At least one person knew there was going to be a spill from the Gold King Mine before EPA actions caused a breach and at least three million gallons of mining wastewater flowed into the Animus River on August 5. Nine days after the fact, the EPA has yet to explain exactly how and why the massive spill happened.

A letter to the editor of the Silverton Standard out of Silverton, Colorado, dated July 30 warned the EPA’s actions were setting the area “up for a possible Superfund blitzkrieg.” Dave Taylor, a retired self-identified geologist of 47 years condemned EPA’s experiments to divert leakage at the Red and Bonita mine along the same creek as the Gold King Mine. Taylor writes:

Here’s the scenario that will occur based on my experience:

Following the plugging, the exfiltration water will be retained behind the bulkheads, accumulating at a rate of approximately 500 gallons per minute. As the water backs up, it will begin filling all connected mine workings and bedrock volds and fractures. As the water level inside the workings continues to rise, it will accumulate head pressure at a rate of 1 PSI per each 2.31 feet of vertical rise. As the water continues to migrate through and fill interconnected workings, the pressure will increase. Eventually, without a doubt. The water will find a way out and will exfiltrate uncontrollably through connected abandoned shafts, drifts, raises, fractures and possibly from talus on the hillsides. Initially it will appear that the miracle fix is working.

“Hallelujah!”

But make no mistake, with in seven to 120 days all of the 500 gpm flow will return to Cement Creek. Contamination may actually increase due to disturbance and flushing action within the workings.

The whole of Taylor’s letter is worth reading. It is a well-known fact among locals that the EPA has been pushing to put old mines in the region into the Superfund program for some 25 years. The allegation that the EPA has been conducting misguided experiments that would compromise old mines and water quality to expedite that process further impresses the need for oversight of the work at hand and an investigation of EPA’s actions up until the spill. Whether or not that actually was the case remains to be understood.

The Gold King Mine spill comes at a particularly problematic time for EPA.

In a letter to the EPA requesting information on the spill, the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hit upon the situational irony: “It is concerning that the agency charged with ensuring that the nation’s waters are clean is reportedly responsibly for the toxic water spill at Gold King Mine.”

Just over a month ago, the EPA finalized a controversial rule defining which waters are covered by the Clean Water Act as under the jurisdiction of the federal government rather than state and local governments. As it turns out, the rule is so far reaching and vague that virtually every body of water, whether a ditch or a river, can be considered under the federal government’s jurisdiction.

As Heritage Research Fellow Daren Bakst notes, Administrator McCarthy dismissed concerns with the rule as “ludicrous” and “silly” in selling the rule to the American public. Further, the EPA pitched average people and companies—farmers, homebuilders, road construction companies—as dangerous polluters: “Remember, being jurisdictional doesn’t mean anything unless you want to pollute or destroy a jurisdictional water.”

But now the EPA is the polluter, and the pollution isn’t farm drainage ditches or “dredge and fill” material from construction projects but three million gallons of toxic mining waste water flowing down a river used for recreation, farming irrigation, and drinking water resources.

McCarthy, who visited the site earlier this week, said she is “absolutely, deeply sorry that this ever happened.” Ultimately, the American tax payer will have to pay for the mitigation, cleanup, and settlements for losses borne by farmers, businesses, and others impacted by the spill and subsequent closure of the river. This money should not come out of a general fund but from the EPA’s budget itself. The EPA is charged with a “core mission is ensuring a clean environment and protecting public health” and is itself responsible for the spill. Rightly, the EPA should carry the entire burden of that responsibility out of its own budget.