Please tell me what Salazar did wrong so I can understand why you are so angry. TiA.
Stimulus cash will pour into mine cleanup
Up to $25 million will fund a new plant to treat polluted Summitville water and finish the Superfund work.
By Mark Jaffe
The Denver Post
Posted: 04/16/2009 12:30:00 AM MDT
The Summitville Mine Superfund site will receive up to $25 million in federal stimulus funds to replace an aging plant used to treat polluted mine water.
The plant is "antiquated and held together with baling wire and duct tape," said Ken Wangerud, site project manager for the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Unable to handle all of the polluted water flowing from the mine site, the plant has released small amounts of acid-laced water to an Alamosa River tributary during high-water periods, which allows the pollution to be diluted, Wangerud said.
"Considering the difficulty of running that facility, they've done a skillful job," he said.
The grant to the Rio Grande County site is part of $600 million in stimulus funds targeted for Superfund sites.
"It is a welcomed move," said Lisa Evans, an attorney who works on hazardous-waste issues for the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice.
"Under the Bush administration, Superfund dollars were cut and the pace of cleanup slowed," Evans said.
The EPA took over the 1,400-acre Summitville Mine site in late 1992 when the operator went bankrupt.
Mine pollution killed fish in a 17-mile stretch of the Alamosa River and created about a square-mile of tainted land.
At the time, there were five small water-treatment plants on the site. A couple were closed and the rest consolidated into a single, upgraded operation, Wangerud said.
That plant, however, had a rated capacity of 1,000 gallons per minute. "It just didn't have the capacity to treat all the water," Wangerud said.
The new plant will handle 1,600 gallons a minute, removing acid and metal contamination from the mine drainage water, according to the EPA.
The treated water is discharged into Wightman Fork, a tributary of the Alamosa River, which flows into the Rio Grande.
When the plant is operational, cleanup work at the mine site will be complete.
In the past 17 years, $200 million to $250 million has been spent to clean, cap, plug and dike the Superfund site, according to the EPA.
The cost of managing the site and treating contaminated water is about $2.5 million a year, Wangerud said. The state of Colorado has taken over management of the site.
The grant for the new plant helps "close a difficult chapter in Colorado's history by accelerating the cleanup," said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who worked on the Summitville situation while a U.S. senator from Colorado.
Mark Jaffe: 303-954-1912 or mjaffe@denverpost.com
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