a long time.”

McQuillan said instead, the state environmental department has been more concerned over the high levels of E. coli found in the stretches of the Animas and San Juan rivers within New Mexico, which pose a more immediate risk to human health.

“The Gold King spill took a lot of the attention away from that issue that’s still out there,” he said. “That’s why we need a holistic approach to the entire watershed. Maybe this single event will cause that holistic response.”

The EPA listed 48 mining-related sites in its Superfund proposal, all around the Silverton area. However, New Mexico officials maintained Wednesday a real cleanup of the watershed should include other contaminating sites from Silverton to Lake Powell.

“The elephant in the room right now is we don’t trust the government, and that’s focused at the EPA,” Dembowski said. “Why aren’t they answering questions?”

New Mexico officials claim the EPA hasn’t justified important data, such as metal levels in the water returning to pre-spill conditions, and failed to answer simple questions about the temporary water-treatment plant, which led the state to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

San Juan County Commissioner Kim Carpenter, who referred to the post-Gold King spill world as “hell,” made it clear he too is no fan of the EPA.

“There’s a lot of resentment over the mine spill,” he said.

“In every state there’s a fight about water. And sometimes we overlook the fact we have to fight for what we have, not just what we want.”

However, Carpenter said New Mexico communities along the Animas and San Juan watershed are “at the mercy of where it all starts,” and for real cleanup efforts to begin, “the blaming has to stop.”

Virginia McLemore, with the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, begrudgingly agreed that although relationships between communities along the watershed might not historically be fair, they must work toward a shared goal.

“For years, Colorado gets the financial benefits, and we have to deal with the metal laden sludge,” she said. “But this is a problem that affects us all, and we have to trust the federal agencies will do their part.”

Location map for abandoned mine near Silverton. The Silver Wing is in the upper right corner of the aerial.

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

It was John Muir’s favorite bird.

“He is the mountain streams’ own darling, the humming-bird of blooming waters, loving rocky ripple-slopes and sheets of foam as a bee loves flowers, as a lark loves sunshine and meadows,” he wrote in 1894.

On and off for 30 years, Muir, regarded as America’s most influential naturalist, noted the American Dipper in his explorations of Yosemite, and saw the bird as intrinsically tied with the life of the rivers.

“They scarce suggest any other origin than the streams themselves; and one might almost be pardoned in fancying they come direct from the living waters, like flowers from the ground.”

And now, more than 120 years later, a community reeling from a mine spill that has reinvigorated questions over the Animas River basin’s health will monitor the bird to gain a better understanding of the local watershed.

“I think the spill served to highlight we live in a really contaminated watershed,” said Kimberly Johnson, a volunteer with the American Dipper Project. “So a group of us bird aficionados got together to look at the river from a wildlife point of view.”

[…]

While the spill caused no immediate die-off of fish and other aquatic life, the heavy-metal laden sediment deposited in the river has raised concerns about the long-term health of aquatic species.

University of Saskatchewan biologist Christy Morrissey said the American Dipper – a bird she researched to earn her doctorate – is the “perfect indicator of water quality.”

“Basically, just the presence of dippers will indicate the suitability of the habitat. Then you can measure a lot of things, contaminate-wise, which are useful for understanding the effects of something like a mine spill.”

The American Dipper, a sooty gray bird with a tail that points upward, lives its entire life on a river, rarely straying more than a few meters from the fast-moving, cold water.

Weighing about 2 ounces, North America’s only aquatic songbird can dive and spend up to 30 seconds under water, upturning rocks for aquatic insects, such as stoneflies, mayflies and caddisflies, midges and even small fish.

Yet for how stalwart the bird is – it’s been noted to withstand negative 40-degree air temperatures in Montana – the avian diver is extremely vulnerable to instability in a river’s ecosystem.

Pete Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, said if a dipper’s food source begins to decline, the bird has been known to decrease in numbers along rivers, and in some cases, completely abandon waterways.

In a reverse situation, after a dam in Washington was removed, Marra said a flailing population of dippers almost immediately rebounded as salmon were able to reach upstream and reproduce, thereby providing an essential food source for the bird.

“We used dippers to show how rapidly a river system can rebound,” Marra said. “But they can also be used as evidence of how contaminant releases affect ecosystems.”

A 10-month study on aquatic bugs, which are known to accumulate metals over time, will be released later this week, said Scott Roberts, an aquatic biologist with Mountain Studies Institute, which is part of a multi-year monitoring program on the Animas.

And while the institute and others look below the surface, a group of self-organized volunteers operating under the name The American Dipper Project will keep a lookout above this summer.

The project extends along the Animas from behind Home Depot all the way to Silverton. Volunteers are assigned a stretch of the river and asked to visit three times throughout the summer, for a minimum of 20 minutes.

