Utah seeks to recover for mine waste spill

SALT LAKE CITY — Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes plans to take legal action against the Environmental Protection Agency following reports that it didn’t alert the state to river contamination after a massive mine waste spill last year in Colorado.

Reyes said the federal agency must be held responsible for damage from the spill that contaminated rivers in three Western states.

The announcement comes after Utah regulators said the EPA didn’t alert them to water quality tests showing elevated levels of metals like lead and arsenic in San Juan River months after the August spill. The data was posted online in October, but wasn’t sent to Utah, so regulators weren’t aware until they found it months later.

While there isn’t a current threat to public health, the state will resume its own tests of the water.

“Our job is to protect health and safety of Utah residents, and we take that seriously,” said Alan Matheson, executive director of the Utah Department of Environmental Quality.

An EPA spokeswoman says the agency is looking into the state’s concerns.

The tests found several peaks in metal concentrations, including in the days right after the Aug. 5 mine spill that may have dumped more than 880,000 pounds of metals into Colorado’s Animas River. The contaminants flowed from there into New Mexico and Utah.

An EPA crew trying to clean up the abandoned Gold King mine near Silverton, Colo., accidently set off the spill from the southwestern Colorado gold mine. An agency report released last week found that most of the metals settled into the Animas River, though some reached the San Juan.