3 adjacent mines still leaking foul water
While state and federal leaders focused on the Gold King Mine blowout and downriver contamination, three adjacent mines still are leaking more than 540 gallons per minute of waste laced with heavy metals into Animas River headwaters.
And mine owners squared off Tuesday over who, beyond the Environmental Protection Agency, is ultimately responsible.
EPA officials said the initial 3 million-gallon deluge from Gold King is dissipating but kept the Animas River closed. They declined again — six days after an EPA crew triggered the blowout — to release data on contamination levels of cadmi-
um, lead, arsenic, zinc, manganese and other heavy metals.
Gov. John Hickenlooper was in Durango on Tuesday, and EPA chief Gina McCarthy is scheduled to be there and in New Mexico on Wednesday.
But the culprit for the continuing acid discharge — which has long since killed headwaters fish — still wasn’t clear in thick EPA and state records on the Sunnyside, Mogul, and Red and Bonita mines.
Gold King owner Todd Hennis, president of San Juan Corp., said Tuesday in an interview that backed-up wastewater inside the Sunnyside Mine is to blame for Wednesday’s blowout. Sunnyside Gold Corp. is owned by Kinross, a $2.3 billion company that runs mines worldwide.
“It is our belief that, when Sunnyside put bulkheads inside the Sunnyside Mine, they redistributed the flow of wastewater out of other mine portals. It is a bad flow, very high in the nasty minerals, very acidic,” said Hennis, who also owns the Mogul Mine and vowed full cooperation with the EPA on the Gold King cleanup.
Hennis called on Kinross to voluntarily install a water-treatment plant for $5 million to $20 million on Cement Creek to prevent further harm to the Animas and downriver communities.
“Please, Kinross, step up,” Hennis said. “Do a voluntary deal with the EPA. You need to set up a treatment plant to deal with the water impacts of the bulkheads inside the Sunnyside Mine.”
Kinross officials — their North American operations are based in Denver — flatly rejected the notion that underground tunnels are connected.
“Sunnyside Gold Corporation is not involved whatsoever. It never owned or operated Gold King and did not take part in work being done there,” company reclamation manager Larry Perino said. “Sunnyside Mine workings have no physical connection to the Gold King, and such a connection never existed. Sunnyside is not the cause of the water buildup at Gold King.”
Hennis retorted: “They are lying. They leased the Gold King extension in 1989. They mined it in 1990 from Sunnyside — and then left everything open. The bulkheads at Sunnyside caused mine pools that extend into Gold King.”
Colorado officials in 1995 agreed to let Sunnyside install bulkhead plugs to try to control acid drainage. Once ranking among the state’s largest underground gold mines, Sunnyside employed hundreds of workers before closing in 1991.
A legal agreement between Colorado and the previous owner of Sunnyside, Canada-based Echo Bay, also led to significant cleanup work along Cement Creek — until a water treatment plant closed in 2003. The agreement waived Colorado’s legal ability to prosecute Sunnyside for bulkhead leakage.
Whether or not mine tunnels are connected — U.S. Geological Survey experts and state mining regulators said Tuesday this remains uncertain — a continuing combined flow of 540 to 740 gallons a minute of acid drainage from the Mogul, Sunnyside, and Red and Bonita mines still is degrading Animas headwaters even as the mustard-yellow plume from the Gold King blowout dissipates.
This is in addition to a continuing Gold King discharge, estimated at 500 to 700 gallons a minute — wastewater now partially treated in emergency settling ponds.
“That water (from the three other mines) that is still coming out of these mines is loaded with dissolved metals. Even though the river now looks clear, it is loaded,” said Bruce Stover, director of Colorado’s abandoned mines reclamation program, who has worked on problems with old mines for 30 years.
“These mines are draining as we speak. We had a disaster last week — a surging amount of water coming out. That same amount of water is coming out over six months and harming the Animas. That water is coming out 24/7,” Stover said, adding there are 29 other leaking old mines in the Silverton area.
“The discharge of all those mines is continuing. Unless the EPA, locals and state work on the problem, there will not be any solution to what is happening on the Animas,” Stover said.
On Tuesday, Colorado Sens. Michael Bennet and Cory Gardner and Rep. Scott Tipton urged McCarthy to visit the site. From Washington, D.C., McCarthy addressed the disaster.
“Working with local officials, EPA is providing alternative water supplies and free water quality testing for domestic drinking water wells along the river. We have been in touch with the state leadership, as well as the congressional delegations, and we have kept the White House informed,” she said. “The EPA is an agency whose core mission is ensuring a clean environment and protecting public health. So it pains me to see this happening. But we are working tirelessly to respond and have committed to a full review of exactly what happened to ensure it cannot happen again.”
State attorneys general from Colorado, New Mexico and Utah are planning to meet Wednesday in Durango about potential legal action. Navajo Nation leaders have threatened a lawsuit against the EPA.
Hickenlooper and state natural resources and health officials toured Durango with an eye to reopening the river for rafting and other business.
“I think we share the anger that something like this could happen,” Hickenlooper said as he stood on banks of the Animas. “But I think, that said, our primary role is now: That’s behind us, and how are we going to move forward?”
State mining officials said they are preparing for delivery to Hickenlooper’s office by the end of Thursday a map of 200 old mines around Colorado leaking into waterways.