Believed to be approximately a million gallons heavy with zinc, lead, arsenic gushed into Cement Creek then Animas River. Towns along the river have cut off water temporarily and all river activity is halted.
The general cause is already known. A company bought property with a mine. The company never mined. The mine contained contaminated waste water and there are reasons for believing the mine did not produce all that contamination by itself, it is believed that much of the wastewater collected there over time as the mines were abandoned. The EPA is investigating that. During a hiatus the EPA backfilled a large hole, upon returning heavy equipment created an opening before the wastewater was pumped out as planned.
The corporation has released a couple statements saying they had nothing to do with what happened and blaming EPA.
This is the Four Corners area where the borders of four western states cross neatly as squares. Silverton and Durango, two tiny towns tucked into the bottom corner of Colorado. Durango, the town that is more active, keeps an old train running between the two. The short tourist train ride between the two towns is worth the effort of going there. You are guaranteed the most extraordinary photographic opportunities right from the train no matter the time of year.
The mine itself is located in Aztec New Mexico.
Video removed. Unable to disable autoplay. Too bad. It is a very good video available below at the Channel 9 News link.
Channel 9 News 2
Michelle Malkin
Google [epa animas]
Google images [animas river, colorado]
ABC News Twitter with people commenting.
20 comments:
Aztec?
They must have thought it was in Mexico, so it would go unnoticed.
Another federal agency looking out for the public.
The EPA should pay fines and cleanup costs out of their operating budget, and pension funds, and figure out how to deal with that just like a private company would. No billing the taxpayers.
The environment got a knock on the door. "Hi we're from the EPA, and we're here to help.
I tried turning auto-play off, but was unsuccessful.
Howdy.
I notice the media isn't digging deep into this story beyond the shocking images. How typical. Is investigative reporting dead? Yes yes yes the yellow water is disgusting, incredibly gross and extremely alarming. Th EPA screws-up and accidentally dumps millions of gallons of mine waste into a major river....
How exactly?
Why?
What was all that nasty mine waste doing there to begin with? Is this an old mine or a new mine?
Not this trip (I just got back from Lake City and CB) but I've traveled the long distance to SW CO for vacations in the past and the Animas river is a particularity lovely stretch of river. It's unusually blue. Many of CO rivers run clear (or tinged with brown or green), not really blue. The Animas is blue.
There are 3 mountain passes that take you from Durango north to Silverton and into Ouray. A lot of old mines are dotted along the way. Years ago I drove the 3 passes north from Durango to Ouray and noticed yellow water running along one small creek toward Ouray. At the time I thought it was gross and wondered why and where ... and how come nobody is alarmed?
EPA shouldn't be a joke. after readying the local paper in CB about toxic mines near Crested Butte that are potentially ready to spill their poison into local water supplies and how the EPA plans to place a concrete plug in one of the mines... I do think we need some entity (yeah - a non-corrupt/non-politicized competent agency would be nice) looking after water quality. Instead of wasting time labeling carbon a pollutant.
readying = reading. dang autokorext
If the leak be made profitable for the corporation doing the mining would that be a good thing?
I can take the video down. It's at the link. The thing is, it's a surprisingly good video. They get right to it. No messing around with preliminaries and inconsequentialities.
But right now I'm minorly bummed out with myself.
I read an article about finding new proof of Jesus and it was no such thing. Then at the end another article is suggested about Egypt and I'm all, "ace!" and I go there. They found a new tomb of the wife of a guy named Neferefre and I go, there's the nefer and there's the Re, "beautiful Re" but what the heck does "fre" mean? Never hoid of it. So I look. Turns out: Beautiful is Re or Re is Beautiful. ORLY? How did they say "is" or "to be" what does "fre" really mean? I looked all over.
I opened my copy of or Mark Vargas hieroglyphic dictionary, vast at 2,000 pages of itty bitty pictures, Looked for all those things, "fre" and get all kind of irrelevant results, "to be" all kind of irrelevant results, and same with "is."
So I drop that line of pursuit and try something else. Just show me the name in hieroglyphics and I'll translate them myself. There's gonna be nefer and there's gonna be Re but what will fre turn out to be?
Pffft.
It's the short stubby snake "f" sound. It is a possessive. It means "his" it is a masculine marker. It means "father." And it turns things grammatically masculine, a modifier that makes words comport. It says very clearly in pictures Goodness/(beauty) father Re.
That nefer banjo thing is everywhere. More so in female names than male names. The f snake is even more places. And Re, of course, is everywhere too even on the modern Japanese flag, bang, right there, Re stark red dot on white Japanese sheet.
I read it wrong. It wasn't fre. Never was. They had it right all along; Nefer-ef-re.
Mining is profitable. We use all sort of products that contain metals and other things that were mined. It's nasty business.
Mining is nasty nasty nasty - look at what China mines and dumps. I for one, would rather go without the product and have clean water.
AS for this particular spill, I want to know more. I don't have enough information from our oh-so-hackTastic pretty-boy media.
Yep if a private company spilled just 1,000 gallons in a creek, Action News,CNN etc would be running stories night after night.
The video above is really amazing. Welcome to china.
Remember in "Ghostbusters" when Dickless shut down the grid?
I thought we (supposedly) wanted to be more like China…
It's actually interesting. I heard David Stockman yesterday predicting global markets collapsing on account of the unsustainable party economics of China.
R & B - The only pols who have stated openly they want the US to be more like China are Hillary and Tom Friedman.
Every Republican I hear mention China says that our labor standards need to be competitive with theirs.
EPA is going to say they need more money.
They were there doing an investigation along the lines April Apple describes. There is reason to believe the waste seeped from one mine to another in link and settled at Aztec. EPA were working on the case and halted its investigation for a season. They plugged a pipe and filled a large hole.
Upon returning they were supposed to drain the wastewater first. This is their reason for being. Protecting water supply. It would be a gigantic job. They set right to work digging back the hole to get at the plug that burst through.
Now they're investigating what went wrong.
You're right, we need something like that. We have something like that. Something like that and much more with it.
Then once they have the money to properly clean up a million gallons of poisoned water and now to clean up the river, they'll use it for that and for whatever other direction they chose to expand their purview, a ploy we see through and nothing that's new they always did screw us with the fits that they threw they piss in a river that once was clear blue and that's where resentment and resistance grew and people said, this, we've been through, and poo on all you and they tossed their wood shoe then went home for a brew.
R & B - On the spliced and diced Jon Stewart show? I've never heard that.
We have no choice but to compete with China. The D's want to do it from on high, command and control, like the kind of power the Chinese government have over their people.
CNN/via Drudge
"According to the EPA, the spill occurred when one of its teams was using heavy equipment to enter the Gold King Mine, a suspended mine near Durango. Instead of entering the mine and beginning the process of pumping and treating the contaminated water inside as planned, the team accidentally caused it to flow into the nearby Animas River. Before the spill, water carrying "metals pollution" was flowing into a holding area outside the mine."
Any accountability for such incompetence? No breath holding. You'll turn blue -- or orange.
"Officials said they believe the spill carried heavy metals, mainly iron, zinc and copper, from the mine into a creek that feeds into the Animas River. From there, the orange water plugged steadily along through the small stretch of winding river in southern Colorado and across the state border to New Mexico where the Animas meets the San Juan River. The EPA said it will continue to sample water downstream from the mine until the contamination has passed and it determines there are "no additional concerns for aquatic life or water users." When asked if the spill could affect drinking water, the EPA spokesperson said she did not yet know."
don't know? that's Clintonian speak for- we don't recall. We forgot. Not our fault. We aren't scientists and what diff does it make?
Post a Comment