Showing posts with label Colorado. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Colorado. Show all posts

Monday, August 24, 2015

FIRE EPA EMPLOYEES, SAYS GEOLOGIST: ‘WHERE IS DONALD TRUMP WHEN YOU NEED HIM?’

Dave Taylor, the retired geologist who predicted the EPA project that caused the massive 3 million toxic spill in Colorado on August 5 would fail, says the EPA employees who caused the spill should be fired as soon as possible.

In a second letter to the editor published in the Silverton Standard on Thursday, Taylorwrote:
When I wrote my Letter to the Editor, published July 30, 2015, I warned of potential problems with the EPA’s Red and Bonita mine plugging scheme. At the time, I had no idea that the EPA could be so incredibly incompetent as to cause the failure of the Gold King Mine plug. Breaching the plug, August 5, 2015, resulted in a catastrophic deluge of 3 million gallons of contaminated water and mine waste that flowed down Cement Creek to the Animas River.
“In my opinion,” Taylor continued, “the EPA employees responsible for the breach should be held accountable and fired ASAP.”
“But of course, that probably won’t happen. Following the VA investigation, which took many months, only one employee was fired,” Taylor noted.
“Where is Donald Trump when you need him?” Taylor asked rhetorically.
“You’re fired!” Taylor added, indicating the message he wanted Trump to send to the EPA employees responsible for the breach.
“In the mining business, one must have the attitude that all accidents are preventable and prepare accordingly,” Taylor wrote.
“Obviously, the EPA was over confident and didn’t take the time to stand back, evaluate and think about how much water was upstream of the plug, what the hydrostatic pressure might be and what could happen if the plug was disturbed,” the retired geologist added.
“Over the years, I have worked on similar delicate projects. I always thought out my most effective Plan ‘A’ and subsequent additional back-up Plans ‘B,’ ‘C’ and ‘D’ just in case ‘Murphy’s Law’ came into play,” he noted.
“I don’t think the EPA even thought about a back-up plan, afterall, they are geniuses and could never make a mistake!” Taylor commented.
“The EPA is going to be covered up with follow-up testing, lawsuits and clean-up efforts,” Taylor predicted.
Taylor just might see Trump follow his recommendation about the firing of EPA employees responsible for the August 5 spill.
On August 13, eight days after the spill, GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump toldtalk radio host Hugh Hewitt, “[t]his is all the more example why EPA, we should do it locally. We shouldn’t be doing it from Washington.”
“Often times for a thing like this, you have to just get rid of them [the bureaucrats in charge],” Trump added. That would presumably include EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who visited Colorado earlier this month but didn’t go to see the site of the spill.

