Trump blasts EPA over mine waste spill

Donald Trump excoriated the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over its recent spill of mine waste into a river.

The GOP presidential hopeful said the incident in Colorado that turned the Animas River bright orange further proves his point that the EPA’s authorities should be put in the hands of state and local governments.

{mosads}“This is all the more example why EPA, we should do it locally. We shouldn’t be doing it from Washington,” Trump told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt on his Wednesday show.

Trump said the heavy metals in the sludge that spill out are “probably going to kill the fish, kill everything. And it was totally their mistake. They opened the wrong door and all of this stuff spewed out.”

So far, state and federal officials have not found any impacts on the health of humans or wildlife from the spill.

Trump also said the spill shows hypocrisy on the Obama administration’s part, since the EPA punishes business owners such as Trump for minor violations.

He said he might fire an EPA administrator if he or she were responsible for such a spill.

“Often times for a thing like this, you have to just get rid of them,” he said.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), another presidential contender, was on Hewitt’s show earlier Wednesday, and he said the EPA’s spill demonstrates its “incompetence.”

He lamented farmers and American Indian tribes who cannot use the river, and said the EPA has been completely unresponsive to them.

“It’s not just the crisis they’ve created, it’s their response to it that belies arrogance and this notion that ‘yeah, we’re sorry it happened, but we don’t need to give you any more information, because we’re the EPA and you can’t do anything to us,’ ” he said. “So I think it’s both competence and arrogance at play.”

EPA head Gina McCarthy announced Wednesday that the river’s metal and acidity had returned to pre-spill levels in the county where it started.

Meanwhile, the agency is conducting an internal review and commissioning an external one and ordering all EPA mining-related assessments across the country to be paused.

Various lawmakers and congressional committees are also pledging to investigate, and the House Oversight Committee is asking for an inspector general probe.