Gold King Mine - a systemic failure

Congress Is as Much to Blame for the Gold King Mine Spill as the EPA

An investigation by the United States Environmental Protection Agency at Colorado’s Gold King mine went badly awry earlier this month, triggering a spill of zinc, iron, copper, and other heavy metals into Cement Creek. From there, three million gallons of polluted water flowed into the Animas River and eventually Lake Powell. As the mustard-colored plume crept south, three states and the Navajo Nation declared states of emergency.

Since the August 5th incident, EPA critics have heaped blame on the agency. Florida senator Marco Rubio called the agency “arrogant.” Representative Scott Tipton of Colorado said, “If a mining operator or other private business caused the spill to occur, the EPA would be all over them.”

You can insert your own joke here about members of Congress accusing others of arrogance and unaccountability. A more serious point to make, though, is that Congress created this situation. The American West is speckled with thousands of abandoned mines dangerous to both environmental and human welfare, and the EPA has been left to clean up the mess without adequate resources. Politicians—the people tasked with providing those resources—are as much to blame for the disaster as the EPA.

A DIRTY HISTORY

If you wanted to open a mine around the turn of the 20th century, the federal government only had two demands: Provide adequate ventilation and don’t employ miners younger than 13. That was it. There were no inspections and certainly no environmental standards. State regulations were equally spare. Pollution simply wasn’t a major concern in the era when Gold King—and thousands more now-abandoned mines—operated.

“I’ve spoken to older miners who worked in the 1920s and '30s,” says Ron Cohen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. “They didn’t think about disrupting the environment. They were supporting the economic development of the country through two world wars. This was their front.”

The environmental bill, however, would eventually come due. For example, many hard-rock mines, like Gold King, contain pyrite, or “fool’s gold.” When pyrite is exposed to air and water, it creates a solution that can leach heavy metals out of the surrounding rock. This toxic cocktail, known as acid mine drainage, flows out of many abandoned mines around the country.

THE SCALE OF THE PROBLEM

Trying to plug every leaky mine in the U.S. is a colossal task. A typical mine has several features that can contribute to water contamination, including entryways, dams, and holding bins for excavated rocks. Add those together and Colorado alone has 4,670 potential sources of pollution. The state’s abandoned mines release three million gallons of contaminated water into local waterways—the same volume as the Gold King spill—every two days. Many other states face the same problem. California has 5,200 pollution points in and around abandoned mines. Montana, Idaho, Pennsylvania, and Arizona are also burdened by abandoned mines.

In addition to ongoing leaks, accidents at these sites occasionally release huge amounts of effluent all at once. According to data compiled by Cohen, over the last two decades, spills many times the size of the Gold King accident have occurred in abandoned mines in Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, Kentucky, and Arizona.

States don’t have the resources to properly seal up every abandoned mine, either. Colorado estimates that it spends $5,000 to deal with each problem area within a mine. Since the state has 10,818 locations that pose safety hazards, like open mine shafts, in addition to its 4,670 environmental threats, addressing these issues will eventually cost around $80 million—the state’s annual budget for it is $2 million.

Source: Pacific Standard

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Taxonomy

• Decontamination
• Environmental Consequences
• Environmental Engineering