Saturday, August 22, 2015

Mine owner tried to stop EPA from drilling, was threatened with fines

Hey, remember that time when the EPA blew a hole in the side of an abandoned mine and flooded the surrounding river basin with millions of gallons of toxic sludge? Ah… good times, my friends. At the time we wondered if they were going to fine themselves for all of the ecological damage they caused. Well, no such luck, natch. But there were some fines discussed. They came up in conversation when the mine owner tried to keep them from messing around with site. Todd Hennis had some experience with the EPA in the past and they had caused some similar leaks at another property of his. This time he told them he didn’t want them in there messing around, but they made their position clear. (Washington Examiner)
Mr. Hennis said he opposed having the EPA investigate leakage from the inactive mine near Silverton, Colorado, because he had tangled with the agency in previous years over its work at another mine he owns in Leadville, Colorado.
“I said, ‘No, I don’t want you on my land out of fear that you will create additional pollution like you did in Leadville,’” Mr. Hennis told Colorado Watchdog.org. “They said, ‘If you don’t give us access within four days, we will fine you $35,000 a day.’”
The EPA has admitted that its agents accidentally unleashed the acidic flood, which has since contaminated the San Juan River in New Mexico and seeped into Lake Powell in Utah, albeit in very low concentrations.
The Interior Department and the EPA’s Office of Inspector General are investigating the circumstances leading up to the accident, while at least two House committees are also expected to hold hearings on the spill.
It turns out that Watchdog Colorado was all over this earlier in the week and the story seems to check out. There was a dump of a significant amount of toxic chemicals back in 2005 and it was indeed another of Mr. Hennis’s properties.
But the EPA escaped public wrath in 2005 when it secretly dumped up to 15,000 tons of poisonous waste into another mine 124 miles away. That dump – containing arsenic, lead and other materials – materialized in runoff in the town of Leadville, said Todd Hennis, who owns both mines along with numerous others.
“If a private company had done this, they would’ve been fined out of existence,” Hennis said. “I have been battling the EPA for 10 years and they have done nothing but create pollution. About 20 percent (of Silverton residents) think it’s on purpose so they can declare the whole area a Superfund site.”
If Mr. Hennis is correct, the earlier incident was far more egregious. The EPA had collected large quantities of sludge and dumped it down a shaft in the New Mikado mine without telling Hennis that they were doing it. The chemicals later leached into the local water supply. So is somebody going to investigate precisely what these EPA characters have been up to out there in the mountains? Senator John McCain has called for an investigation, but even if they do find that some serious skulduggery has been going on, what do they do after that? I mean, who do we normally call to investigate an environmental disaster and determine what damages, if any, are due? We call the EPA. Are we going to have them investigate themselves?
What could possibly go wrong?

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Obama's Toxic Environmental Pollution Agency by Michelle Malkin

Obama's Toxic Environmental Pollution Agency
Here in my adopted home state of Colorado, orange is the new Animas River thanks to the blithering idiots working under President Obama's Environmental Protection Agency.

It's just the latest man-caused disaster from an out-of-control bureaucracy whose primary mission is not the Earth's preservation, but self-preservation.

As always, the government cover-up compounds the crime — which is why the agency's promise this week to investigate itself has residents across the Rocky Mountains in stitches. Or tears.

After the EPA and officials and their contract workers accidentally spilled three million gallons of pent-up toxic sludge on August 5 from a defunct mine in San Juan County that hadn't operated since 1923, EPA apparatchiks delayed notifying residents for more than 24 hours. They vastly underestimated the volume and spill rate of gunk. Then, while refusing to release data, EPA head Gina McCarthy flew to the glowing river to fecklessly declare that the water "seems to be restoring itself."

The cleanup costs for the Colorado spill alone are estimated at $30 billion. Small farmers, ranchers and tourist-related businesses will be reeling for years to come — yet the EPA is simultaneously pushing forward with Draconian ozone regulations (based on cherry-picked junk science) that will punish the state's residents with no discernible health benefits.

If only Mother Nature could help wash away the institutionalized corruption that has been leaching from Obama's EPA headquarters since Day One:


—BP oil spill data doctoring. Former White House Director of the Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy Carol Browner and the EPA suffered no consequences after they repeatedly lied and cooked the books in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010. Browner, who pulled the puppet strings of then-EPA head Lisa Jackson, misled the public about the scope of the disaster by falsely claiming that 75 percent of the spill was "completely gone from the system." Then she falsely claimed that the administration's initial report on the disaster was "peer-reviewed."

The Interior Department inspector general also singled out Browner for misrepresenting the White House's blue-ribbon science panel, which opposed a six-month drilling moratorium, and exposed how she butchered their conclusions to justify the administration's preordained policy agenda.

Browner, an inveterate left-wing crony lobbyist/activist, left office without so much as a wrist slap. Brazen data doctoring and destruction are her fortes. As EPA head during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, she was held in contempt by a federal judge after ordering a staffer to purge and delete her computer files. Browner had sought to evade a public disclosure lawsuit by conservative lawyer and author Mark Levin's Landmark Legal Foundation.

