DENVER – Over a recent breakfast, Gov. John Hickenlooper, fellow Western governors and chiefs of key federal agencies put their heads together on the problem of leaking inactive mines.
It has stymied Western leaders for decades.
But during that Feb. 21 confab in Washington, D.C., with the EPA-triggered Gold King Mine disaster still roiling, Hickenlooper determined that a consensus had emerged: make tackling these tens of thousands of ecological time bombs a priority.
“There was a consensus: The time is now,” Hickenlooper said, conveying his vision in an interview last week. “Let’s get a thorough inventory, assess – or, let’s say, reassess because almost all these mines have been assessed in the past – and begin looking at real timelines. How much would this cost? And what would be the best way to get the maximum reduction in toxicity?”
The problem is huge, even after so many Superfund cleanups, Hickenlooper said, “but it doesn’t mean you quit.”
“What Gold King did is put it front and center,” he said. “So, I think, there is a willingness to go.”
As part of the push, Hickenlooper said he would like to call a water summit with governors from New Mexico, Arizona and Utah.
And he’s “all for” turning Silverton, beneath the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado, into a research hub to find the best way to neutralize old mines – short of installing water-treatment plants on every contaminated waterway.
“Are we sure there’s not some much less expensive way to deal with this issue? It was what they were trying to get at when they put in those big plugs,” Hickenlooper said, referring to past efforts to contain toxic drainage underground.
Worries about the West’s once-lucrative but now mostly abandoned old mines are intensifying because thousands – at least 230 in Colorado – still are draining thousands of gallons a minute of acidic, metals-laden muck into streams and rivers. This is happening at a time when high-growth states seek more clean water.
Headwaters of major rivers that originate in Colorado are tainted, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment data. Acid metal drainage from mines is identified as a main source of toxic contamination.
The cost of addressing the estimated 500,000 inactive mines around the West, congressional natural resources, staff members said this week, would be $20 billion to $54 billion, based on a 2004 Environmental Protection Agency report.
A comprehensive fix likely would require reform of the nation’s 1872 mining law, to charge the mining industry fees to help finance cleanup and tweaking the Clean Water Act to encourage voluntary cleanups.
Companies and conservation groups say they need legal shields against liability if things go wrong, as they did at the Gold King on Aug. 5, when an EPA crew botched efforts to drain the mine and triggered a 3 million-gallon torrent that turned the Animas River mustard yellow with heavy-metal laced mine wastewater.
Federal agency chiefs at the breakfast with Hickenlooper included Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Bureau of Land Management Director Neil Kornze, along with Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead and Utah Gov. Gary Herbert.
Tens of thousands of abandoned mines are on public lands managed by the BLM and U.S. Forest Service.
The Interior Department “finds it unfortunate that an incident like the Gold King Mine spill had to happen to highlight an issue that land managers in both the federal and state governments have been grappling with for years,” Jewell testified at recent congressional budget hearings.