Jul. 07, 2006 - 20:42 MDT

TOO CLOSE TO HOME

I guess a person feels the hurt more if the wound is on his physical body. An article in our Rocky Mountain News this morning comes pretty close to something like that. The article by Todd Hartman of that paper is quoted here in full:

EPA CHIEF: FILL LEGAL HOLE IN CLEANUP OF OLD MINES

IDAHO SPRINGS -- "With hundreds of abandoned mines delivering untold tonnages of fish-killing copper, cadmium and zinc into Colorado's mountain streams daily, one might think that greens, government and corporate do-gooders would be climing over one another to clean up the mess."

"Not so. A hitch in the nation's tangle of environmental laws can leave even the well intentioned lilable for the very pollution they are trying to eradicate, a disincentive to detoxify old hard-rock ;mines that has scared off even colorado's own public health department."

"In the latest effort to call attention to this legal morass, the Enviromental Protection Agency's top administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, paid a visit to the Clear creek mining region west of Denver on Thursday. He called on Congress to pass a so-called "Good Samaritan" law that would allow cleanups of old mine sites without the fear of lawsuits from government or third parties."

"While the Good Samaritans ae ready to get to work, they have run into legal roadblocks," Johnson said from a podium 100 yeards south of Interstate 70, with mining-tainted waters pourning down a hill behind him. New legislation, he said, "will improve water quatlity by accelerating the pace of" of cleranups."

"Congress has been batting around similar proposals for more than a decade. But the bills get held back by worries that mining companies would use a new law to reopen mines, or that work would be done poorly, perhaps even increasing pollution, with no one accountable."

"But now greens and government officials sense an opportunity. With President Bush backing a version of the Good Samaritan bill, bipartisan support in Congress for the concept and in Johnson, an EPA administrator who has made the matter a priority, hope abounds that this might be the year."

"Congress will fix it when they get the word we're at the tipping point." Ed Rapp, of the Clear Creek Watershed Foundation. told a gathering of about 50 officials, envioromentalists and academics who met at the Idaho Springs Visitors center before accompanying Johnson to a press event at the McClelland Mine near Dumont."

"Several state agencies and private entities, including Coors Brewing Co., joined forces in the 1990s to clean up part of the McClellan site, on the banks of Clear Creek. Workers capped, graded and replanted the site."

"They also set their sights on the mine tunnel itself, where polluted waters carry some 10 pounds of metals a day into Clear Creek. Final designs and funds were in place, but the state ended up pulling back, fearful of legal language in the Clean Water Act and other laws that could leave it and other parties at risk of financial exposuree if someone dedcided to sue over any pollution still leaching from the site."

"Colorado and the West is dotted with sites just like McClelland, as many as 500,000, according to some estimates."

"The largest polluting mines, palces such as Summitville in south-central Colorado, benefit from federal Superfund laws. But it's the countless smallelr sites, not big enough to fall under Superfund, that give regulators and enviormnentalists fits."

"Colorado's congressional delegation has long voiced support for Good Samaritan legislation, including Rep. Mark Udall of the 2nd district."

"U.S. Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard are sponsoring a new version of the bill this year. Rep. Bob Beauprez, of Colorado's 7th Congressional District and the Republican candidate for governor, attended Thursday's gathering and voiced his support for Good Samaritan legislation."

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I suppose it needs for a person to survey the territory a bit in order to understand the implications of the matter, really. Out here in the West the wrinkles of the earth called mountains are "slip'n'slides" for water. What comes down on top, goes either to the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean eventually. Unfortunately gathering pollution of many different kinds on the way.

Heather and I left Denver this morning before we read the paper, bound for "the Claim" that our two sons and their cousin have up on Clear Creek near Idaho Springs to spend a bit of time "creekside" remembering pleasant times of the past.

By the time we finally got uphill we were hungry, so we went on to Idaho Springs for a meal. It had started raining before we got that far and didn't look like it would let up soon. We talked as we ate and decided to take the road that old timers call "The Oh My God Road," it is named the Virginia Canyon Road.

Of course in Idaho Springs we were at the site of the old Argo Mine which was a running concern when I went to YMCA Camp Chief Ouray up by Grand Lake in 1932. It was a huge mine and the tailings are quite evident yet today. Quite a bit of effort has been put into controlling wastewater from the mine entering Clear Creek, through the years.

Our trip up the Virginia Canyon road reminded us once again the untold amount of old mine tailings mounded up here and there along the way. Sometimes it seemed to us there were more piles of tailings than there was natural groundcover. Those tailings from the bowels of the earth contain minerals that would not normally come into action in the world with the rapidity and amount they do from mine tailings. The rain falls, the snow falls also, the liquids filtering down through the tailings leach out the unfavorable elements and compounds and enter the water supply through the outflows of the various creeks that feed the streams on their way to the oceans. Then too is the water that comes out of the mine tunnels.

I had no idea that this article was in the news today or possibly I would have tried to log how many mounds of tailings we saw along the way, the landscape was more yellowish tailings than groundcover that is for sure.

The contamination of potable water does not sift down to the bottom of the streambeds, the worst of it is dissolved and goes with the flow. How much can be processed and removed by various city's systems before being put in the pipelines to homes is hard to tell.

I guess mine shafts have pretty well been sealed agains human traffic, yet every year someone falls to their death.

We can't hold folks in the past for the witches brew coming down from the hills, they didn't know the extent of the contamination or that is was dangerous to human health. All that can be done is to stop the flow of poisons now. By whatever means needed without legal fol-de-rol tangling those who are trying to clean up our water.

So, in the east we have the factories that have to be kept check on that they don't pollute, packing plants effluent, oil patch detritus as well, but first I think clean water must be assured coming from the hills. In my heart this is much TOO CLOSE TO HOME . . . . . . . . . .

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