—Email evasion and transparency trouncing. While Browner was doing her dirty work as Obama's unaccountable eco-czar, Jackson busied herself creating sock-puppet email personalities to circumvent public disclosure rules as the agency crafted radical climate-change policies in secret. She learned the tricks of the trade from Browner. Jackson admitted to using the pseudonym "Richard Windsor" on one of at least two separate secret government accounts. Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow Christopher Horner discovered the elaborate ruses in 2012. The agency had stonewalled Horner's FOIA requests on the use of alias accounts at the agency; CEI sued to force the administration to comply.

In December 2012, Jackson resigned amid multiple investigations. Not a wrist slap. Not a scratch. In March of this year, a federal judge blasted the agency for avoiding a separate FOIA request by Levin's Landmark Legal Foundation related to sock-puppet email accounts created by Jackson and others "who may have delayed the release dates for hot-button environmental regulations until after the Nov. 6, 2012, presidential election."

Apple Computer hired Jackson in 2013 (and all of her multiple personalities). Two months ago, the company proudly announced that it was promoting Jackson to "vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives" and head of the company's "global government affairs and public policy teams."



—Enabling sex predators and porn addicts. Last month, the EPA inspector general finally testified on Capitol Hill about the agency's chronic mismanagement of alleged sexual perverts on the payroll. One employee "engaged in offensive and inappropriate behavior toward at least 16 women, most of whom were EPA co-workers," the IG reported. Supervisors "were made aware of many of these actions and yet did nothing."

Well, not exactly "nothing." The employee was actually promoted to assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Homeland Security — a position he used to harass six more women.

Two other EPA workers were caught binging on porn during work hours; one was observed getting his X-rated fix by a minor who was at the office during Bring Your Child To Work Day. EPA allowed one perv to retire with full benefits; the other is still on leave collecting a $120,000 yearly salary.

Double standards. Data destruction. Imposition of radical job-killing regulations. Law-breaking with impunity. Only in Washington does a rogue government agency with an $8 billion budget get away with such serial incompetence and criminality in the name of the "public good." Protecting the environment has become a full employment racket for green crooks and cronies.



Tuesday, August 18, 2015

EPA HIDING DATA FROM TOXIC SPILL IT CAUSED IN COLORADO

A settling pond is used at Cement Creek, which was flooded with millions of gallons of mining wastewater, on August 11, 2015 in Silverton, Colorado. The Environmental Protection Agency uses settling ponds to reduce the acidity of mining wastewater so that it carries fewer heavy metals. (Photo by

The Environmental Protection Agency insists it needed to take over a gold mine in Colorado. But — now that it’s caused a massive pollution spill — the agency refuses to furnish proof that it ever needed control of the mine.

Not only did the EPA coerce the mine owner to grant it access on threat of a $35,000 per day fine and then fail to take common sense precautions to check the water pressure behind the Gold King mine when it began removing debris from the portal, now the agency is hiding the data related to the before and after effects of the spill.
On Friday Breitbart News posed eight specific questions to the EPA regarding the pollutant levels and exfiltration rates at the Gold King mine and the Red and Bonita mine during the period before and after the August 5 spill into the Cement Creek and Animas River in Colorado. The agency failed to offer any response by our Monday evening story deadline.
Those questions are:
1. What was the rate of exfiltration in GPM (gallons per minute) from the Gold King portal before the spill?
2. What is it now?
3. What was the rate of exfiltration in GPM from the Red-Bonita portal before the spill ?
4. What is it now?
5. What was the PPM (parts per million) for arsenic, cadmium, lead and copper in the exfiltrating water from the Gold King portal before the spill?
6. What is it now?
7. What was the PPM for arsenic, cadmium, lead and copper in the exfiltrating water from the Red-Bonita portal before the spill?
8. What is it now?
Dave Taylor, the retired geologist who predicted the EPA project that caused the toxic spill would “fail in 7 to 120 days” tells Breitbart News EPA’s failure to provide this information is troublesome.
“These are simple questions with simple answers that they undoubtedly have at their fingertips. If not, then there is something they don’t want us to know,” Taylor tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
“Forget about what happened during the spill. Comparing this before and after information will tell us EXACTLY what has occurred and what changes the spill may have caused,” Taylor says.
Dr. David Lewis, a former EPA scientist and currently the director of research for theFocus for Health Foundation, tells Breitbart News that he is finalizing plans for his independent analysis of current Animas River pollution levels available for public review by as early as next month.
Republican Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson is scheduled to visit Durango, Coloradoon Tuesday to find out more details about the toxic spill into the Animas River caused by EPA incompetence.

