Dispatch from the Riverbank

Frustrations with lack of information about toxic mine spill continue in the Four Corners

Rivers run a lot of colors, borrowing shades from red rock canyons after summer rain, running mud brown during spring runoff and baking to a cool, soothing emerald green in the dog days of summer.

But hearts broke earlier this month when the Animas River ran shades of yellow and orange, compared to Tropicana and Tang, after a Colorado mining remediation spill flooded the river with an estimated 3 million gallons of sludge filled with the heavy metals that the gold rush left on the landscape.

The river winding through Aztec and Farmington, where it feeds municipal water supplies and irrigates fields, has since returned to a pea-soup shade of green. Yet, in its sleepier bends, particles of orange remain, pooling in foam and settling among the stones.

Likewise, while the outrage and fury that exploded during public information sessions earlier this week has settled to a simmer, anger and frustration—particularly at the dearth of details from the US Environmental Protection Agency—are still clinging to the corners.

Just what was in that pulse of mustardy water, how much of it there was and when the river will be safe to use again remain unclear.  Restrictions on domestic wells that had been in limbo were lifted Friday morning, yet local officials from cities and the state remain concerned with the federal response to the situation, which both Colorado and New Mexico governors have already declared a disaster.

"San Juan County has done a great job of getting information out as it comes in. I think we had a very efficient process for relaying information back and forth to citizens, elected officials [and] staff. However, I'm still very disappointed in the EPA's ability to disseminate information," says Josh Ray, Aztec city manager. Both Ray and the city's mayor waited on hold Wednesday afternoon for 45 minutes for a daily phone conference update with the EPA, this one meant to finally release the test results from Aug. 7 and 8, when the plume passed through Aztec, only to find out it had been canceled. No one in Aztec City Hall had been notified.

Local officials need to get a handle on drinking water for their residents.

Aztec residents have roughly 35 days of uncontaminated water in a reservoir and then will be turning to a pipeline that can bring 500,000 gallons per day from neighboring Bloomfield. Without knowing what's in the water and how much, Ray says, it's tough to guess when or if they'll be able to draw water from the Animas River again. The City of Farmington currently estimates it has water for up to 170 days, including  what it delivers to the Navajo Nation.

"We continue to be concerned about the gap of time between sampling and receipt of results, and I think all of you are here because you share that concern," Tommy Roberts, mayor of Farmington, said during Wednesday's public information meeting at the Farmington Civic Center.

Roughly a dozen officials gave updates to about 100 audience members and took questions. Lack of water test results and inconsistencies in information from various officials remained the most heated concerns.

"There's a three-day gap between the time of sampling and the receipt of results—and it actually may be longer than that. We continue to press for quicker turnaround of data release," Roberts said.

THE PLAY-BY-PLAY

An EPA contractor was working to shore up a dam blocking a mine adit that had filled with water, to keep it from emptying into watersheds below, and accidentally breached that dam on Aug. 5 at 10:30 am. Millions of gallons of mine waste were released into Cement Creek and downstream into the Animas River, which runs through Durango, Colo., eventually flowing into the Colorado River, water supply for much of the American West.

Environmental Restoration LLC, the EPA contractor, issued a statement only to declare that their contract with the EPA specifies confidentiality on all on-site matters, referring all questions to the EPA Region 8 public information officer and to the already published "factual accounts of all occurrences onsite since the event." Environmental Restoration also said that the company stands behind its project management team and workers.

New Mexico was not notified of the spill until 9:30 am Aug. 6, 23 hours after it occurred. Within hours, the state contacted municipal water officials and recommended they shut off intakes from the Animas River.

A plume that colored the entire river for miles, moving at about 4 miles per hour downstream, reached the San Juan River confluence, just west of Farmington, the morning of Aug. 8, and Kirtland, New Mexico, by 4 o'clock that afternoon, where it was reported to have been diluted enough "to be muddy with an orange tinge rather than solid orange," the EPA reported.

Meanwhile, sampling along Cement Creek and the Animas River showed pH and metals concentrations returning to those that predated the spill, according to the EPA, though changes in stream flow could bring those levels back up. EPA photos taken along the river corridor showed the river still running an unnatural yellowish color.

As of Thursday, eight days after the spill, the EPA had posted test results only for Aug. 5 and 6, for samples taken north of Durango. Those results showed increased levels of aluminum, iron, lead, calcium, chromium, manganese, zinc and copper, among others.

The mine is still discharging 500 to 700 gallons per minute of water in a stinging orange color, which is being diverted to newly constructed ponds to be treated before entering Cement Creek. Near those ponds, Cement Creek runs through hillsides a shade of umber that matches the water running through them.

