Jewell defends EPA work

House Republicans grill secretary on Gold King

House Republican lawmakers grilled Interior Secretary Sally Jewell on Tuesday, challenging her agency’s review of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Gold King Mine disaster on Aug. 5 — and Jewell maintained itwas an accident.

“Do you want to amend that statement or retract it at all?” House Natural Resources Committee chairman Rep. Rob Bishop, RUtah, said in a brief exchange during a three- hour budget oversight hearing.

Bishop showed an Aug. 7 e- mail from a Bureau of Land Management official in Colorado. That official informed superiors that “the EPA was attempting to relieve hydrologic pressure behind a naturally collapsed adit/ portal of the Gold King Mine. ... While removing small portions of the natural plug, the material catastrophically gave way and released the mine water.”

House staffers interpreted that e- mail to mean the EPA was “deliberately” removing small portions of a plug to relieve pressure when the blowout occurred.

Jewell told Bishop she stood by her previous testimony to committee lawmakers and the conclusions of Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation technical reviewof EPA actions leading up to the mine disaster.

But Bishop said the email “basically says the EPA was deliberately removing a small portion of the plug to relieve pressure in the mine.”

Jewell said the EPA work at the mine was “preparatory” for future work at the mine — rejecting notions that the EPA purposely triggered the blowout. “It was an accident,” Jewell said.

House committee staffers used a subpoena to get the e- mail from Interior officials — shortly after the committee issued an investigative report.

Bishop said the e- mail should have been provided earlier, along with thousands of heavily redacted documents. He told Jewell the lack of transparency is unacceptable.