The EPA river spill: Tale of two cleanups

Imagine this story on our TV screens tonight:

Breaking News:  An engineering crew working heavy digging machinery at an old mine site “inadvertently unleashed into a tributary of the Animas River a …million-gallon soup of toxic mining wastewater.” 

{mosads}The spill is soon revised upward to 3 million gallons.  The media calls for comment:  “…This is just something that happens when we’re dealing with mines sometimes,” says an official associated with the group that caused the spill.

Seven days later, a senior executive ventures out to the spill site – well, out to a microphone stand within 55 miles of the site, which after all “is a significant distance away” over unpaved roads – and pronounces that “the river seems to be restoring itself.”

Imagine the outcry against the company responsible for the spill, and the officials who uttered such callous comments. 

After all, just last year, a West Virginia company spilled 10,000 gallons of chemicals into a nearby river – an amount surpassed in the Animas spill in the first ten minutes of a million-gallon torrent.  Mine officials at the West Virginia company were given jail time, the company was fined and ultimately went bankrupt.

But that won’t happen to those who caused the Animus spill.  It won’t happen because the engineering team worked for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  So don’t expect to see the EPA official who offered the “this just happens sometimes” explanation frog-marched to jail – or Gina McCarthy, the EPA adminstrator who touted the river’s restorative powers just one week after the spill, to lose her job.

In fact it’s far more likely that the EPA’s misuse of its authority will result in the agency gaining even more power.

That’s what a retired geologist named Dave Taylor wrote in a Letter to the Editor to a local Colorado paper before the EPA disaster:  “within seven days, this “grand experiment” in my opinion will fail, …with a toxic outflow to follow.”  The geologist offered a second prediction: “And guess what [EPA]… will say then?  Gee, “Plan A” didn’t work so I guess we will have to build a treatment plant at a cost to taxpayers of $100 million to $500 million….”

Cynical?  Yes, but not half as much as anti-mining groups’ rush to use a spill caused by the EPA at a mine closed in 1923 to put the breaks on mines being planned and permitted right now.  EarthWorks — whose director admitted in Congressional testimony that the organization had never judged a single U.S. mine as having met their standards — declared the Animas spill reason for a wholesale revision of U.S. mining law.  The Natural Resources Defense Council looked past EPA’s role at Animas to take a swipe at the mining sector:  “After this month’s mine disaster on the Animas, there is even less reason to believe the self-serving, impossible promises of mining executives who claim that with good engineering, they can protect our waters for centuries.” 

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of the anti-mining activist:  It’s a case of “What, Me Worry?” when the EPA pollutes a river – and an inconvenient truth when private sector cleans up a mining mess others left behind. 

Which is precisely what’s happening at a place called Holden Village in Washington State.  The mess at Holden dates to mining done between 1938 and 1957.  The mine owner who left the mess did one good deed:  he signed the land over to a religious community to build a spiritual retreat that has welcomed thousands of pilgrims to the remote mountain region ever since.

But the mess remained, and in the decades that followed, the closed mine passed from one owner to another, and finally on to Rio Tinto when it bought Canadian mining giant Alcan in 2007.

After conducting soil and water tests and fashioning a reclamation plan, Rio Tinto set about a comprehensive cleanup that, all told, will take five years and $400 million — as local media put it, “repairing a mountain where [the company] never once pulled out even an ounce of ore.”  But don’t expect a Breaking News banner for this story.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, the EPA Administrator announced a “hiatus” for the EPA teams poking around old mine works across the United States.  As for anti-mining activists who will seek to turn the EPA’s disaster into an expansion of federal power over the U.S. mining industry, after Animas, forget a hiatus — they’ll be working overtime.

As for reform, here’s an idea:  whenever the EPA crews do go back to work, maybe the agency should run the next cleanup plan past that retired geologist who saw the Animas disaster coming. 

McGroarty is president of American Resources Policy Network, a nonpartisan education and public policy research organization in Washington, D.C.