Sunday, August 16, 2015

ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS PROVIDE COVER FOR EPA INCOMPETENCE THAT CAUSED TOXIC WASTE SPILL

Three settling ponds are used at Cement Creek, which was flooded with millions of gallons of mining wastewater, on August 11, 2015 in Silverton, Colorado. The Environmental Protection Agency uses settling ponds to reduce the acidity of mining wastewater so that it carries fewer heavy metals.

The same environmental groups who called for severe penalties against companies and industry executives responsible for similar environmental catastrophes are singing a different tune now that the EPA has caused a toxic waste blowout into Colorado’s Animas River.

Breitbart asked three leading environmental groups – the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC], and Earth Justice – to explain why they aren’t working to see EPA leaders punished in the same way they wanted private industry executives held responsible for similar spills.
Only the NRDC offered a response.
Earth Justice and several other environmental groups have made no public comment on the Animas River spill at all. In their public statements, neither the NRDC nor the Sierra Club pointed the finger at the EPA.
Though the Sierra Club did not respond to our inquiries, it did offer this public statementon August 11:
The Animas River was sadly already contaminated due to the legacy of toxic mining practices. The company that owns this mine has apparently allowed dangerous conditions to fester for years, and the mishandling of clean-up efforts by the EPA have only made a bad situation much worse. As we continue to learn what exactly happened, it’s time that the mine owners be held accountable for creating this toxic mess and we urge the EPA to act quickly to take all the steps necessary to ensure a tragedy like this does not happen again.
In a recent statement, the NRDC’s President Rhea Suh said only that the EPA “inadvertently triggered the mine waste spill last week,” while casting mining companies and Republicans in the House of Representatives as the responsible parties.
Retired geologist Dave Taylor, who predicted that the EPA project that caused the massive spill would “fail within 7 to 120 days,” tells Breitbart News that the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] are trying to shift the blame from the EPA to the mining companies.
“They’re trying to blame the mining companies, not the EPA that caused the spill,” Taylor tells Breitbart News in an exclusive interview.
A spokesperson for the NRDC elaborated on the organization’s views in an interview with Breitbart News.
“EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said on Tuesday everyone at EPA was very sorry for the spill and would work to make sure this tragedy never happens again,” NRDC spokesperson and director of strategic engagement Bob Deans tells Breitbart News.
Deans says NRDC thinks the EPA should be “held accountable” for the spill, but was unable to say what “holding them accountable” actually means.
He declined to call for the firing of any EPA executives, when asked specifically whether EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy or EPA Region 8 Administrator Sean McGrath should be fired.
“We want to withhold comment until all the facts are in. You know, when the BP oil rig blew out in the Gulf Coast a few years ago, it took months to find out what happened.”
When Breitbart asked if he believed the BP incident was comparable to Animas River, Deans said “No.”
The retired geologist Taylor doesn’t need months to know what the EPA did that caused the environmental catastrophe.
As he told Breitbart News, “It was incompetent and stupid for [the EPA] to go up to that existing plug [in the Gold King mine] and try to remove it without knowing how much water was upstream and behind it and what the hydrostatic pressure was. The plug was stable until they fooled around with it. Once they disturbed it, that’s what activated the blowout.”
According to one report, the EPA coerced the owner of the Gold King mine to grant them access or else face a fine of $35,000 per day.
The CBS affiliate in Denver reported that Todd Hennis, the owner of the Gold King mine, “said the EPA forced him to allow access to his mine four years ago. He did not want to give the EPA access to investigate the leakage from his mine but said he was fined daily.”
“When you’re a small guy and you’re having a $35,000-a-day fine accrue against you, you have to run up the white flag,” Hennis told CBS Denver.
Dave Taylor is unimpressed with the spin coming from both the NRDC and the Sierra Club..
“They’re trying to throw it back on the miners,” Taylor tells Breitbart News. “What about the EPA being held accountable?”
The NRDC tried to spin the debacle in a way that reflected favorably on the EPA.
“This thing [the Gold King mine] was pouring out contaminated water at the rate of 3 million gallons every 4 days, all going down and then into the Animas River,” Deans tells Breitbart News.
In an emailed statement, Deans adds “the Gold King Mine was leaking toxic mine waste at the rate of 1.845 cubic feet per second – roughly 1.2 million gallons per day – before the EPA accident.”
“On Sunday, EPA officials said the mine continues to discharge waste – now being channeled into ponds – at the rate of about 500 gallons per minute, or 720,000 gallons per day, which is the (lower) base figure we used to derive the estimate of 3 million gallons every four days or so, prior to the accident,” the emailed statement continues.
But Taylor makes short shrift of this argument, pointing out that due to the EPA’s management of information, it is very difficult to get a true estimate of contaminated water flows from the Red and Bonita mine and the Gold King mine before and after the toxic blowout caused by the EPA at the Gold King mine on August 5.
