Colorado has been haunted by its toxic past

It’s been one week since the yellow water started flowing out of Colorado’s Gold King Mine. And residents are upset.

What’s going on is that Colorado is being haunted by its history.

The Environmental Protection Agency has taken full responsibly for disturbing a debris dam by mistake during an attempt to clean up the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado &#8212 sending three million gallons of toxic water into the Animas River.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy certainly gets the irony.

“EPA’s mission is to protect public health and the environment,” McCarthy recently told the press. “No agency could be more upset about the incident happening.”

But you might be asking, “Why was all that toxic water just sitting there to begin with?”

And the answer is because there was a time in Colorado where you could just dig a mine near a river, take out the gold, and then leave. And that’s exactly what mining companies did.

But digging a gold mine starts a chemical reaction. It releases ground water which dissolves the iron oxide in the rock, eventually forming sulfuric acid which turns the water the color of mustard and starts dissolving other heavy metals.

That’s the toxic mixture that has been pooling for years not just in the Gold King Mine, but in hundreds of Colorado’s abandoned mines.

Peter Butler is with the Animas River Stakeholders Group, which has been trying to clean them up.

“There’s a question of whether or not the public is willing to put up some of the money to fix some of these sites,” Butler told the press. “But most of the sites up here, the people who did the damage, are long gone.”

The EPA tried for 25 years to declare the area a superfund site, which would release a lot more money for cleanup. But locals opposed that. They were worried that slapping a superfund label on the river might scare away the tourists.