EPA readies for oversight after toxic mine spill

“This is going to be a longer-term conversation,” requiring “a lot of congressional input in terms of how we address these mining challenges,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said Thursday, nearly a week after a plume of toxic sludge flooded the river system in Colorado, and is now impacting three states.

The incident was caused when an EPA contractor accidentally ruptured a containment wall at a gold mine in Colorado, resulting in the uncontrollable release of millions of gallons of toxic waste into the freshwater river system.

McCarthy explained that EPA will be reviewing how it treats the thousands of mines in the West to ensure this doesn’t happen again. She said it may take designating the nearly 4,000 mines that EPA oversees as government “Superfund” sites, which would secure federal dollars to invest in cleaning up the mines to prevent another spill.

EPA has been looking for years at designating the mines as Superfund sites, McCarthy said. But its going to take a “longer-term conversation” with the Congress, she said.

She added that these mining challenges are “in no way unique to Colorado, … and we will be looking at them more broadly.” She also said there are multiple investigations being conducted on the incident by the agency, including an internal one, to understand what exactly occurred with the contractor.

Rep. Ben Lujan, D-N.M., who joined McCarthy at a press conference Thursday, said he will be part of an effort in the Congress to address the long-term implications of the crisis. Lujan, along with the entire New Mexican Democratic delegation, had criticized EPA for its lackluster response to the incident, and pressed McCarthy to oversee the response efforts in the western states.

“The response that we are seeing is different than how we got started,” Lujan said. But he said there is still a “responsibility in the Congress to address all of the mines that have to be cleaned up, to make sure sites that need to be designated as Superfund sites get that designation, so those resources are made available, and so we are addressing all those abandoned mines, so this problem does not happen again.”

Others, like Rep. Rob Bishop of Utah, the Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he is readying oversight hearings once Congress comes back into session in September. Both Sens. James Inhofe, the GOP chairman of the Senate environment committee, and Barbara Boxer, the Democratic ranking member on the committee, expressed concerns this week over the incident and the need for it to be addressed by their panel.

McCarthy took full responsibility for the spill earlier this week at an event meant to highlight EPA’s work in combating the threat of global warming. The spill that began in Colorado Aug. 5 had since spread a toxic mix of chemicals from Colorado, through the Animas and San Juan rivers, into New Mexico and Utah.

EPA has come under criticism, not only for creating the spill, but for failures in coordinating its clean-up response.

McCarthy said she will brief the White House on the crisis Friday. She wasn’t sure if President Obama would make a statement, but said when it comes to EPA, “nobody wants to do this the right way more than we do.”

McCarthy also told reporters that the agency wasn’t discouraged in its efforts by media accounts that the Navajo Nation was preparing to sue the agency over its response.

She said EPA is used to getting sued. She said she had met with Navajo officials and the lawsuit didn’t come up in those conversations.

McCarthy said the spill response is ongoing, but that there are indications that at least part of the river system is at “pre-incident conditions.”

The data still needs to be checked, but it “gives us a sense that we are on a trajectory” toward improvement, she said. “But clearly we need to continue to work, not just short term, to look at every segment of the river moving forward,” McCarthy added. “EPA is in it for the long haul as well.”