The EPA has announced plans to continue treating drainage at the site, sampling the Animas River corridor and providing drinking water and water testing to private well owners. Data will be evaluated and published, the agency says, "as it is finalized."

DATA DELAY 

The EPA has been sending its test samples to Georgia and tried to deliver them to a lab there on Sunday, only to discover the lab was closed and not accepting deliveries on Sundays.

"That's pretty ridiculous, if you ask me," Ray, with the City of Aztec, tells SFR.

Meanwhile, Farmington's mayor has asked the EPA to deploy a mobile lab to San Juan County.

"We think that a mobile lab will allow quicker turnaround of sampling analysis and distribution of results, and we think a mobile lab could be deployed here and maintained here for a significant period of time," Roberts said during Wednesday's public information session. "We know we have longer term impacts on the river ecology, we know that we're going to be needing to test sediment as well as water, and we will continue to press for that mobile lab."

He's been told there aren't many mobile labs in the country, and if one can be found and relocated, it's likely to come from the East Coast.

Agencies are also working to bring someone with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Farmington to address health concerns over possible exposure to heavy metals.

The New Mexico Environmental Department has also been conducting its own sampling in the river, at homes where wells may be contaminated and at the county fairgrounds, where residents can bring in water samples for staff to check. NMED used labs west of the Mississippi and had results posted online that show the river water returning to levels that match pre-plume conditions.

"We immediately jumped on the situation because the contamination that was released was extremely dangerous, and it would have been reckless and irresponsible not to immediately act and do everything in our power to protect the community and ensure that you're safe and your family is safe," Ryan Flynn, NMED's cabinet secretary, said in Wednesday's public meeting. State officials, Flynn said, have "chosen to be as transparent as possible…so we are not waiting to provide information to you. We are not saying you're not smart enough to interpret this data or to consider it. We want to get it out to you."

NMED sent staff to the Farmington area to begin surface water sampling by Aug. 7, before the plume entered the state, to collect baseline data.

There's no reason the EPA shouldn't already know what was in the mine and the water that poured forth from it, Ray adds.

"The EPA had been working in the Gold King Mine site," he says, "so therefore if they'd been there for an extended period of time, they had to have known what elements were inside of that mine if they were going to work there…Simply put, if they would have just told us, 'These are the things we interacted with in the mine'—but to withhold that information, to not let us know until later that night that a spill had occurred, that's just unacceptable."

When Ray did hear about the spill, the news came from state offices and the City of Durango. The list of heavy metals that might have been in the water has included arsenic, lead, zinc, iron, cadmium and mercury, but a week after the spill, the city had still received nothing solid from the EPA on what contaminants were in the water, he says. As information does come in, the city is sending it out to residents through all available channels.

"We're not holding anything back. We're not the EPA," he says.

There's no estimate yet on how much remediation or ongoing water treatment for heavy metals, if needed, might cost the city, according to Ray.

IN THE DARK AND UP THE CREEK

"Right now we don't really know what all is going on. It's kind of hard to find out a lot of information," says Aztec-area resident Cherry McKinney. Her home draws water from one of five local water associations that were informed their sources may have been contaminated by whatever it was that washed down the river. She's been told they're on Stage 1 restrictions and directed to a website to see exactly what that means—something like watering every other day, limiting bathing and limiting washing, she says. It wasn't clear. And there's no time frame for how long water restrictions will continue.

"I don't think anybody knows right now," McKinney says. "We're managing. What else is there to do? You can get mad and kick something, and then you've got to get busy managing. It's just a shame. You don't think about a beautiful river being so contaminated…I wish I could say it's a beautiful river, but it's not right now. I hope it will be again."

She loaded up water for herself, her husband and an elderly neighbor at a free distribution center at the Church of Christ in Aztec. Volunteers there had handed out roughly 1,400 gallons of water on Tuesday and were down to the last 200 or so gallons while waiting for a new supply to arrive on Thursday. A similar load had been taken to the Navajo Nation.

A trio of teenagers was staffing the water station Wednesday afternoon, handing out boxes with 6 gallons of water per family member for households who use well water (or other sources considered at risk).

One of the teens says that standing in her front yard, she can throw a rock and hit the river. Her family is still waiting on test results about their well.

A week ago, one fisherman says, the river was clear enough he could see where he wanted to drop his fly to snag a fish. Now it's too cloudy to see the bottom.

And yet, water samples taken when the river was the color of Tang showed levels of heavy metals that did not exceed the state drinking water standards.

