Days ago, the Associated Press reported that an Environmental Protection Agency truck crashed and spilled sludge into a creek near Silverton in southwestern Colorado. That was nothing like the disaster the EPA wrought on Aug. 5, 2015, when its contractors released 3 million gallons of metals-laden water into Cement Creek, the Animas River, and the San Juan River and created an 80-mile plume of orange water.
Last year, I urged then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on his visit to Colorado to adopt “a new approach” as a national model “to the benefit of millions of Americans.” Sadly, he failed. It is time for officials in Washington to exercise adult supervision, clean up the EPA’s mess, and be a good neighbor.
In the 1880s, Silverton attracted those searching for silver and gold. In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, establishing the Superfund program, to reclaim hazardous sites, including mines, and charged the EPA with enforcement. To avoid the consequences of being designated as responsible for a Superfund site and to ensure the value of their claims, San Juan County miners invested millions of dollars in remediation and joined with local citizens in so doing. Unfortunately, the EPA is a bad neighbor. In the wake of its spill, the EPA designated 100,000 acres a Superfund site, subjecting locals to civil and criminal liability. That is not all.
The EPA has jurisdiction over several old mines (the infamous Gold King, for example) and the ability to process effluence from them through its water treatment facility. With the world watching, Coloradoans assumed the EPA would run that facility at full capacity. Instead, the EPA allowed hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated acidic water carrying hundreds of thousands of pounds of metals to flow through the federally-owned American Tunnel portal and directly into Cement Creek. When locals became suspicious, an unnamed EPA employee fired back, “[T]he plant is running the way it was designed to.” Only to written questions from Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Colo., did the EPA admit the plant “has the capacity to treat up to 1200 gallons per minute of water [but] is currently treating over 600 gallons per minute.” Nonetheless, the EPA insists it is “not diverting any mine-impacted water around the treatment plant,” despite photographic evidence that shows otherwise.
Meanwhile, the EPA plans to spend millions of dollars on projects with little or no environmental benefit. Locals are not deceived. Ty Churchwell, San Juan Mountains Coordinator for Trout Unlimited, said “[The EPA] could bring the already-existent treatment facility to full capacity [causing] an almost immediate and measurable reduction in metals impacting our beloved Animas.” Peter Butler, co-coordinator of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, declared, “You could get a lot bigger bang for the buck in treating [these mines] and get substantially more metal reductions than you will with these kinds of projects[.] Maybe even 10 times.”
Finally, the EPA, to evade responsibility for its mess, is taking corporate hostages as it did in the bad early days of Superfund — a practice Congress tried to end decades ago. The EPA is ordering Sunnyside Gold Corporation, which operated in the Silverton Caldera from 1986 to 1991 and engaged in three decades of remediation and reclamation beginning in 1988, to perform costly, wasteful, and useless investigations. Engineering and Mining Journal, reporting on Sunnyside’s mining and reclamation efforts, called it “incontrovertible” that metals loading in the Animas River are “substantially reduced” and “but for” Sunnyside’s actions, “metals levels in the Animas River, and impacts on aquatic life, including the trout fishery downstream of Silverton, would undoubtedly be more adverse.” Compare that with the EPA’s refusal to run its water treatment plant at capacity. Little wonder it is targeting Sunnyside, but no one is fooled.
As the third anniversary of the EPA’s Gold King disaster approaches, westerners hope the new EPA administrator will take charge of his agency, including the Deep State mischief makers in Colorado.
William Perry Pendley is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, has argued cases before the Supreme Court and worked in the Department of the Interior during the Reagan administration. He is the author of Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan’s Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today.
