Keyword: goldkingmine
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In the wake of the train derailment that caused a huge environmental disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, Michael Barasch, a top lawyer for issues related to the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, is warning the public not to trust the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA is insisting that the air is safe. Barasch led the charge to inform hundreds of thousands of people that they were entitled to compensation for the health problems they’d experienced as a result of breathing in poisonous dust from the World Trade Center after the attacks. He says he still has clients who are...
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On August 5, five years to the day after suffering from a 3-million-gallon spill of heavy-metal-laden toxic wastewater from Colorado’s Gold King Mine, the State of Utah announced a settlement of its claims against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several EPA contractors (who thus far have not been held responsible, accountable or liable) for their alleged negligence in allowing the spill. The notorious, devastating accident turned Cement Creek and the Animas, San Juan and Colorado Rivers yellow all the way from Colorado through New Mexico and Utah and into Lake Powell. The settlement is good news. Yet those whose...
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Gina McCarthy and Deb Haaland are on Biden’s climate team. This should be interesting given both of their ties to the disastrous Gold King Mine spill of 2015. That year, a mine up near Silverton, Colorado was under clean-up protocols by the EPA. The same EPA that Gina McCarthy was running at the time. Then, the spill happened. The Animas River turned into yellow sludge from southwestern Colorado all the way into and nearly through New Mexico. Who lives in New Mexico and just the year before lost her bid to be NM Lieutenant Governor? Joe Biden’s new choice for...
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On the fifth anniversary of the notorious spill of 3 million gallons of heavily contaminated acid mine water from the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the State of Utah announced an agreement that ends the state’s lawsuit. Neither the EPA nor the contractors involved at the Gold King spill site are entirely off the hook for their alleged missteps that resulted in downstream damages. Lawsuits filed by the Navajo Nation, the State of New Mexico, and a group of Navajo farmers and ranchers have been consolidated, and discovery is proceeding, with a projected...
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A U.S. appeals court panel sided with the Trump administration Friday in a mining pollution dispute, ruling that state and federal programs already in place ensure that companies take financial responsibility for future cleanups. The ruling came after the administration was sued by environmental groups for dropping an Obama-era proposal that would have forced companies to put up money to show they have resources to clean up pollution. The mining industry has a legacy of bankrupt companies abandoning polluted sites and leaving taxpayers to cover cleanup costs. But the three-judge panel with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District...
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EPA just started hauling waste from treatment plant to new storage site. A truck hauling sludge from the Environmental Protection Agency’s water-treatment plant for the Gold King Mine went off the road Monday and crashed into Cement Creek. ... The EPA just started on June 15 hauling sludge from the water treatment plant, about 10 miles north of Silverton in an area known as Gladstone, to a historic mine waste pile, called the Kittimac, along County Road 2. The trip is 10 to 15 miles one way, but involves windy, mountainous dirt roads. Three months after the EPA triggered the...
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Critics fear move will impact upper Animas River aquatic life. Could the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to haul waste from the Gold King Mine to the banks of the upper Animas River put undue stress on a fishery already struggling to survive? ... Three months after the EPA triggered the Gold King Mine blowout in August 2015, the agency built a temporary water-treatment plant, in an area known as Gladstone, 10 miles north of Silverton within the Cement Creek watershed. But for the past year, the EPA has said room is running out at Gladstone to store the waste byproduct...
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After almost two years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General released its report on the Gold King Mine disaster that dumped over a million pounds of metals into the Animas River, turning dozens of miles of the river orange. While inspectors general are tasked with finding out the truth and holding agencies accountable, this recently released report sheds no more light on the disaster than previous misleading reports. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has inherited not only an environmental mess, but also the mess created by an agency more interested in its narrow self-interests than truth. Pruitt now has...
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Shortly after the EPA triggered the release, to obscure and limit its own liability, the EPA created the Bonita Peak Mining District—around the Gold King Mine—and made the Superfund designation. Past EPA studies found the area did not merit inclusion on the National Priorities List. ... EPA’s Attempt to Bury its Colorado Gold Mine Disaster is Illegal. ... Mountain States Legal Foundation for its clients ... advised the three-judge panel that the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), pursuant to the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA or Superfund statute), designated what it erroneously called the Bonita Peak...
