EPA chief: Fill legal hole in cleanup of old mines

Todd Hartman, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 7, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Local News

IDAHO SPRINGS - With hundreds of abandoned mines delivering untold tonnages of fish-killing copper, cadmium and zinc into Colorado's mountain streams daily, one might think that greens, government and corporate do-gooders would be climbing over one another to clean up the mess.

Not so. A hitch in the nation's tangle of environmental laws can leave even the well-intentioned liable for the very pollution they are trying to eradicate, a disincentive to detoxify old hard-rock mines that has scared off even Colorado's own public health department.

In the latest effort to call attention to this legal morass, the Environmental Protection Agency's top administrator, Stephen L. Johnson, paid a visit to the Clear Creek mining region west of Denver on Thursday. He called on Congress to pass a so-called "Good Samaritan" law that would allow cleanups of old mine sites without the fear of lawsuits from government or third parties.

"While the Good Samaritans are ready to get to work, they have run into legal roadblocks," Johnson said from a podium 100 yards south of Interstate 70, with mining-tainted waters pouring down a hill behind him. New legislation, he said, "will improve water quality by accelerating the pace" of cleanups.

Congress has been batting around similar proposals for more than a decade. But the bills get held back by worries that mining companies would use a new law to reopen mines, or that work would be done poorly, perhaps even increasing pollution, with no one accountable.

But now, greens and government officials sense an opportunity. With President Bush backing a version of the Good Samaritan bill, bipartisan support in Congress for the concept and, in Johnson, an EPA administrator who has made the matter a priority, hope abounds that this might be the year.

"Congress will fix it when they get the word we're at the tipping point," Ed Rapp, of the Clear Creek Watershed Foundation, told a gathering of about 50 officials, environmentalists and academics who met at the Idaho Springs Visitors Center before accompanying Johnson to a press event at the McClelland Mine near Dumont.

Several state agencies and private entities, including Coors Brewing Co., joined forces in the 1990s to clean up part of the McClelland site, on the banks of Clear Creek. Workers capped, graded and replanted the site.

They also set their sights on the mine tunnel itself, where polluted waters carry some 10 pounds of metals a day into Clear Creek. Final designs and funds were in place, but the state ended up pulling back, fearful of legal language in the Clean Water Act and other laws that could leave it and other parties at risk of financial exposure if someone decided to sue over any pollution still leaching from the site.

Colorado and the West is dotted with sites just like McClelland, as many as 500,000, according to some estimates.

The largest polluting mines, places such as Summitville in south-central Colorado, benefit from federal Superfund laws. But it's the countless smaller sites, not big enough to fall under Superfund, that give regulators and environmentalists fits.

Colorado's congressional delegation has long voiced support for Good Samaritan legislation, including Rep. Mark Udall of the 2nd district.

U.S. Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard are sponsoring a new version of the bill this year. Rep. Bob Beauprez, of Colorado's 7th Congressional District and the Republican candidate for governor, attended Thursday's gathering and voiced his support for Good Samaritan legislation.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News