In what may turn out to be one of the worst ecological disasters in recent memory, the
EPA recently “accidently” spilled millions of gallons of waste into the Animas river
in Colorado.
Why did it turn that freaky orange color?
So, the EPA made the Animas River orange on accident by spilling some wastewater out of
a mine.
I don’t know about you but I’m picturing buffoonish guys carrying barrels of waste
and one of them just trips and whoops it all falls into the river.
While there might have been some buffoonery, the whole incident is a little more complicated
than that.
Like most Western Tales it all starts with a mine.
The Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado in fact.
Most of the area is littered with mines, when in the late 1880-1920s lots of people went
looking for precious metals.
But, the thing about mining is, sooner or later if you dig deep enough, you’ll run
into water.
If the water ends up reacting with pyrite (or fool's gold) and oxygen it will form a
pool of sulfuric acid and dissolved iron.
This acid isn’t good on it’s own, but if it gets in contact with people it can cause
blindness, and if swallowed it can burn holes in your insides.
In this case, the water dissolved other minerals too, like lead and copper.
Each metal is toxic on its own, but mix them all together and you get a nasty soup of heavy
metals.
Miners back in the day didn’t have to do anything with it, because there was no one
regulating their wastewater.
Usually they just dumped it somewhere, like a nearby river.
But in this case, a lot of it was still trapped inside The Gold King Mine... or it was.
The mine changed hands multiple times over the past few decades, and eventually fell
into disrepair.
Now, it had been leaking toxic water for a while now -- which brings us to the EPA.
The EPA knew the mine contained wastewater, and was considering designating it a superfund
site since the 1980s; a designation reserved for only the worst toxic messes.
Remediation efforts were underway, but that’s what caused all this trouble.
You see, the EPA was trying to clean up the site.
The main goal was to install a pipe to drain some of the water and plug the mine so that
all the toxic water would stay trapped inside.
While trying to excavate some fallen debris in the mine, some of that debris collapsed
and it all went south really quick.
Toxic water started pouring into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River.
Turning the Animas River the color of… well Newsweek describes it as “reminiscent of
boxed mac and cheese”.
yuuuum.
One EPA official said they were surprised that “there was quite a bit more mine wastewater
up there than [they] had expected.
They were really trying to make things better.
but they didn’t.
While initial reports estimated the spill at a million gallons, four days later it became
apparent that THREE TIMES that amount was actually spilled, releasing all those toxic
heavy metals into the environment.
The UK based Guardian reported that metals like “cadmium, arsenic, lead, copper ,and
manganese”.
At it’s peak, the mine was gushing about 500 gallons of water a minute!
Most of these metals were released in an initial “plume” where levels of lead spiked to
3,500 times the normal level and arsenic, 300 times normal.
But according to a Colorado Parks and Wildlife test, the water isn’t too deadly.
They tested the toxicity of the water by placing cages of fish in the water for a few days.
They’ve only had one fatality out of hundreds of fish.
Unlike a similar test during another big spill back in the 1970s when a huge heavy-metal-loaded
tailings pile spilled into the river.
During that similar test with fish, nearly all died within 24 hours.
So this isn’t the first or worst disaster the river has seen, but we can hope it’ll
be the last.
Already things seem to be clearing up, the EPA says the notoriously orange tint isn’t
visible anymore, but the river remains closed indefinitely.