Source: http://www.denverpost.com, May 7, 2016
By: Gwen Lachelt
The American people are about to inherit another costly Superfund site, courtesy of inadequate and outdated federal mining regulations. Earlier this month, the EPA recommended that the Gold King Mine in southwest Colorado, which dumped a torrent of mine waste into the Animas River last year, should be added to the list of the nation’s most toxic clean-up sites.
Three million gallons of polluted water laden with arsenic, lead and other harmful contaminants spilled out of the inactive gold mine last August, flowing directly into the Animas River, the lifeblood of Colorado’s La Plata County. The people of southwest Colorado rely on the river for drinking water, to irrigate fields, to sustain wildlife and support a large outdoor recreation industry.
Seven months later and we are healing — slowly. There’s no telling how long the recovery will take, but we can measure it in decades. And the cost of cleanup? In the tens of millions.
The part that stings the most: Mining companies, unlike any other extractive industry, won’t be held responsible for this disaster. It’s the American taxpayer left holding the bag.
That’s right: We have to pay for their pollution. For too long, the mining industry has cheated the system, evading its financial obligations. Time and again, it has skipped town on its toxic messes, leaving taxpayers with the cleanup bills.
Fortunately, we have an opportunity to make sure this doesn’t happen again. A recent U.S. Court of Appeals decision ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to stop letting polluters off the financial hook. The judges have directed the EPA to develop and put into effect so-called financial assurance regulations as required by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, commonly known as the “Superfund” law.
Like a rental deposit, these companies will be required to post funds, up front, to ensure that money will be available for mine cleanup if needed. The rules were required to have been initiated in 1983, but have languished for decades.
Yes, these common-sense protections should have been on the books 30 years ago. Fortunately, the appeals court ruling, recognizing this pattern of delay, includes a binding schedule for the EPA to finally get this done.
But don’t think that will stop certain members of Congress from trying to kill it. The Washington tradition of putting hard-rock mining interests ahead of the American people’s dates back even farther than 1983. Special interests have thwarted every effort to update the fundamental law governing hard rock mining, the 1872 Mining Law.
Since then, we have seen technological advances that demand updating the law. That seems to matter little to these lawmakers who will stop at nothing to fight mining reform, including a new bill introduced by U.S. Sen. Michael Bennett of Colorado that would fund mining cleanups. These same lawmakers then have the gall to attack the EPA for failing to do enough about mining pollution. They’ve gutted other funding for cleanup and spill prevention, and then cynically used the Animas River to attack the agency for political gain.
In other words, we simply don’t have enough money to pay for mine cleanup and spill prevention for the hundreds of thousands of abandoned and inactive mines that litter our country.
Yet there are communities all across the country that rely on their rivers the way we rely on the Animas. Their health and safety depends on assurances that funds will be available if the unthinkable happens to them, as it did to us.
Prevention is far more cost-effective than cleanup, and we have enough messes on our hands already. Cleaning up each of the 142 largest Superfund sites is projected to cost almost $20 billion. Extensive research shows that when financial assurance rules are in place, risky industries have an incentive to adopt safer methods. So if the EPA heeds its own research and drafts strong standards, we’ll see fewer spills.
Metal mining is and will forever be a part of our history in southwest Colorado. It has both bankrolled our towns and left a patchwork of tunnels and pits brimming with toxic waste. Gold King Mine, the source of the Animas River pollution, has been inactive for years. It is one of about 200 inactive and abandoned mines that would, if breached, release their pollution into the Animas.
La Plata County will recover. So will the Animas. The river, like our community, is resilient. Yet there are no illusions that the threat has now passed. Countless other communities remain helplessly exposed. It’s time to turn that burden back where it belongs: on the mining companies responsible for the pollution. The public and the environment have paid the price for too long.