Thousands of emails related to the Gold King Mine spill that were posted online last week by the Environmental Protection Agency will eventually be made searchable, the agency said Thursday.
The documents were posted largely in response to multiple open records requests from media outlets across the country that are seeking more information about the Aug. 5, 2015, spill.
They generally consist of email communications involving EPA employees – pre-spill and post-spill – in addition to attachments and meeting invites, the EPA said Thursday in an email to the The Durango Herald. The oldest document is from March 2013, and the most recent is from November 2015.
The documents were uploaded as PDFs to a file-sharing site but are unsearchable without opening each of the 29,126 links. Even then, because the PDFs have been uploaded as images rather than text documents, it is difficult to perform keyword searches without using optical reading software. There’s about 20 gigabytes worth of uploads.
The Herald first reported on the document dump Wednesday, but the EPA did not immediately respond to an email seeking additional information.
In a prepared statement Thursday, the EPA said it wasn’t able to immediately publish the documents to a website that manages Freedom of Information Act requests, so it published them to an FTP (file transfer protocol) site to make them publicly available as soon as possible.
“We are looking into technical options to help users sort through the documents,” the EPA said Thursday.
Once the documents can be published to a FOIA site, relevant documents will be linked with the appropriate FOIA requests. If a document is relevant to multiple requests, it will appear under each requester’s file.
“We are on track to close out the vast majority of the 45-plus large GKM (Gold King Mine) requests by the end of August,” the EPA said Thursday.
The documents were uploaded as images because the EPA’s software exports them that way, said Nancy Grantham, a spokeswoman for the agency. Ultimately, the agency intends to use additional software to add character recognition information to the PDFs and thus provide text-searchable documents, Grantham said.
“To make at least this information available to the public as an interim measure, we have made the image-only PDF files available at the FTP site,” she said.
The EPA has posted thousands of pages of documents related to the Gold King Mine spill on the Gold King Mine emergency response site, www.epa.gov/goldkingmine, where many people requesting information have been sent.
“From a FOIA production standpoint, we view the agency’s response on GKM to be a success,” the EPA said.
Anyone wanting to browse the 29,000-plus documents can do so by visiting bit.ly/2aPbnJ2, scrolling to July 29, 2016, and clicking on the FTP drive.
shane@durangoherald.com