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A spill at a U.S. Steel plant in northern Indiana that sent wastewater containing a potentially carcinogenic chemical into a Lake Michigan tributary was apparently caused by a pipe failure, the steelmaker said Wednesday. Tuesday’s spill of an unknown amount of wastewater led to the closure of two beach areas at the scenic Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and prompted a local water utility to stop drawing water from the lake out of “an abundance of caution,” the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said. U.S. Steel said a preliminary investigation shows an expansion joint failed Tuesday in a pipe at its Portage,...
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Republicans and Democrats have criticized the agency’s decision to ignore victims associated with the Gold King Mine spill, which released 3 million gallons of dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and arsenic into the Animas River. Citizens of the Rocky Mountain state are relying on the incoming Trump administration to require that the EPA pay damages in the wake of a massive agency-caused toxic water spill in Colorado. Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, a tribe whose water supply was affected by spill, said he’s hoping Congress and the Trump administration will force the EPA to take responsibility. “There is no reason...
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The Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday it will not repay claims totaling more than $1.2 billion for economic damages from a mine waste spill the agency accidentally triggered in Colorado, saying the law prohibits it. 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. …
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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 Friday 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. […] New Mexico Environment Secretary Butch Tongate accused the EPA of...
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The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday said it plans to require mining companies to show they have the financial wherewithal to clean up their pollution so taxpayers aren’t stuck footing the bill. The proposal follows a 2016 agreement reached under court order for the government to enforce a long-ignored provision in the 1980 federal Superfund law. The requirement would apply to hardrock mining, which includes mines for precious metals, copper, iron, lead and other ores. It would cover mines and processing facilities in 38 states, requiring their owners to set aside sufficient money to pay for future clean ups. The...
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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials improperly withheld information from The Daily Caller News Foundation confirming its reporting that the contractor responsible for the August 2015 Gold King Mine spill was awarded nearly $2.7 million not long after the disaster. The EPA internally acknowledged the award and crafted a response to TheDCNF’s finding, according to emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, but the response was never sent to the news organization. (RELATED: Feds Obstruct Media Probe By Blocking Interviews With Key Officials) “It just slipped through the cracks,” EPA spokeswoman Melissa Harrison told TheDCNF 32 minutes after deadline. “It...
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The Environmental Protection Agency has spent millions of dollars over the last decade on military-style weapons to arm its 200 “special agents” to fight environmental crime. Among the weapons purchased are guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities, according to a new report by the watchdog group Open the Books. “Protecting the environment just got real. With millions of dollars spent on military style weaponry, the EPA is now literally ensconced with all institutional force,” said Adam Andrzejewski, founder of Open the Books and the author...
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Meanwhile it’s not safe for anybody now that Barry’s come out of the school bathroom and into the parkland The Pirate in the Oval Office is not only fleecing American citizens out of more than 265 million acres of public lands and waters, he’s rubbing their noses in his park acquisition on his way out of the door. Barack ‘Captain-Kidd-you-not” Obama spent Father’s Day weekend hanging out in the park.
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The federal government says filtered tap water is safe for everyone in Flint, Michigan, lifting a recommendation that pregnant women, nursing mothers and children under 6 drink only bottled water to avoid lead exposure. The announcement Thursday is based on tests of filters that have been distributed for months for free by the state of Michigan and the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency says the filters remove or reduce lead to well below the action level of 15 parts per billion. …
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March for Environmental Hope A real thing, Jimmy. If truth is stranger than fiction, it should come as no surprise that Friday marks the start of the first-ever pro-nuclear power march — probably in world history — and it all starts in San Francisco. The March for Environmental Hope, a four-day trek from the City by the Bay to Sacramento, is being pitched as a family-friendly event — and in this case that means more than funnel cakes and bounce houses. Organizers are hoping to tug on the collective heart strings of America by making this about the children, as...
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Now that many environmentalists and climate scientists have realized that nuclear energy is essential for addressing global warming, a coalition of environmental groups is sponsoring a multi-day March for Environmental Hope in California in support of nuclear power
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