Free Republic

The city of Durango and La Plata County, Colorado, have declared a state of emergency after a federal cleanup crew accidentally released mine waste into the water. An estimated 1 million gallons of waste water spilled out of an abandoned mine area in the southern part of the state last week, turning the Animas River orange and prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to tell locals to avoid it. According to the EPA, the spill occurred when one of its teams was using heavy equipment to enter the Gold King Mine, a suspended mine near Durango. Instead of entering the mine...

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials refused for weeks to share water-quality data with their state counterparts following a blowout of toxic wastewater from a Colorado mine that fouled rivers across the Southwest, New Mexico's top environmental regulator testified Thursday. The move by federal agencies aimed to downplay the severity of the spill, hobbling the state's response to the high levels of arsenic, lead and other contaminants involved in the spill, New Mexico Secretary of Environment Ryan Flynn said. His criticisms, aired before a U.S. House committee investigating the Aug. 5 accident, offered more fodder for congressional Republicans eager to find...

It was a dirty river before, it’s a dirtier river now, we’re moving on. That sums up the attitude of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who testified before two Senate committees today. Democratic lawmakers made excuses for the agency while Republicans hammered at McCarthy to take responsibility for the rusty contaminated sludge her agency unleashed on the Animas River and across three states. ... Has anyone been fired for …? ... Colorado’s Sen. Cory Gardner attended both hearings, and drilled McCarthy on the agency’s appalling lack of telephone etiquette – downstream users weren’t notified until days after the incident. When Gardner...

The Environmental Protection Agency was accused Wednesday of doctoring footage from the Gold King Mine spill, removing the audio of a worker saying, “What do we do now?” During a House committee hearing on the accident, Rep. Bill Johnson, Ohio Republican, showed what he said was an original on-site video taken the day of the Aug. 5 spill, which includes the audio, and then the same video posted on the EPA’s website that beeps out the audio. “The last few seconds of the audio has been removed to prevent the viewers from hearing the team on the ground saying, ‘What...

Sunday the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President released a statement to the public in regards to FEMA and the EPA's refusal for assistance in cleaning up the toxic water in the San Jaun River. "We are extremely frustrated with the news that both FEMA and the U.S. EPA have declined our urgent requests to continue assistance to the Navajo Nation. U.S. EPA caused this entire disaster, they have harmed the people, the water and the land. I appreciated the fact U.S. EPA took responsibility and I was hoping for the U.S. EPA to prove to the...

Managers at the Environmental Protection Agency were aware of the possible risk for a catastrophic “blowout” at an abandoned mine that could release “large volumes” of wastewater laced with toxic metals, according to internal documents released late Friday. EPA released the documents following weeks of prodding from news organizations like The Associated Press. EPA and contract workers accidentally unleashed 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater on Aug. 5 as they inspected the idled Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado. Among the documents is a June 2014 work order for a planned cleanup that noted that the old mine had not...

Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency. It's just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth's preservation, but self-preservation. As always, the government cover-up compounds the crime -- which is why the agency's promise this week to investigate itself has residents across the Rocky Mountains in stitches. Or tears. After the EPA and officials and their contract workers accidentally spilled three million gallons of pent-up toxic sludge on August 5 from a defunct...

The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t responding to claims by Todd Hennis, owner of the Gold King mine in Colorado that the agency coerced him to grant access to his property. Once taking over, of course, EPA’s incompetent attempts to remove debris created a massive 3 million gallon toxic waste spill from the mine. Hennis told the CBS Denver affiliate that unless he allowed the EPA to have access and authority to conduct operations on the site the agency had threatened him with daily fines of $35,000. “When you’re a small guy and you’re having a $35,000-a-day fine accrue against you,...

DENVER—Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s big gulp of water from the formerly orange Animas River wasn’t just icky, it was “reckless and irresponsible,” said New Mexico’s top environmental official. New Mexico environment department secretary Ryan Flynn said Mr. Hickenlooper’s decision to fill up his water bottle from the site of the EPA’s 3-million-gallon wastewater spill in Durango, Colorado, sends the wrong message. “If it’s true, it’s a reckless and irresponsible act by a public official,” said Mr. Flynn in the Farmington (N.M.) Daily Times. “He might as well stick 15 cigarettes in his mouth and light them all at the same...

A week before The EPA disastrously leaked millions of gallons of toxic waste into The Animas River in Colorado, this letter to the editor was published in The Silverton Standard & The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist detailing verbatim, how EPA would foul the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money...

Fenton, Mo., company was tasked with mitigating pollutants from closed mine. Missouri-based Environmental Restoration LLC was the contractor whose work caused a mine spill in Colorado that released an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a major river system ... The EPA, which was overseeing the servicing of the mine, had previously said an unnamed outside contractor was using heavy equipment when it accidentally triggered a breach in the abandoned Gold King Mine, letting out wastewater that had built up inside it. “Environmental Restoration LLC was working at the direction at EPA ... Environmental Restoration is one of...

Dave Taylor, the retired geologist who predicted the EPA project that caused the 3 million gallon toxic spill into the Animas River in Colorado would fail, tells Breitbart News, “I didn’t really know they were going to fool with the Gold King mine in addition to the Red and Bonita mine.”In a July 30 letter to the editor of the Silverton Standard, Taylor predicted that the EPA project to plug the Red and Bonita mine would fail “within 7 to 120 days,” and the 500 gallons per minute flow of toxic waste from those mines which the project stopped temporarily...

Last Wednesday, a small EPA-supervised work crew inspecting the Gold King mine accidentally knocked a hole in a waste pit, releasing at least three million gallons of acidic liquid laden with toxic heavy metals. (ABC) This letter to editor, posted below, was published in The Silverton Standard and The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist, one week before EPA mine spill. The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. It the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development...