On August 5th, the Gold King split open while a team contracted by the United States Environmental Protection Agency was investigating the source of the leak. The accident sent a yellow plume south into the Animas River and turned Western waterways into a mustard ribbon, causing three states and the Navajo Nation to declare states of emergency.
The accident heightened a debate in Silverton about the future of this region's old mines and served as a reminder, some critics say, that the Gold King's toxic demise could be repeated at any one of thousands of abandoned mines across the United States.
By 2011 the Gold King was spitting out metal-laced waste at an average rate of 176 gallons per minute, according to EPA data and it was just one of several leaky mines in San Juan County with a discharge rate that residents, local officials and experts called alarming.
In the creek below the mines, tests showed that the water had levels of cadmium and copper more than 10 times the maximum federal standard for a waterway that sustains aquatic life, and the level of zinc was more than 40 times that of the federal standard.
On Saturday, from a viewpoint just across from the Gold King, the flow rate of the mine was still running at 600 gallons a minute, more than three times its typical rate.
SILVERTON, Colorado — It will take many years and many millions of dollars simply to manage and not even remove the toxic wastewater from an abandoned mine that unleashed a 100-mile-long torrent of heavy metals into Western rivers and has likely reached Lake Powell, experts said Thursday.
Plugging Colorado's Gold King Mine could simply lead to an eventual explosion of poisonous water elsewhere, so the safest solution, they say, would be to install a treatment plant that would indefinitely clean the water from Gold King and three other nearby mines. It would cost millions of dollars, and do nothing to contain the thousands of other toxic streams that are a permanent legacy of mining across the nation.
The Gold King delay illustrates a problem dwarfing the 3 million-gallon waste plume accidentally released by contractors working for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency: There are about 500,000 abandoned mines nationwide, and only a fraction have been dealt with, despite decades of effort.
EPA has estimated the cost of cleaning up abandoned mines nationwide, not including coal mines, at between $20 billion and $54 billion.
Many of the abandoned mines — including in the Silverton area where Gold King is located — were developed after an 1872 federal mining law encouraged development and allowed people to lay claim to minerals beneath public lands.
They've since become legacies of the industry's boom-bust cycles, in which companies fold up operations when metals prices fall, leaving behind sources of toxic wastewater that chronically leave rivers barren and taint drinking water supplies.
Of the abandoned mines in the U.S., more than 48,000 had been inventoried through the BLM's Abandoned Mine Lands program, which began after new federal laws focused on environmental protection in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s.
But only about one in five of the inventoried mines is being cleaned up or requires no more action. More than 38,000 await further analysis or work, according to the bureau.
In Colorado alone, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of abandoned mines discharging acid rock drainage, Jamison said. The potent stew of heavy metals accumulates as chemical reactions brew up sulfuric acid at concentrations high enough to dissolve steel, and leach poisons down mountainsides and into groundwater decades after mines close.
The EPA announced Thursday that surface-water testing in Colorado revealed very high levels of lead, arsenic, cadmium and other heavy metals in the middle of the sickly yellow plume released on Aug. 5. These metals far exceeded government exposure limits for aquatic life and humans in the hours after the spill.
Costs also are a major hurdle: Robinson, the former BLM official, said a treatment plant capable of cleaning up the stream of toxins spewing from Gold King and other nearby mines into the Animas River basin would take up to $5 million to build, and much more to operate.
"We're now 25 years down the road of trying to get the Animas cleaned up," he said. "It's time to stop dinking around with the problem and get on with it."
The EPA tested for 24 metals in the spill; One of the most dangerous, lead, was found below Silverton's 14th Street bridge at more than 200 times higher than the acute exposure limit for aquatic life, and 3,580 times higher than federal standards for human drinking water. Levels of arsenic were more than 24 times the exposure limit for fish and 823 times the level for human ingestion. Cadmium was found at more than six times the aquatic limit, 33 times that for humans.
CLQ Price at posting:
19.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
(20min delay)