“They [the EPA] just back figured the spill. They’re hiding information,” Taylor tells Breitbart News.
“It’s almost impossible to find out how much water before the screw up was coming out of the Red and Bonita Mine,” he adds.
“How much was coming out of Gold King mine? Next question—the Gold King Mine blows…. How many hours did it take for this 3 million gallons of contaminated water filled with sludge to get out of there? Two hours? Ten hours?” Taylor asks.
“They’re [the EPA] hiding that information. They hide everything,” he says.
“We got cadmium, we got arsenic, copper, and lead. What did we have in the creek before? It’s all hidden scientific gobbledygook. Maybe they don’t think we’re smart enough to understand it. They’re just taking the information and twisting it around,” Taylor adds.
As for the claim by the NRDC that there was little difference between the 3 million gallons of contaminated water that the NRDC and the EPA claim had leaked from the Gold King mine in the four days preceding the blowout and the 3 million gallons that escaped during the blowout, Taylor explains why this claim is not correct.
“The mines [the Red and Bonita mine and the Gold King mine] were making 500 gallons per minute before the EPA caused blowout, according to press reports. One of the reasons this blowout was a lot more catastrophic is that the water that was leaking out before the spill was not full of sludge. It was basically clear,” Taylor says.
“Their incompetence — the EPA’s that is — was so bad, the adit [the passage leading into the mine] it was on top of a huge [contaminated] tailings pile, when that blowout occurred, the water [flowing out] cut down through the tailings pile, carrying the tailings, and it stirred the whole mess up.”
“The reason that blowout spill turned the river orange in some places is it had all that contamination in it from the flushing action. Had it come out slowly, it would have never turned the Animas orange,” Taylor says.
The most dramatic photographs of the Animas River immediately after the EPA caused blow out showed that it had turned the color of the river to a deep orange.
Breitbart News pressed the NRDC on Taylor’s point.
“Was that waste [in the four days before the blowout] substantially free of sludge, in contrast to the 3 million gallon blowout that occurred on August 5?” Breitbart News asked the NRDC.
“It’s not clear what was in it, but it was coming out of the mine,” an NRDC spokesperson responded in an emailed statement.
In other words, the NRDC is attempting to downplay the environmental damage from the contaminants contained in the blowout caused by the EPA incompetence, which was significant, as CBS reported:
Testing from the river hours after the spill shows the amount of lead in the water was more than 3,500 times the limit that is safe for humans. The arsenic levels were 823 times above the limit. And cadmium levels were 33 times higher.
Taylor points out that the blowout may have increased the regular flow of water from the Gold King mine into the Cement Creek, according to some of the publicly reported information. Mine owner Todd Hennis, for instance, told CNN that the flow before the blowout was 250 gallons per minute. After the blowout, that rate has increased to 615 gallons per minute.
As CNN Wire Services reported:
It is a Kinross [Gold]-owned mine — Sunnyside Mine — that Hennis blames for the accumulation of wastewater that spilled.
In the mid-1990s, Kinross got permission to bulkhead, or plug, a segment of the Sunnyside Mine called the American Tunnel.
The project was approved to reduce pollution, but Hennis claims that the actual effect was that it pushed wastewater into other mines, including his.
Before the American tunnel was plugged, the Gold King Mine discharged 7 gallons of water a minute, and didn’t pose a health risk, Hennis said. After the project at the Sunnyside Mine, the discharge from the Gold King Mine discharge had grown to 250 gallons of water a minute, he said…
One week after the spill, the Gold King Mine continues to discharge water at an elevated rate.
As of Wednesday the polluted water was flowing from the mine at a rate of 610 gallons per minute, as measured by the U.S. Geological Survey.
The August 5 EPA caused toxic waste blowout is expected to have long term effects far beyond Colorado. As the Associated Press reported:
In New Mexico, officials lifted a precautionary ban on water from private wells throughout the Animas River valley but kept in place warnings not to drink water from the river or give it to livestock.
Gov. Susana Martinez also formed a special team charged with monitoring the spill’s long-term effects.
“As the river begins to clear up, there are still many questions left unanswered by the EPA,” she said. “New Mexicans deserve to know the long-term effects this environmental catastrophe will have on our communities, our agriculture and our wildlife.”
On the Navajo Nation, tribal officials continued to warn residents and farmers not to use water from the San Juan River, which was also polluted as a result of the spill.
The tribe has set up fresh water stations for residents and water was being delivered for farmers and livestock.
Despite these long term environmental effects, the few environmental groups who are willing to even offer a comment on EPA’s involvement in this incident appear to be more interested in spinning the narrative to blame the mining companies, while largely absolving the true culprit in this incident—the EPA itself.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Editorial: EPA’s double standard

