The Environmental Protection Agency attempted to conceal negligence in causing last year’s toxic wastewater blowout at an abandoned mine in Colorado, according to a report issued Thursday by the House Natural Resources Committee.
“Instead of seeking honest answers about how the blowout occurred, the EPA issued two intentionally misleading reports and used taxpayer dollars to fund a third deceptive report from the Department of the Interior,” the report concludes. “These attempts to conceal incompetence and negligence under the guise of transparency and accountability are shameful.”
It concludes that the EPA should no longer be trusted to do the type of cleanup and remediation it was attempting in Colorado when the spill occurred.
EPA officials said they were looking at the report.
August’s wastewater spill in Colorado sent 3 milllion gallons of toxic sludge into the Animas River in Colorado, sullying the waterways of three states and stoking the ire of both Democrats and Republicans over the agency’s lackluster response.
The report concludes that EPA’s failure to use the proper techniques to relieve water pressure at the Gold King Mine in Silverton, Colo., where it was conducting cleanup of abandoned gold mines, has not been fully explained, despite three reports and numerous hearings with agency officials over the last six months.
There is “no good” explanation for the EPA’s “erroneous conclusions” over how to drain the mine’s wastewater without causing a massive blowout, and why it failed to conduct hydrostatic testing to assess the pressure before signing off on opening the mine.
An Interior Department report said if the EPA had conducted the test, the blowout and wastewater spill would have been prevented. It also said the test had been used by the EPA and its contractors at other mines in the area but was not used at Gold King.
“EPA’s actions at the site are indefensible,” the committee report says. “It appears that EPA recognized this. Almost immediately, EPA rehired the contractors who were involved in the disaster to help address the mess. Why?” it asks. The motive is not clear.
“While all the answers are not yet known, this report will hopefully prevent the morass of errors, half-truths and outright falsehoods from congealing into common knowledge,” the report concludes.
“If nothing else, the incompetence and willful efforts to evade consequences documented in this report demonstrate that EPA and [the Department of Interior] cannot be trusted to spearhead remediation of sites like the Gold King Mine.”
