Mines out of Time

When an estimated 3 million gallons of toxic custard-yellow water spilled from an orphan mine into the Animas River in Colorado, contamination plumed through Durango and past the New Mexico communities of Aztec and Farmington. It has since continued along the San Juan River to Utah and courses ever downstream.

The Animas and San Juan rivers remain closed to public access. Residents of nearby areas are being told to avoid consuming and even bathing in well water until it is tested for contamination, and the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish advises anglers not to eat fish from the contaminated watershed.

Peter Butler, co-coordinator of the Animas River Stakeholders Group, says no one can yet be certain how New Mexico water—and those who depend on it—will be affected by the recent surge. "We know that so far fish and bugs seem to be surviving in Durango, so they'll do even better in New Mexico," Butler says. "But we have no data, and that's a real frustration. A lot of samples have been collected, but the results haven't been released."

As of Monday night, he says, the latest water quality information the group has received were initial results from last Thursday, the day after the spill. Plus, it's impossible to measure long-term effects of heavy metal contamination on an ecosystem in less than a week. The contaminants are ultimately settling to the riverbed, where they will be kicked up by future rains and other weather events.

The plume's dramatic images and sheer volume are grabbing headlines, yet this contamination problem is not entirely new. Even prior to the publicized spill, 800 gallons a minute poured consistently out of the mouths of orphan mines near Silverton in southwestern Colorado. That's over 1 million gallons of wastewater per day containing zinc, copper, cadmium, iron, lead, aluminum and manganese flowing down Cement Creek into the Animas.

CONSTANT CONTAMINATION

The toxic metals are constants in the upper Animas between Silverton and Durango, even if they are not always Tropicana-obvious. And life in that section of the river is rapidly declining. Three of the four fish species found there vanished between 2005 and 2010. Purportedly, the levels of toxins present no danger to humans, only to the macroinvertebrates the fish eat. What's bad for the goose is, apparently, just dandy for the gander.

While Butler and others say they are hopeful that the current contamination of New Mexico's water is "not quite as bad as it looks," the logistics of how we got here extend well beyond the US Environmental Protection Agency's accidental unplugging of the Gold King No. 7 mine.

The constant spillage is partly the legacy of old mines, but it is also the result of contemporary stop-gaps. When the Sunnyside Mining Co. closed its Silverton-area operations in 1991, the company struck a deal with the state whereby it could plug the outlet tunnels and simply treat the leakage from the bulkheads. Sunnyside continued to do so until 2002, when it passed off responsibility for the treatment plant to another company, which shut it down in 2004. Within a year, the river at Baker's Bridge north of Durango saw a definite drop in water quality as measured by the number of fish and crucial macroinvertebrates found there.

The plugged outlet tunnels, meanwhile, caused the water table to rise. The water escaped from the adits of four previously dry orphan mines. These mines—the American Tunnel, the Mogul, the Red and Bonita, and Gold King No. 7—issue the contaminated water into Cement Creek.

Zinc is the most serious and concentrated of the contaminants. Butler estimates that 28.5 tons of zinc emerge from the primary draining adits each year, accounting for nearly a quarter of the total amount recorded in the upper Animas. Lead is more toxic, but its concentrations are lower.

Various amounts of these metals occur naturally, owing to the bleeding metal-rich rocks in the mountains. Some scientists suspect that Cement Creek has never sustained aquatic life due to its natural acidity. However, mining has exposed and removed more rock than natural processes. Water accelerates the leaching process in these orphan mines.

So why isn't someone simply cleaning up the contamination? It's not for lack of desire—ARSG, for example, exists in large part to ensure the survival of the Animas through community self-determination. Yet even with the support of the EPA, the ARSG cannot hazard a remediation effort of the leaking mines around Cement Creek.

"We still have a liability issue we can't overcome," Butler says. The group fears liability under (ironically enough) the Clean Water Act.

The trick here is that the Clean Water Act requires a 100 percent cleanup of a point-source hazard. (Point-sources are uncontained origins of pollution traceable to a mathematical point. A jet engine is a point-source of noise pollution. The San Juan Mountains are not a point-source of runoff pollution, because naturally occurring zinc comes from the entire watershed rather than a single identifiable point—such as an orphan mine's adit.)

The requirement prevents corporate polluters from getting away with anything less than full remediation, but a likely consequence is that anything short of an absolute cleanup opens a good Samaritan to a lawsuit.

PAYING FOR IT

Even though its ability to address toxic runoff is stymied, the ARSG still explores remediation options, including holding an online competition for creative solutions. "We've investigated different options, gotten different ideas," Butler says. "But again, it's an issue of how much time you want to spend on this when you can't do it. And there's no money for it."

No local or regional environmental group has the budget needed to operate a proposed limestone water treatment plant: $12 to $17 million, with $1 million a year in operating costs from now to eternity. "With a draining mine, it's ongoing," Butler says. "That water comes out year-round, so you've got to deal with it regardless."

Another possible solution is to access the EPA's Superfund program, which offers legal protection to the local entities with which it collaborates. It also compels those responsible for pollution to manage or pay for the cleanups.

Yet Silverton has resisted Superfund aid for years, fearing such designation could affect property values, shift local control to outside entities and turn tourists (and their dollars) elsewhere. Relying on the ARSG and other groups kept issues in the family, as it were, and thus kept the problem quieter.

Without enacting Superfund status, the EPA has remained active in assessing the mines. After investigating the Red and Bonita Mine, the EPA decided to install bulkheads to stem the 300-gallon-per-minute flow—upped by this year's rains to 500 gallons. Completion of these bulkheads was scheduled for the end of September, according to the EPA's May 2015 Red and Bonita Mine Bulkhead Construction Fact Sheet. In order to monitor possible changes in discharge from other mines, the EPA planned "to remove the blockage and reconstruct the portal at the Gold King Mine." This process triggered the plume making its way through New Mexico.

Pointing blame at the EPA is easy, but the perpetual cleanup situation requires more comprehensive understanding than fault-finding. These same toxic metals were already entering the Animas River before the spill. Only now, we can actually see the contamination. And without consistent and reliable treatment of the continuous leakage, similar events could recur, with unknowable long-term effects on New Mexico's water.

Hively is a freelance writer and author of a weekly column called Fool's Gold that appears in The KC Post, monthly in The Durango Telegraph and Four Corners Free Press. Follow him on Twitter: @zachhively

Santa Fe Reporter