The Animas River runs orange due to pollution from the Gold King mine

It was the summer of 2015 when the Animas River in southern Colorado turned so bright orange and gold that it made national news.

The metallic color came from the Gold King Mine near the town of Silverton in the San Juan Range. The abandoned mine was closed by an earthen and stone dam, known as a barrier, behind which orange highly acidic drainage water accumulated. But after the federal one An employee of the OOS broke the traffic jam during the unauthorized excavation, 3.5 million gallons of acid runoff rushed downstream over three weeks.

Worker and EPA arrived a series of outrages and accusations. Alarmed tribal nations and cities cut off drinking water and irrigation; tourists left the region at the height of the tourist season.

But here’s a surprising takeaway from Ty Churchwell, catch coordinator for Trout Unlimited: “Looking back, it’s a positive thing because of what happened later.” He is a member of the Community Advisory Group for the Bonita Peak Mining District, the Superfund site that contains the Gold King Mine.

“We have federal super fundand this is the only tool at our disposal to solve this problem,” he said. The “problem” is unregulated hard rock mining that began 160 years ago.

“I know it’s not popular,” Churchwell said, “but in Durango (30 miles downstream) there were no fish kills from the spill. It was ugly and shocking, but a lot of that orange was rusted and the acid water was diluted by the time it got to Durango and downstream.”

The EPA website indicates that more than 5.4 million gallons of acid mine effluent enters the Animas River every day.

Water quality and fish numbers in the upper Animas River have been declining since the early 2000s, Churchwell said. It was then that the last production ended and it closed its treatment plant.

Six months after the spill made headlines nearly a decade ago, the EPA is gearing up to make sure untreated mine waste doesn’t end up in the river again.

Reid Christopher, a 62-year-old former electrician and mountain guide, became Gold King Mine’s restoration specialist after acquiring the area’s old treatment plant in 2019. Now, he said, only purified water leaves the 11,439-foot mine.

Christopher took me on a tour of the treatment plant this July. In a nutshell, treatment begins when the continuously flowing wastewater enters the sumps.

Christopher then pumps slaked lime into the water, raising its pH to 9.25. The high pH releases the heavy metals from suspension, and the added flocculant causes the heavy metals to stick together inside the football field-sized textile filter bags.

Clear — surprisingly clean — water flows from bags into Cement Creek, Christopher said, and the process is so efficient that he said he’d like to clean the drainage from other large mine shafts at Bonita Peak.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is shy about talking to the press. It’s been inundated with bad publicity since the 2015 explosion, even though, as Churchwell points out, “it wasn’t the EPA that demined the San Juan Mountains and left their mess behind.”

Congress never paid much attention to the mess of abandoned mines in Gold King and throughout the West. Until the Biden administration enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, the EPA depended on annual appropriations. That meant that for nearly four decades, the agency never received enough money to thoroughly clean up the heavy metal mine waste that flows from solid mines like Gold King.

And because the mess was buried deep in the mountains at elevations ranging from 10,500 feet to more than 12,500 feet, the agency couldn’t compete for federal dollars until it grabbed all the headlines about the summer 2015 environmental disaster.

Even now, Churchill said, despite the available funding, “the EPA has 48 mine sites in the Upper Animas River and only so many dollars to work with. They need to get the most bang for their buck.”

Commercial use of metals in sludge can bring some money to the EPA. The Colorado School of Mines took water samples to see what (if anything) could be recovered from mine waste.

But even if the mine tailings are worthless, cleaning up the acidic water at the top of the watershed is good for all the living things downstream.

Currently, Christopher is always looking to hire local people for earthworks and haulage. He said the work could last a lifetime.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to stimulating lively debate about Western issues. He lives in Durango.

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Originally published: November 4, 2024 at 10:45 a.m. MST