Dems, EPA defend agency over mine spill criticism

Democrats and a top Environmental Protection Agency official sought Wednesday dispel fierce criticism over a Colorado mine spill that turned the Animas river bright yellow last month, stressing that wastewater spills happen regularly at mine sites. 

Republicans on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee hammered EPA assistant administrator Mathy Stanislaus Wednesday during the first congressional hearing into the accident, which was caused by a team of EPA contractors.

{mosads}But the agency and its allies, including Democrats on the committee and the mayor of the town hardest hit by the mine spill,  reminded the committee that while the EPA should take blame for the Gold King Mine spill, waste leakage into waterways in the area has happened before.

“I am not discounting the significance of the Aug. 5 event at the Gold King mine or its potential environmental impact, but it is important to understand that the issue of mine drainage into the Animas Watershed did not begin last month,” Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Texas), the committee’s ranking Democrat, said.

Johnson showed the committee photos of the Animas River, turned yellow from wastewater in 2012 and 2013 — similar to what happened after the August spill. 

She said environmental regulators should focus on the underlying problem that caused those spills: the “inherently dangerous, dirty and environmentally damaging process of metal mining.”

The Aug. 5 spill sent about 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into Colorado’s Animas River. According to EPA estimates, four mines in the state leak about 330 million gallons of water into rivers there annually on their own. 

Dean Brookie, the mayor of Durango, Co., which is near the mining site, equated the EPA’s inspection of the mine to a game of “whack-a-mole,” where once one abandoned mine is cleaned up, another presents a risk. 

“Pick your color,” he said of the chemicals that have leaked into the rivers before. “We’ve had black, we’ve had gray, we’ve had all types of colors.”

But that reasoning — mining is dangerous and wastewater storage presents spillage risks — fed right into one of Republicans’ line of attack on the EPA. 

Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) pushed Stanislaus on the EPA’s internal risk assessment of the mine and why the contracting team was there in the first place. 

Stanislaus said the team was looking to assess what should be done at the mine to reduce the risks of a blowout or a spill in the future. But Smith said that if the EPA determined the Gold King Mine to be at risk of a leak, the team “clearly did something wrong” to made it happen.

“It seems to me you did not heed the dangers, or you did not act to prevent the spill in an adequate fashion, or the spill would not have occurred,” Smith said. 

The mine spill has given Republicans another chance to bludgeon the EPA, an agency that earned their scorn throughout the Obama administration for its aggressive environmental regulations. 

Wednesday’s hearing was the first of what will likely be many on the spill. The Senate Environment and Public Works has called a spill hearing next week, and the House Natural Resources and Oversight Committees will hold a joint meeting on the matter the next day.  

On Wednesday, Republicans targeted the EPA for a number of aspects related to the accident, from the reasons behind the spill itself and the agency’s response immediately afterward to the information it’s released since then.

The EPA defended itself, with Stanislaus noting that it began issuing warnings about the spill to downstream communities the day of. He acknowledged that wasn’t quick enough, however, and said the agency is working to increase those response times.

He said the EPA has posted 2,500 documents online related to the spill. But even that information was put under the microscope: Republicans noted that audio of an on-site official saying “what do we do now?” had been deleted from a video taken during the incident.  

In light of the video, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) asked, “Was the EPA prepared to respond to an environmental incident of this magnitude?”

Stanislaus said that EPA investigators determined the team had not considered the “worst-case scenario” of a blow-out during the incident. He noted that the EPA and outside agencies are conducting reviews into what went wrong during the spill.

Republicans knocked EPA administrator Gina McCarthy for not appearing at the hearing herself, with the agency sending Stanislaus, the assistant administrator of the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, instead. 

They said the EPA should be held accountable in the same way the agency would punish a private firm if they were a polluter, with some even equating it the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Do you think you should hold the same standard?” Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) said. “Should Gina McCarthy — should we have called for her to be fired?”

Smith, too, said someone at the EPA will eventually have to be held accountable for the incident. 

“It looks like, to many of us, that nobody’s been held accountable,” he said. “Yet the EPA … doesn’t seem to take any responsibility, and that’s simply a disappointment, I have to tell you.”