The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
EPA extra cautious after Gold King spill
By Adam Broderick
On August 5, a cleanup team for the EPA accidentally released nearly three million gallons of water contaminated with heavy metals into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River near the town of Silverton, Colo.
News of the accident traveled far and fast, and the EPA took grief from many. To reduce the risk of something similar happening at the Standard Mine on Mt. Emmons, the EPA has suspended work at the site “out of abundance of caution” while it analyzes exactly what happened at the Gold King and determines how to move forward at the Standard in the safest way possible.
Christina Progess, EPA Superfund project manager, said the goal at Gold King was to assess the ongoing water releases from the mine, treat the mine water, and assess the feasibility of further mine remediation.
“There are many differences between the known conditions of the underground workings at Standard Mine and the unknown conditions at the Gold King that make it unlikely that a similar sized event would occur at Standard Mine,” said Progess. “However, there are also some similarities between the two sites, namely the existence of water behind the collapse within Level 1 workings and the need to intercept those workings and remove the water in order to design and construct a flow-through bulkhead in Level 1. EPA is very concerned about what happened at the Gold King and very interested in ensuring the same thing does not occur to threaten the town of Crested Butte’s drinking water or the ecology of the Coal Creek and Slate River watersheds.”
Shortly after the Gold King accident, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy suspended operations at 27 mining projects across the country. Ever since, an independent third-party contractor, Tetra Tech, has been conducting a multi-layered management review process of each mine one-by-one.
According to EPA mining engineer Jim Hanley, the Tetra Tech team is composed of mostly engineers who have been in the business of optimizing Superfund sites. In other words, Hanley explained, a Superfund team shows Tetra Tech what they plan to do at a site, and Tetra Tech tweaks their plan to make sure it’s the most cost-effective, efficient plan possible.
“It’s called optimization of projects,” Hanley told the News. “This time, though, they’re not so much doing that as they are looking for vulnerabilities, fatal flaws, areas of risk that weren’t adequately accounted for in the design. So they’re looking at how the construction might be putting the mine and the people downstream at risk.”
The Tetra Tech team began their review of the Standard Mine on Monday, August 24, and will give the EPA its opinion by Thursday, August 27. Hanley says he doesn’t know exactly what has been discovered at Gold King, but says the Tetra Tech team was pretty positive in their response to current design plans. He predicts they won’t recommend the EPA do anything differently at the Standard Mine. He knows that operations could remain suspended for another week or two, and Progess says the earliest work could restart would be in that same timeframe.
Hanley believes that at the very best, “If we get a favorable opinion from them, we might have our construction crew back at work as early as Monday.”
The Standard Mine was not completely abandoned when operations were suspended. The EPA is paying for a caretaker crew to basically make sure nothing goes wrong, and since all water flows through the ponds by gravity and there is no pumping involved, pumps don’t need to be kept running. Hanley says the work crew is doing various repairs on equipment and other tasks they had deferred for a while, and making sure all ponds flow as they should.
With the anticipated installation of a bulkhead in the mine’s lowest level to reduce pressure buildup and avoid major catastrophe, this delay in work could potentially prevent the EPA from moving forward at a consistent pace. Still, Hanley says, things are still looking pretty good for the time being.
“We did a scheduled analysis to make sure we could complete all the work we planned before the snow comes, and we’re pretty sure we can finish work for the year before late October. Then we would close up the mine properly so we can get back in there and restart as soon as snow melts,” Hanley said.
According to Progess, the team plans to update the Town Council with study results at the September 8 meeting.
As for local concerns about health and human safety, according to Crested Butte’s Public Works director, Rodney Due, “Crested Butte has enough drinking water available in the town reservoir to supply the town for one month.”
