A federal agency ignored years of warnings about a blocked mine-drainage tunnel and now is under fire for failing to act on what has been declared a local emergency, Leadville and Lake County officials said.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the partially plugged Leadville Mine Drainage Tunnel, was repeatedly told of the tunnel’s problems, the local officials said.
“I don’t know that there’s any place else that I could put the blame. They’re in control of it,” said Lake County Commissioner Carl Schaefer.
Even as state and federal officials have joined the call for action, the bureau still contends that the estimated 1 billion gallons of metals-laden water poses no imminent threat to Leadville and the Arkansas River.
“Reclamation feels like there is not a threat, but we’re proceeding forward like there is because of the concerns that Lake County has,” bureau spokesman Peter Soeth said Monday.
The bureau has agreed to take more water through its water-treatment plant — if it can be piped around the blockage — and will conduct a new assessment of the risks, Soeth said.
“The state, the county commissioners and the federal government agencies all said we don’t know what the true risk is there,” Soeth said.
Meanwhile, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Denver, criticized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Bush administration on Monday for stalling Superfund cleanup efforts.
“Unfortunately for the 2,700 people of Leadville . . . this appears to be yet another glaring example of the consequences that result from this administration’s rollback of the Superfund program,” DeGette wrote in a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
After declaring a state of emergency last week, Schaefer and his fellow commissioners finally have rallied popular and political support for draining the growing pool of acidic mine runoff stopped up behind the tunnel.
They say the buildup threatens lives, water supplies and the health of the Arkansas River.
“Their own engineers have stated in the past that this situation could not get to where it is right now without a catastrophic failure,” Schaefer said of the bureau.
The EPA recommended closing the tunnel in 2004, according to Mark Williams, a geography professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who conducted a hydrology study of the area as part of the effort.
The $4 million plan called for stuffing a concrete plug in the tunnel, diverting a major source of clean water from one nearby mine shaft to another drainage and placing pumps in additional shafts in case the water pooled up, he said.
“The money was actually appropriated to decommission the tunnel, but the EPA could not get the Bureau of Reclamation to sign off on it,” Williams said. “It’s the Bureau of Reclamation’s fault.”
Steve Lipsher: 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com