“Not long enough to disturb but long enough to observe what they’re doing,” said Kristi Dranginis, an organizer and owner of Bird Mentor.

Dranginis said the project’s first-year goal is to identify where nests of the American Dipper are located along the Animas. And then in following years, since the bird is non-migratory, behavior such as reproduction can be further analyzed.

“There was a feeling after the spill of what can we do?” said Shelley Silbert, executive director of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness, which is supporting the effort. “This project offers people who are not scientists, or even really skilled bird watchers, to get involved and contribute.”

With no historical data on the bird, Dranginis hopes to correlate the dipper’s habitat with state and federal findings on metal levels. If a particular dipper’s behavior takes a downturn, the group would ultimately like to test the bird – either through blood or its feathers – for any abnormalities or bio-accumulations.

But that’ll be difficult, Morrissey said. Field studies are almost never sufficient to pinpoint the effect of contaminates on a species, she said, and other environmental factors further entangle research.

“That said, it’s additional evidence that’s supposed to get regulators info that can give some clues,” Morrissey said. “And if the pattern holds, even with variations, then you have a greater support for your hypothesis that it’s whatever the disturbance is that’s caused the problem.”

From The Durango Herald (Jonathan Romeo):

Halfway through a public comment period, a mere five short responses have been posted regarding the proposed Superfund designation for the mining district north of Silverton…

In the wake of the blowout, impromptu emergency meetings lighted up with bombardments toward federal agents and impassioned calls for a swift and immediate cleanup of the river.

Social media transformed into a stomping ground for the concerned, the opinionated and the distrustful – an Aug. 6, 2015, Durango Herald report generated 404 comments. And months later, several Facebook groups cropped up, dedicated to the spill.

As alarmed anger transformed into serious conversations on how to address the long-standing problem of metal loading in the Animas watershed, an even more controversial prospect entered: a Superfund designation that had been opposed for nearly two decades by Silverton and San Juan County.

Yet pressure from downstream communities swelled. After much negotiation and discussion with the EPA, Superfund listing was sought by area and state officials. Labeled the Bonita Peak Mining District that includes 48 mining-related sites, a 60-day public comment period began on April 6.

But now, it seems the flood of convictions has subsided to a trickle of concerns.

The few responses include the plain and simple: “Add the Bonita Peak Mining District in San Juan County, CO to the NPL.”

The wary: “Yes it’s scary that this could or already has happened again, but as a tourious (sic), that loves to go ATVING with my family to see all the history of the area, I’m afraid that by cleaning up all these sites, the tourisium (sic) with (sic) domenish (sic) and the towns of Silverton, Oray (sic), and many others will suffer.”

[…]

And another disagreed with inclusion of the Little Nation mine, located in the Upper Animas, on the listing.

“The Little Nation mine has no water discharge,” wrote Brad Clark, pinning a nearby drainage tunnel as the culprit discharging mine wastewater into a wetland…

First, the pre-problem stage, in which an existing issue alarms experts, but hasn’t captured much public attention. Then comes alarmed discovery: an event that thrusts the problem into the spotlight, and jars people to awareness, who in turn call for a quick fix.

In the final three stages general interest wanes. The public realizes there are no silver bullets; solutions are complicated and time intensive. Some feel discouraged, overwhelmed or bored and the issue recedes to the backgrounds of people’s minds.

And by that time, a new problem has taken its place.

Brian Burke, a psychology professor at Fort Lewis College, agreed. He said the sight of orange water activated public interest. But now, it’s out of sight, out of mind.

“The problem is much more complicated than the EPA making a mistake and leaking some disgusting poison into our river,” he said. “The problem requires critical thinking, and most people won’t take the time to do that.

“Now that it’s not orange anymore, it’s harder to notice, although pollutants are being dumped daily.”

Location map for abandoned mine near Silverton. The Silver Wing is in the upper right corner of the aerial.

Location map for abandoned mine near Silverton. The Silver Wing is in the upper right corner of the aerial.

From The Durango Herald (Jessica Pace):

Environmental Protection Agency officials say by next month they intend to provide La Plata and San Juan counties a list of tasks it expects to complete in 2016 at the proposed Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site.

“Next month, we could provide a more comprehensive briefing on 2016 activities, where we will collect data and figure out what questions that data will answer,” Superfund project manager Rebecca Thomas said in a brief meeting with Durango city councilors and La Plata County commissioners Thursday afternoon.

The rest of the year includes plans for a hydrology study to evaluate risks to human health and water quality as well as an evaluation of historic and cultural resources in the area.

Thomas said the sampling will answer the question of which mining sites, if any, can be quickly remedied and removed from the National Priorities List, such as those contributing to Mineral Creek, which is less complex than the areas surrounding the Upper Animas River and Cement Creek.

