House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, cornered Interior Secretary Sally Jewell Tuesday over an email he says contradicts her statements that a toxic mine spill the Environmental Protection Agency caused last year in Colorado was an “accident.”
The mine blowout released 3 million gallons of heavy-metal-tainted water into the Colorado Animas River and the waterways of New Mexico and Utah. Bishop’s committee recently subpoenaed the Interior Department in February to provide it with email communications between Interior and the Army Corps of Engineers.
Much of what they received back was completely redacted, Bishop said. But one email that Interior sent to the panel, unrelated to the subpoena, was revealing.
The email shows “that less than 48 hours after the blowout, your employee in Colorado talks to the EPA official in charge, and then emails all senior leadership at [the Bureau of Land Management], and basically says that EPA was deliberately removing a small portion of the plug to relieve pressure in the mine when the blowout occurred.”
Prior to divulging the email, Bishop recited Jewell’s prior testimony to the committee in which she called the blowout accidental. She told Bishop that she sticks to that assessment of the events. But Bishop prodded further.
“There was nothing unintentional about EPA’s actions … .They fully intended to dig out the plug and breach it,” he added. Bishop said it was a “major mistake due to a lack of engineering and planning, but it was done on purpose,” not an accident.
Jewell fired back that the EPA work at the mine was “preparation” in nature, as she testified previously to the committee, and was documented in a report her agency released on the spill last year.
Bishop said that her prior testimony does not go along with the email released at Tuesday’s hearing. Committee aides issued a release quoting Jewell’s testimony from December, when she said: “We did not see any deliberate intent to breach a mine. It was an accident.”
“One of the most frustrating parts, and why we actually subpoenaed documents, you gave us 6,000 pages, much of it redacted of information. But this particular document we only got on the day we submitted the report from this committee that we had to go through and ferret out ourselves,” Bishop told Jewell.
The committee report was issued last month, showing negligence on the part of the EPA in causing the spill, while raising issues about Interior’s lack of credibility in conducting oversight of the agency.
The email released at Tuesday’s hearing came from Brent Lewis, a Colorado official with the Bureau of Land Management who was chronicling EPA’s activities at the time of mine spill. The events were detailed in the email after talking with EPA officials 48 hours after the spill occurred.
The portion raised with Jewell at the hearing reads: “On 8/5/2015, the EPA was attempting to relieve hydrologic pressure behind a naturally collapsed adit/portal of the Gold King Mine. The EPA’s plan was to slowly drain and treat enough mine water in order to access the inner mine working and assess options for controlling its discharge. While removing small portions of the natural plug, the material catastrophically gave way and released the mine water.”
Committee staff said the email raises new questions, such as why Interior would have collected documents responsive to the committee’s requests in November, but not release them until February.
