A region-wide disaster occurred when an estimated 3 million gallons of water began gushing out of the collapsed portal into the Gold King Mine on Wednesday morning. That the Environmental Protection Agency, whose exploratory work triggered the spill, has struggled to assess and communicate the event and its magnitude is one in a series of ironies surrounding it – beginning long before the agency’s track hoe began digging through the debris in the mine tunnel. More typically, the EPA is on the team of respondents to such spills, entering the scene to assist industry and local and state authorities.
In its efforts to assess the contamination above Silverton and recommend at site-specific cleanup, the EPA triggered an inter-county, state and jurisdictional catastrophe that has implications for a wide range of critical sectors to the entire region. In such an episode, rapid and honest communication and an emergency protocol are essential.
While the EPA’s crew drew the statistical short straw when it unleashed the toxic sludge from the Gold King Mine, the agency is hardly responsible for the circumstances that made the spill so concerning. Because of poor mitigation requirements imposed on mining companies, now long since gone from the Silverton scene, the contamination in Gold King and its cohorts in the vast network of mines has been unaddressed for more than a century, collectively. Further, the area’s geology is itself responsible for the chemical mixture of concern, which was exacerbated by the mining activity. This complexity of cause is compounded by the legal environment, which currently assigns liability for the whole mess to anyone who attempts a cleanup effort, should anything go wrong. The EPA, then, would presumably be the logical choice to take on the task – and will certainly be instrumental to the larger cleanup effort going forward.
In the early moments of the disaster, though, the agency did not perform that role well. As the plume of yellow-orange water made its way through the Animas River on Wednesday and Thursday, the necessary outreach system that should have been in place prior to the digging – just in case, no matter how improbable an event like this may have been – was not. The communication was casual and devoid of details. The plan going forward was not clearly articulated. The level of danger to human health, aquatic life and Animas-dependent crops was anyone’s guess. Questions are amassing from all sectors and agencies throughout the region as they continue to scramble to notify and coordinate with one another. With eyes turned to the EPA for answers as to just how severely the river is contaminated, this is not a time for positive spin.
U.S. Senators Michael Bennet, a Democrat from Denver, and Cory Gardner, a Republican from Yuma, traveled to Durango on Sunday morning to emphasize the need for an expedient plan to address last week’s spill and all its many implications for Southwest Colorado’s ecosystem and economy. Both senators, at a riverside meeting referenced a need for long-term solutions to the multi-faceted problem that led to the disaster. Among these is reforming the liability laws for mine cleanup – an effort that has long languished in Congress. This long-overdue reform could have prevented the Gold King spill; perhaps the much-needed update will be the disaster’s legacy. In the meantime, the EPA must lead the regional community through the fallout with honesty and clarity about what exactly is at stake – and what is needed to address it.
