Thanks EPA. Thanks a lot.

It's a disaster, for sure.

What a nightmsre. I am just reading Civil Action. My daughter's summer AP reading assignment. Just talking now about high levels of arsenic in the water. Scary stuff.

I've been there three times (twice following the river between Silverton and Durango on the 550). It really is a disaster - which seems to get more media here in Europe than actually in the USA. (We had a special report yesterday on the state-wide tv, if such could happen here with our old mines, too.)

It is getting at least some national attention. I would think it very unlikely to happen in modern Germany, though who knows what happened in the DDR years. Environmental issues didn't seem a priority.

I worry about future events, too. We've always been vaguely aware of the hazards of some of the abandoned mines up around Silverton, but I was thinking more in terms of small seepage from some of the leach fields at the mines, and had no idea there was such a volume of toxic water behind abandoned dams.

This is horrible. Such beauty fucked over. I pretty much have had no words since I first saw all this.

Meantime I got a letter from the abq water service, wanting to test my water re standards - nothing to do with this situation, just usual follow up on what is going on in housing tracts. We'll see, I might be a test case or not. Not that we in Abq are dealing with this EPA mess. Just that the water authority does seem to be trying. Meantime, my neighbor's house flooded a month ago, just like mine did in 2012. Avoid polybutylene housing tracts!

Roger sent me photos of the Animas river area many years ago, and I still have in mind to paint from/about them.
Roger, do you have your own copies of the photos?
Let me know if you want them back. (I hope to keep one, though there are many good ones, but I get it if you want them all back).

Sorry to here about this. There are thousands of similar situations in the West and maybe several hundred old coal mines in the EAst that could do a "dumper" like this.
The damn program manager sytem that EPA uses and its reliance on consultants is part of the problem. The consulting industry (IMHO) has become a commodity service and many companies dont even keep qualified folks on staff and the companies hire guys like me as only a last resort.
I had a buddy who, last year was called in to do a geotechnoical "Repair" on a retaining wall that was undermining a portal at an old mine that was slowly filling with ground water and was gonna breach. There was so much he could have done to take the stresses off (had they called him earlier)

There will be more of this unless EPA gets its **** together.

I see the media is being fed a line of "happy talk" about how well the contractors and EPA have responded.

Hows the river looking today? I hope youre not a fisherman

Well, it looks normal as far as I can tell. Still, haven't we been led to believe that mercury becomes concentrated in animals. I also remember that lead shot is prohibited in these water fowl flyways because ducks pick up the pellets to keep their craws grinding away.

It looks like the river flow has been fairly stable, which is good. It's a fairly fast river and as long as the flow wasn't decreasing, there probably wasn't a lot of new sediment being deposited. There's a mud bank I kind of use as a flow gauge, but haven't been by it for a week. I hope it's the natural color of mud, and not a sickly orange.

Big relief a few days ago to hear that the leading edge of the plume was no longer visible. Sounds like they've set the bar pretty low.

The attorneys general of Colorado, New Mexico and Utah have hinted that they might sue the federal government individually or collectively because this disastrous leak happened while the EPA was trying to clean up one of their badly ignored and contaminated mines.

So basically, it's like telling your mother she has to use her own money to come clean your house and then getting pissed at her because she broke your favorite sippy cup.

I know nothing...but when the waste discharge chemicals (discharged an estimated 3 million gallons of ****) were being released..or whatever the action was, why didn't anyone/someone say, "Hmm..the color of this discharge into the river sure looks bad. Maybe we should stop quickly?"

What am I missing? Did they not want to break up their card game?

I'm guessing they were hoping it would stop by itself and no one would notice.

Last I heard from EPA was that the river was back to normal. Later in the same article, they cautioned that if we came in contact with the water or the sediment we should be sure to wash our hands. I'm trying to hold both thoughts at the same time.

They say it's past and it has all been diluted. Reminds me of an Australian youtube a few years ago about an oil tanker badly leaking. "The Front Fell Off". Asked about environmental concerns, their spokesman explained it away, saying the ship had been towed out of the environment. Magnificant! The whole video was a total spoof, but it does sound like our pollution has now safely flowed out of the environment.

How bloody stupid do they think the public is? I think we know that answer. But the jump-up concept here is this is the EPA, the very agency that is designed to protect us from the polluters. They aren't supposed to sound like BP did after the Gulf disaster.

Of course, with our next Prez election, that'll remedy all of this, right? If the Repugs get in, there'll be no EPA. If the Dems get in there, they'll change the admin heads.

Problem be gone. Poof!

Here. I found it. See how easy the casual dismissal can be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU4t6zRAKg

ETA: Craven posted this back when the earth was much younger.

Thank you a million times. This is priceless!

Reminds me of Deepwater Horizon, where the agencies that are supposed to be watching companies to sensitive work, making sure it is done right.....dont.

I am sure I heard The Professor promise that government science people would not let us down again. Some people actually believe him.

I think it's important to distinguish between BP and the drilling from a job done by EPA and it's private contractor.

There is not much different....the government is tasked with approving plans, using its own scientists and whom ever it wants to hire, and they do some combination of not caring enough to try and incompetence way too often. That the EPA legally had more control of this job site than the oil well means little, the government had plenty of power to make BP and the rest of the crew work smarter . They just did not.

And I hear that what went wrong here scientifically and from an engineering standpoint was about as boneheaded as it gets.

Turns out that the Next Generation system is $30 billion currently programed, to be done by 2030. ERAM was supposed to be a $2.1 billion early part of that, which was supposed to be done in 2010. Not sure about the cost to date of ERAM but it is well above $2.1 billion, and it still does not work right. The list of failures along the way is extensive. An overview can be found here

https://www.ignet.gov/sites/default/files/files/eram_briefing_letko_08_01_13.pdf

Gotta wonder what Al Gore was working on when he was "reinventing government", because as we saw with the ObamaCare website they suck at buying technology.

It would be really cool if we could get into just how bad our government sucks, and how are we going to fix it. We as a nation have not even begun to examine the question. We really need to get to it, morale is dropping fast.

Air Traffic Control? Sounds like a good topic for a thread. Maybe someone should start one.