The test results for water samples taken Friday through Sunday by NMED, posted Wednesday evening, showed water quality returning to "pre-event levels." The lingering concern lies not with the water but with the sediment the millions of gallons of mine water left along the riverbanks and in irrigation ditches.

AGRICULTURE AND ANIMALS IMPACTED

Everyone in the affected area can make a claim for losses through the EPA, which could refund expenses and damages caused by the spill. Residents are encouraged to take pictures and keep receipts of everything, right down to dinner purchased out when they couldn't cook at home.

And no doubt much of the damage will be seen in agricultural products

"A lot of people are asking us when the ditches are going to be turned on, and the simple answer is, when we feel like public safety is not going to be impacted by that decision," Bonnie Hopkins, agriculture agent with the New Mexico State University's San Juan County Extension Office, said during the Wednesday evening public meeting. Hopkins had spent the afternoon with irrigation stakeholders and said, "The general message from the irrigation meeting was to not try to push a short-term solution for a long-term problem. We really wanted people to understand that by using contaminated water, you may be building up heavy metals in your soil that we can't ever get back out. You're also absorbing liability for anyone else's domestic well that is along your ditch line, so it's simply not worth the risk until we fully understand what these test results are and how they come back."

They're scheduling deliveries of livestock water and using EPA money to have hay delivered for livestock that had to be cleared from pastures near the river.

Water is being prioritized for those who make a living farming and have crops like vegetables with a shallower root system; 6,000-gallon tanks are being used to distribute water. However, Hopkins said, they don't have the resources to provide water for those growing forage, like alfalfa, and looking to cover hundreds of acres with millions of gallons of water.

"The biggest thing I do every night is I go home and pray for rain," Kim Carpenter, CEO of San Juan County, said.

Even after the river water is running clean, and the sediment in it determined to be safe, remediation work will need to be done to remove contamination before irrigation ditches are reopened.

Though the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has received calls about affected wildlife, Matt Anthony, the department's northwest area sergeant, says nothing "was specifically targeted so we couldn't get officers there." Aerial surveys haven't located wildlife in distress or dead, Anthony says.

UP NEXT 

Water quality tests of about 60 wells and 700 samples collected at the county fair station so far are not revealing the same contaminants in the river, and officials believe, as expected for this time of year, that river water is not flowing toward domestic wells. Testing is expected to continue, though that plan is still being developed and will be based on what initial sampling reveals.

Whatever happens next, it's clear New Mexican state, county and city officials, working with the EPA, plan to come to decisions on all matters moving forward, separate from what Colorado chooses to do.

"We have to make sure for ourselves that the water is safe," said John Longworth, division director of the office of the state engineer.

New Mexican officials, in fact, look upstream and declare some of the management choices being made there, in the fallout of the spill, downright reckless.

"We are in no way comparing what we do to Durango. Frankly, some of the things we're seeing up there are absolutely irresponsible," Carpenter said. "But I want to make it also very clear, we had a little bit more time to prepare. They saw that plume roughly a day and a half before we did."

He also takes issue with upstream leadership that suggested the best move for farmers would be to let the crops die and collect money from the EPA's claims process, and instead he is urging Farmington-area producers to do everything they can to keep their fields going.

Flynn, with NMED, specifically called out Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper for choosing to drink water from the Animas River during a visit to Durango.

"He might as well stick 15 cigarettes in his mouth and light them all at the same time and take a picture about how that's good for you," Flynn said. "Under the best of circumstances, you should not be drinking river water…For a child or a family or someone to think it's OK to go drink river water, it's just totally reckless and irresponsible for a public official to send that message to people."

The governor did treat the water with an iodine tablet, but it's still been roundly dismissed, Flynn said, as a "cheap political stunt with zero regard for what is scientifically valid and the health of citizens."

Hickenlooper is known for these grandstanding gestures; in 2011, he notoriously consumed a glass of what was supposedly a new formula of fracking fluid while making the case that hydraulic fracturing is safe.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy finally made it to Farmington on Thursday and said water quality in the Animas River near Silverton, the area where the spill occurred, was returned to "pre-event water quality levels." McCarthy reiterated the agency's commitment to Four Corners-area residents who rely on the Animas for drinking and irrigation water and said they will "have new data soon and…will put it in context for local decision makers, so they can make the most informed decisions regarding the ongoing use of water resources."

On Friday morning, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez announced the state's emergency funds allocated for the cleanup would top $1.25 million and said that she was naming a multiagency, long-term impact review team to monitor the effects of the problem.

"As the river begins to clear up, there are still many questions left unanswered by the EPA. New Mexicans deserve to know the long-term effects this environmental catastrophe will have on our communities, our agriculture and our wildlife," the governor's press release stated.

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