In The News

A Navajo lawmaker is sponsoring a bill advocating President Barack Obama hold the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accountable for the Gold King Mine spill. The EPA has accepted responsibility for the spill last month that released more than 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into the Animas River, which meets the San Juan River and flows through the northern portion of the Navajo Nation. In testimony before several Senate...

Researchers say they found scattered accumulations of heavy metals along a 60-mile stretch of riverbank in Colorado and New Mexico a month after the Gold King Mine wastewater spill and say that any potential threat to crops and livestock should be studied further. David Weindorf of Texas Tech University and Kevin Lombard of New Mexico State University said they found patches of discolored sludge containing elevated levels of iron,...

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy is appearing at three Capitol Hill hearings to answer questions about the mine waste spill in Colorado that her agency has taken responsibility for. The hearings are part of an effort by lawmakers to figure out what went wrong at the Gold King Mine and afterward, who is responsible and how the EPA can prevent it from happening again. Republicans have attacked the EPA as...

The EPA, like the rest of the federal bureaucracy, exists by a double standard. But the shamelessness of the regulatory state in perpetuating that double standard never ceases to amaze us. On Aug. 5, an Environmental Protection Agency team triggered the release of at least 3 million gallons of rust-colored sludge from the inactive Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colo. According to EPA testing, concentrations of arsenic, lead and other...

As part of a series of congressional hearings, outraged members of the U.S. House of Representatives grilled the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and affiliated parties and asked the agency to take responsibility for the Aug. 5 acid water spill from the Gold King Mine that affected multiple water systems in the Four Corners. The federal Science, Space and Technology Committee on Wednesday complained of negligence and lack of...

House Republicans blasted the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday for triggering a mine spill that polluted the Animas River, but some Democrats argued the accident was small compared with the amount of pollutants that private mining companies release into the river each year. House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, called the actions of federal and contract workers who accidentally unleashed mining waste into...