The Animus River spill — an accidental release of polluted mining site wastewater into a tributary of the Colorado River, has focused renewed attention on America’s toxic mining legacy. Under the 1872 Mining Act, anyone can stake a claim on federal land and mine the minerals there by paying royalties ranging from $2.50 to $5.00 per acre — almost nothing. Since 1872, miners have taken over $230 billion of minerals from federal lands, and continue doing so at a rate of $2 to $3 billion a year. (Source: Wikipedia)
with respect to environmental abuse, hard-rock mining arguably is America’s worst and dirtiest industry; miners dig out the valuable ores, often leaving behind unfunded Superfund sites for the public to clean up. Miners avoid financial responsibility for these messes by setting up limited-life corporations that go out of existence when the mine shuts down. The result is there’s no legal entity or liable party for government lawyers to sue under CERCLA laws. This racket sticks the government with cleanup bills running into tens of millions of dollars per mining site. In economic terms, few if any U.S. hard-rock mining operations would be profitable if they had to pay for cleaning up the pollution they cause.
The source of the 100-mile-long plume of toxic waste now flooding down the Animus River is the Gold King Mine, which was operated by the Sunnyside Gold Corp. from the 1880s to 1923. It’s one of thousands of abandoned mines in Colorado’s gold and silver country, where mining used to provide most of the employment, and therefore enjoyed the political support of the local populace.
(I’m personally connected to this history; my grandfather, as a young man, sought his fortune in the Colorado mining towns, and my father was born in Silverton. Not succeeding there, Granddad became a South Dakota farmer, but he eventually returned to Colorado and spent his later years in Denver.)
In the decades since the Gold King Mine closed, acidic water polluted with heavy metals including arsenic, lead, mercury, beryllium, and cadmium accumulated in its tunnels and some of it leaked out. EPA workers were performing remediation work at the site when a rock dam failed and released 3 million gallons of the mine’s polluted water into a nearby creek.
More than a century of mining had already severely damaged the region’s flora and fauna, so there weren’t any fish left to kill. But the toxic metals released by the spill are likely to remain in river-bottom sediments permanently, and damage crops and cause human health problems for decades to come. Experts are calling it a “horrible” spill.
The fact this accident was triggered by EPA workers no doubt will provoke gleeful attacks on the environmental protection agency by anti-environment conservatives. In Colorado, TV news commentators were quick to blame the EPA. That, of course, is a red herring; EPA was there trying to protect the environment, farmers, and downstream human inhabitants from past mining pollution. Mining, not environmental regulation, is the true culprit. The EPA workers didn’t create this pollution; the miners did.
Similar legacies exist all across the American West: Abandoned mines, toxic mining sites, expensive Superfund cleanups, and dozens of environmental disasters that have either happened or are waiting to happen. If we listened to the EPA’s critics, there would be a lot more of them.