New Mexico’s top environmental official on Friday raised doubts about the of the Gold King Mine spill, saying he found the “independent investigation to be anything but independent.”
“We are already quite clear on the fact that (Environmental Protection Agency) made a mistake, as the DOI’s report underwhelmingly reveals,” Ryan Flynn, the state’s environment secretary, said in a statement.
The interior department’s report, released Thursday, found the EPA-caused was caused by rushing with inadequate engineering know-how and could have been prevented.
The report did not, however, place blame on any specific person, deferring instead to separate, undisclosed investigative efforts.
“What we were wondering, and hoped the report could tell us, is why EPA made the mistake, and who at EPA made the decisions that authorized dangerous work to proceed based on un-validated estimates,” Flynn said.
Flynn cited language in the report from the Army Corps of Engineers, which helped in the investigation, that raises questions about the interior department’s conclusions.
“The (corps) believes that the investigation and report should have described what happened internal within EPA that resulted in the path forward and eventually caused the failure,” the review says.
A spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation on Friday pointed to a section in the report that states: “The BOR Evaluation Team believed that it was hired to perform a technical evaluation of the causes of the incident, and was not asked to look into the internal communications of the onsite personnel, or to determine why decisions were made. The evaluation team did not believe it was requested to perform an investigation into a ‘finding of fault,’ and that those separate investigative efforts would be performed by others more suitable to that undertaking.”
Jesse Paul: 303-954-1733, jpaul@denverpost.com or @JesseAPaul
