The EPA has Been Dumping Toxic Waste Longer than Reported

Mine owner: EPA record of toxic dumping dates back to 2005

The EPA has a record of releasing toxic runoff from mines in two tiny Colorado towns that dates to 2005, a local mine owner claims.

The 3-million-gallon heavy-metal spill two weeks ago in Silverton polluted three states and touched off national outrage. But the EPA escaped public wrath in 2005 when it secretly dumped up to 15,000 tons of poisonous waste into another mine 124 miles away. That dump – containing arsenic, lead and other materials – materialized in runoff in the town of Leadville, said Todd Hennis, who owns both mines along with numerous others.

“If a private company had done this, they would’ve been fined out of existence,” Hennis said. “I have been battling the EPA for 10 years and they have done nothing but create pollution. About 20 percent (of Silverton residents) think it’s on purpose so they can declare the whole area a Superfund site.”

Like Silverton to the south, Leadville was founded in the late 1800s as a mining town and is the only municipality in its county. Today, tourism is its livelihood.

It’s against this backdrop that the Environmental Protection Agency began lobbying to declare part of Leadville a Superfund site in order to develop a recreational area called the Mineral Belt Trail. The project was officially completed in 2000, but apparently the agency stayed on and continued to work in town.

In late 2005, the EPA collected tons of sludge from two Leadville mines and secretly dumped it down the shaft of the New Mikado mine without notifying Hennis, its owner, according to documents reviewed by Watchdog.

A drainage tunnel had been installed at the bottom of the mine shaft by the U.S. government in 1942, meaning that any snow or rain would leach toxins into the surrounding land.

Hennis said the EPA claims it has installed a treatment pond near the tunnel to clean runoff. The EPA rebuffed his demands to clean up the mess it created in his mine, he said. In frustration, Hennis sent the county sheriff a certified notice that any EPA officials found near his property were trespassing and should be arrested.

Despite that history of bitterness, in 2010, the EPA asked Hennis to grant its agents access to Gold King Mine in Silverton because the agency was investigating hazardous runoff from other mines in the region.

“I said, ‘No, I don’t want you on my land out of fear that you will create additional pollution like you did in Leadville,’” Hennis said. The official request turned into a threat, Hennis said: “They said, ‘If you don’t give us access within four days, we will fine you $35,000 a day.’”

An EPA administrative order dated May 12, 2011 said its inspectors wanted to conduct “drilling of holes and installing monitoring wells, sampling and monitoring water, soil, and mine waste material from mine water rock dumps…as necessary to evaluate releases of hazardous substances…”

When the EPA hit Hennis with $300,000 in fines, he said, he “waved the white flag” and allowed the agency on his property.

So for the past four years, the EPA has been working at the mine and two others nearby – all which border a creek that funnels into the Animas River. One mine to the north had been walled off with cement by its owner but it continued to leak water into Gold King. The EPA installed a drainage ditch on the Gold King side of the mine to alleviate the problem, but then accidentally filled the ditch with dirt and rocks last summer while building a water-retention wall.

That was the wall that burst when a contractor punched a hole in the top on Aug. 5, sending a bright orange stream cascading down. The EPA looked like the Keystone Kops as anger intensified in the media and general public: 24 hours passed with no notification to the lower states or Navajo Nation; the White House ignored mentioning the incident; and it took a week for the EPA administrator to tour Durango downstream, while refusing to visit Silverton itself.

The EPA says cleaning ponds have been installed to leach toxins from the water, and claims that anything released now is actually cleaner than before the spill occurred. The fallout from this disaster in the lower states is still unknown.

Also unknown is the fate of Silverton itself. For months, the EPA has been pushing town leaders into allowing designation as a Superfund site out of belief that the whole town is contaminated. This is something the town has resisted, as its reputation is at stake and no current tests have shown any evidence of toxic soil levels.

“Whenever we hear the word ‘EPA,’ we think of Superfund,” said Silverton Town Board Trustee David Zanoni. “They say, ‘We want to work together.’ That’s B.S. They want to come in and take over. The water up here is naturally filled with minerals. They don’t need to be here cleaning up.”

If the EPA’s litany of mistakes at Gold King mine is a barometer, Zanoni said, handing over the reins of Silverton would be a disaster.

“They had no contingency plan in case all of this went to hell,” he said.

The EPA could not be reached for comment.

*** How bad is the EPA otherwise? Sheesh much worse than can be fully explained yet here are some additional facts.

AmericanThinker in part:

“I’m very concerned that vital information regarding suspected employee misconduct is being withheld from the OIG,” Patrick Sullivan, assistant inspector general, testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“This is truly a broken agency,” committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., said, adding that the employee problems have gotten to the point of being “intolerable.”

The committee revealed several startling allegations and cases shared by the inspector general’s office. In one case, an employee was getting paid for one or two years after moving to a retirement home, where the employee allegedly did not work. When an investigation began, the worker was simply placed on sick leave.

In another case, an employee with multiple-sclerosis was allowed to work at home for the last 20 years. However, for the past five years, she allegedly produced no work — though she was paid roughly $600,000. She retired after an investigation.

In yet another case, an employee was accused of viewing pornography for two-to-six hours a day since 2010. An IG probe found the worker had 7,000 pornographic files on his EPA computer.

At the hearing, Sullivan detailed specific concerns with the agency’s little-known Office of Homeland Security.

The office of about 10 employees is overseen by EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy’s office, and the inspector general’s office is accusing it of operating illegally as a “rogue law enforcement agency” that has impeded independent investigations into employee misconduct, computer security and external threats, including compelling employees involved in cases to sign non-disclosure agreements.

EPA Deputy Administrator Bob Perciasepe told Congress that the agency’s employees work cooperatively with the inspector general and support its mission.

[…]

The dispute between the inspector general’s office and the Homeland Security office came to a head last year, as Republicans in Congress investigated the agency’s handling of John C. Beale, a former deputy assistant administrator who pleaded guilty in federal court last fall to stealing a total of $886,186 between 2000 and April 2013, falsely claiming he was working undercover for the CIA. The Beale case was initially investigated by the Homeland Security office months before the IG’s office was made aware of it.

Sullivan said Wednesday that the office’s actions delayed and damaged their own probe.

Further, he claimed a “total and systematic refusal” to share information has stymied investigations. Sullivan said the office for years has blocked the inspector general’s office from information by citing national security concerns and compelling employees to sign non-disclosure agreements.

The Beale case is especially egregious because this singularly unqualified employee was giving input into new environmental regulations for years. Makes you wonder about the “scientific basis” for clean air and water regs issued in the last few years.

The EPA’s Office of Homeland Security may have begun innocently enough, but was turned into something sinister by the Obama administration. It became an umbrella political hit squad, squashing potentially damaging investigations, intimidating witnesses, and interferring in the operations of the inspector general’s office, It reports only to the EPA administrator and is thus outside the normal chain of command at the agency.

Sounds like the old East German Stasi.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy should be fired immediately and the homeland security office disbanded. This is intolerable behavior from anyone in government, much less from an agency with so much power.

Denise Simon