Sure accidents happen — it’s why we call them accidents. But you can bet if some oil company had been responsible for filling a Colorado river with toxic sludge — rather than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — the Obama White House would be all over it. The Justice Department would likely have already launched an investigation and company officials marched into federal court.
But the EPA — which in its zealotry to rid our air of pollutants wants to ride herd over every coal- and oil-fired plant in the nation — took 24 hours just to notify the residents of nearby Durango of their major-league screw up.
An EPA crew assigned to clean up the Gold King mine high in the San Juan mountains of southern Colorado accidentally opened up a passage from an old tunnel in the mine, allowing millions of gallons of yellow toxic sludge to spill into a creek, and from there into the Animas River. As of Monday it had already traveled 100 miles south into New Mexico. And from there who the hell knows because it’s still flowing, heading toward Utah, including Lake Powell — an area along with Durango itself jammed with tourists this time of year.
Local officials are furious because it took the EPA 24 hours to warn anyone of the arsenic and lead-laden stew headed their way. And the earlier estimate of a 1 million gallon spill later measured at least 3 million gallons.
Yes EPA officials have apologized, but then so did those BP officials after the Gulf Coast oil spill — before they were given the boot. And there are a host of questions still not answered by EPA officials — such as why was the EPA using heavy machinery in an area known to be filled with toxins. Why was the community not notified in a timely fashion. And who will compensate businesses along the route.
Remember the latter was a key requirement in the wake of the BP oil spill.
So where do the victims of the EPA’s incompetence go to have their lives and businesses made whole in the wake of this environmental disaster?