Thursday’s meeting was largely a repeat of information from the EPA, though local officials had questions and comments about the process.

“There are a lot of people in Durango concerned it could happen again,” City Councilor Sweetie Marbury said, referring to the EPA-triggered Gold King Mine spill on Aug. 5 that ejected 3 million gallons of metal-laden water into regional watersheds.

“How will you identify the risk areas to prevent another spill happening?”

Thomas said one of the leading priorities for the Superfund team will be to examine draining adits to assess their structural stability.

Thomas said the EPA is deciding whether to expand the Gold King Mine treatment facility to treat other nearby drainage sources.

The Bonita Peak Mining District near Silverton contains 48 mine-related sites and was recommended for placement on the Federal Register for Superfund designation on April 7. The EPA now seeks comments from the public, which can be submitted online at the EPA Superfund Program Bonita Peak Mining District page.

The Superfund managerial team will return for updates the week of May 23.

Meanwhile, Animas River pollution has many sources. Here’s a report from Jonathan Romeo writing for The Durango Herald

With much of the recent focus on the Cement Creek drainage, the major sources for metal loading into the reaches of the Upper Animas River remain a bit of a mystery for researchers.

Yet Sunnyside Gold Corp.’s four massive tailings ponds along the Upper Animas River – about a mile northeast of Silverton, above the confluence with Cement Creek – have long been under suspicion.

“From Arrastra Gulch down to Silverton, there is a substantial amount of metal loading, and it’s not clear where that is coming from,” said Peter Butler, a coordinator with the Animas River Stakeholder’s Group. “The sources are not as identifiable as Cement Creek.”

From the late 19th century to the early 20th century, miners routinely dumped any by-product from metal extraction directly into rivers or lakes throughout the highly productive Silverton caldera.

In the 1930s, Sunnyside began hauling ore from Gladstone through Silverton and up what is now County Road 2 to the Mayflower Mill for processing. Only 5 percent of the ore contained precious metals.

The leftover 95 percent of waste rock, which usually contained heavy metals that included cadmium, copper and lead, was dumped beside the mill until 1992. The four piles now stretch about a mile and a half.

Sunnyside over the years has conducted numerous projects to reduce the leeching of metals into the Upper Animas, including covering the piles with clay to reduce the entry of water and digging diversions to prevent groundwater from seeping into the ponds.

Still, high concentrations of metals continue to load, according to data collected by the stakeholder’s group. Butler said in March and April, more concentrations of metals can enter the river along that stretch than all the loading that discharges from Cement Creek, considered the worst polluter in the mining district.

On Tuesday, Silverton native Larry Perino, a spokesman for Sunnyside, revealed the results of sampling conducted last year during high-flow and low-flow points to the stakeholder’s group.

Water samples taken within the tailings pond showed levels of cadmium, copper and six other metals that exceeded Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment standards. Within the Animas River along that stretch, cadmium and copper were the only metals in excess.

However, the results leave many gaps for researchers characterizing the watershed. Testing occurred only a few days in May and September, and neglected the historically high period of metal concentrations that occur in March and April.

When questioned, Perino doubted the veracity of the historical data and cited the company’s tight time frame for testing. He later added those months would have been difficult to take samples given the inclement weather.

“I think it’s impossible (to draw conclusions) unless you’re out there weekly,” said Perino, adding the company has no further plans to test this summer.

Regardless, the next steps for remediating the tailings ponds are unknown. The site, owned mostly by Sunnyside, a subsidiary of mining conglomerate Kinross, is included on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Superfund listing, raising uncertainty over jurisdiction and responsibility. Sunnyside, one of the region’s largest and longest running mining operations, could be targeted as a potentially responsible party, despite years of undergoing voluntary cleanup projects aimed at being cleared of further liability.

“Right now, there are no formal agreements between EPA and Sunnyside,” said Rebecca Thomas, the EPA’s manager for the Superfund site. “So if they chose to collect data, that’s certainly their prerogative. We’ve had a cooperative relationship historically, and I think that will stay.”

Doug Jamison with the state health department said it’s too early to draw conclusions on just how much Sunnyside’s tailings contribute to the overall metal loading in the Animas watershed.

“I think there’s a lot of evaluation that needs to be done,” he said. “On the other side of the valley, there are also some potential sources.”

Indeed, of the 48 mine-related waste sites included in the Superfund listing, nearly 30 are along the stretches of the Upper Animas.

Perino said testing was done at Howardsville, above the tailings, to compare how water quality changed during its flow downstream, but he did not have that information available.

In the coming summer months, the tailings – designated a National Historic Landmark in 2000 – will be the subject of further scrutiny.

“In general, I think people were hoping (Tuesday) for a more definitive answer,” Butler said. “But I think what we learned is that it’s a difficult thing to figure out.”