Secretary of Interior Sally Jewell faced fresh Republican scolding in Congress Wednesday over her agency’s investigation into the summer’s spill of toxic sludge into the waterways of three states, which was caused by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, admonished Jewell’s investigation for not holding anyone at EPA accountable for the spill, which released 3 million gallons of contaminated water from an abandoned mine in Colorado into river systems that stretched to New Mexico and Utah.
“If our goal in the aftermath of this spill is to learn lessons to prevent future disasters, the Interior report is a flop,” Bishop said. “Those that read it come away wondering when the real report will be coming out.”
Bishop and other Republicans at the hearing wondered why Interior did not hold anyone at EPA accountable, which is what Bishop had expected.
The report, which was issued earlier in the fall, showed that the EPA failed to deploy a drilling method to release pressure from the mine, which would have stopped the blowout.
“Instead of holding EPA accountable, the [Interior Department] issued a report that totally glossed over the most critical questions about how and why the spill occurred,” Bishop said. “Far from being objective, it failed to identify decisions internal within EPA that caused the urgency to start digging, which ultimately caused the blowout, rather than wait for technical input.”
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy had said that the Interior report “would uncover these details,” but the investigation does not, Bishop said.
He said the EPA “promised” that the report would show who was at fault and what exactly occurred. Bishop scolded the EPA’s release of additional information Tuesday night as an addendum to its own initial review of the incident.
Democrats defended the agencies, saying Republicans should be focused on the bigger issue at hand: the clean up of the thousands of abandoned mines in the West that pose similar risks as the Colorado spill.
Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the top Democrat on the panel, issued an analysis that showed the “Republican response” to the Gold King Mine spill would take 564 years to clean abandoned mines.
Grijalva said the GOP is coming under criticism for it response to the spill with a series of bills that do nothing to improve the situation in the West, while cutting funds for mine cleanup.
Instead, Republicans on the committee have devoted “considerable time and effort to criticizing the EPA and Department of Interior for their handling of the spill that resulted from EPA contractors trying to clean up an abandoned mine land.”