[VIDEO] EPA chief touts Obama's green agenda amid mine spill

EPA Contractor Behind CO Mine Spill Got $381 Million From Taxpayers

PHOTO: The Animas River flows through the center of Durango, Colo. on Aug. 7, 2015.
Source:  Brian Lewis/The Denver Post/Getty Images
PHOTO: The Animas River flows through the center of Durango, Colo. on Aug. 7, 2015. Source: Brian Lewis/The Denver Post/Getty Images
The EPA may have been trying to hide the identity of the contracting company responsible for causing a major wastewater spill in southern Colorado, but the Wall Street Journal has revealed the company’s identity.
Environmental Restoration (ER) LLC, a Missouri-based firm, was the “contractor whose work caused a mine spill in Colorado that released an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a major river system,” the WSJ was told by a source familiar with the matter. The paper also found government documents to corroborate what their source told them.
So far, the EPA has refused to publicly name the contracting company used to plug abandoned mines in southern Colorado, despite numerous attempts by The Daily Caller News Foundation and other media outlets to obtain the information. It’s unclear why the agency chose not to reveal the contractor’s name.
What is clear, however, is that ER has gotten $381 million in government contracts since October 2007, according to a WSJ review of data from USAspending.gov. About $364 million of that funding came from the EPA, but only $37 million was given to ER for work they had done in Colorado.
When contacted by phone, The DCNF had been informed ER’s offices had closed for the day. The EPA did not return a request for comment on the WSJ’s story revealing the identity of the agency’s contractor.
ER contractors reportedly caused a massive wastewater spill from the Gold King Mine in southern Colorado last week. EPA-supervised workers breached a debris dam while using heavy equipment and unleashed 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into Cement Creek. The toxic plume eventually reached the Animas River where it’s been able to spread even further, forcing Colorado and New Mexico to declare a state of emergency.
The EPA has taken responsibility for the spill and has officials on the ground working with local officials to remedy the situation. Still, local officials and Native Americans are furious with the EPA over the spill, and have not ruled out legal action to make sure the agency remains accountable.
“No agency could be more upset about the incident happening, and more dedicated in doing our job to get this right,” EPA Chief Administrator Gina McCarthy said in a press conference in Durango, Colorado Wednesday. “We couldn’t be more sorry. Our mission is to protect human health and the environment. We will hold ourselves to a higher standard than anyone else.”

Letter to Editor PREDICTED COLORADO EPA SPILL One Week Before Catastrophe=> So EPA Could Secure Control of Area (Updated)

epa spill
Last Wednesday, a small EPA-supervised work crew inspecting the Gold King mine accidentally knocked a hole in a waste pit, releasing at least three million gallons of acidic liquid laden with toxic heavy metals. (ABC)

This letter to editor, posted below, was published in The Silverton Standard and The Miner local newspaper, authored by a retired geologist, one week before EPA mine spill. The letter detailed verbatim, how EPA officials would foul up the Animas River on purpose in order to secure superfund money. If the Gold King mine was declared a superfund site it would essentially kill future development for the mining industry in the area. The Obama EPA is vehemently opposed to mining and development.
The EPA pushed for nearly 25 years, to apply its Superfund program to the Gold King mine. If a leak occurred the EPA would then receive superfund status. That is exactly what happened.
The EPA today admitted they misjudged the pressure in the gold mine before the spill – just as this editorial predicted.
The letter was included in their print edition on July 30, 2015. The spill occurred one week later.
editorial colorado epa

UPDATE: Via Ace of Spades – The Silverton Standard confirmed today this letter was indeed published a week before the EPA spill.
Via: The Gateway Pundit
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