You might call this unusual because Durango has access to a backup supply. In 2011, voters approved spending $6 million to buy 3,800 acre‑feet of water storage in a reservoir called Lake Nighthorse. The rationale was simple: The town could build a pipeline and ship that water into its system whenever dry times occurred.

But since then, not much has happened.

Former city manager Ron LeBlanc tried to move the project forward before retiring in 2019. An engineering study in 2023 concluded that the town should connect Lake Nighthorse to its system using one of three possible pipeline routes. Still, no construction began.

Durango’s mayor, Gilda Yazzie, says the city paid for its share of a pipe at the base of the dam, along with what¶¶Òőap called a manifold — a device that would split water among the four users of Lake Nighthorse. But nothing has been built to connect that manifold to Durango’s water system.

Lake Nighthorse itself is the scaled‑down result of the Animas–La Plata Project, authorized by Congress in 1968. That project would have covered the Animas and La Plata river valleys with canals, pumps and pipelines. Instead, the final plan built just one dam and one pumping station, leaving the Animas River free‑flowing.

That decision helped protect the area’s natural beauty while also attracting more people to Durango. Some of those new residents have since moved into fire‑prone areas. Many Western cities have learned the hard way about not securing enough water to fight wildfires. Fires racing through Los Angeles in 2025 wiped out entire neighborhoods. Water storage ran out and hydrants went dry.

Durango water engineer Steve Harris has 52 years of experience in the field and is known for promoting water conservation. He thinks Durango is making a serious mistake by not connecting a pipe to Lake Nighthorse.

“The city has a century of the Animas and Florida Rivers being so good to them with steady year-around flows that they don’t even know they need storage,” he said. “They may only find out during a water crisis.”

Right now, Durango has 10 to 30 days of water stored in its Terminal Reservoir, which holds 267 acre-feet. That¶¶Òőap annual water consumption for about 600 households; Durango has over 9,000 households. The city depends mainly on the Florida River, with large draws of summer water from the Animas River. When the two rivers flow normally, the taps run. If both rivers dry up or clog with debris from fires, the city could run out of water within weeks.

Climate change and a 25‑year drought highlight this risk. In the last eight years, on 34 days, the Animas River averaged less than 100 cubic feet per second, a low level reached only twice in the previous 120 years. Close calls have already happened. In 2002, the Missionary Ridge Fire filled both rivers with ash and debris and forced the city to cut back pumping. In 2015, the Gold King Mine spill sent millions of gallons of waste into the Animas River, stopping city pumping for a week.

When Harris spoke at a Durango Neighborhood Coalition meeting last year, residents expressed overwhelming support for more water storage. That message hasn’t reached city leaders. Mayor Yazzie said voters were happy to support a $61 million sales-tax–funded municipal building and popular new recreation projects. But she said raising taxes for a major water project would be difficult.

“We are looking at a potential water and sewer fee increase to keep the toilets flushing,” Mayor Yazzie said. As for building a pipeline to Lake Nighthorse and a much-needed new water treatment plant–an investment water engineer Steve Harris estimates at about $100 million—“it all depends on how much the citizens are willing to pay for water. “

Durango’s reluctance to invest in its water system stands out in the West, where water storage is usually characterized as urgent. Las Vegas for example, built three separate intake tunnels into Lake Mead to make sure it could keep taking water even as the reservoir dropped.

Durango’s Lake Nighthorse pipeline remains a paper concept. This winter, with snowpack in the San Juan Mountains the lowest recorded in generations, it¶¶Òőap time the town acts to guarantee more water. Fighting flames with empty hoses would be a sorry sight.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Durango, Colorado.

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Caused by federal contractors working to treat pollution from the Gold King Mine, the accidental release of water laden with heavy metals prompted the creation of a Superfund site and a reckoning with lingering environmental harms from the area’s mining legacy, including hundreds of abandoned mines high in the San Juan mountains.

A decade later, community members and staff are still grappling with the long-term cleanup of the area’s mines and tailings piles. Forty-eight of them outside Silverton. They continue to leak heavy metals into local waterways and soils.

“We’re pleased that the EPA is at the point where in the next 18 months, we’re going to see some decisions made about how those sites are cleaned up,” said Chara Ragland, the chair of .

Studies have since shown that the Aug. 5, 2015, Gold King spill had little long-term environmental impact because the water already contained so many heavy metals from runoff and other mines. Locals hope the federal Superfund cleanup process will improve water quality in the Animas River basin so that it will be cleaner than before the Gold King incident.

“Doing things right takes time, but we’re committed to long-term results,” EPA Regional Administrator Cyrus Western said in a statement last week.

The Superfund process has been slow, but it is the only legal tool available to clean up abandoned mines, said Ty Churchwell, the community advisory group’s secretary and the mining coordinator for Trout Unlimited.

“For me, there’s no use in complaining,” Churchwell said. “I’d rather do a thorough job than rush a job and screw it up.”

Progress so far

In the months after the spill, the EPA constructed a water treatment plant to clean the discharge from the Gold King mine. That plant continues to function today, treating between 300 and 500 gallons of water a minute before it flows into Cement Creek — a tributary to the Animas River.

After intense community debate, the EPA in September 2016 created the to tackle pollution from the Gold King Mine and 47 other historic mining sites in San Juan County . The site covers about and includes abandoned mines and tunnels as well as piles of mining waste rock that leak heavy metals.

There are between the creation of a Superfund site and when the government delists it because it considers the work complete. Overall, the Bonita Peak Mining District remains on step one: collecting data on the extent of contamination and assessing risks from that contamination.

The EPA has spent years evaluating the baseline level of aquatic and terrestrial health, surveyed water quality and studied the labyrinth of mine tunnels and shafts in the area.

In the meantime, the EPA has also completed the cleanup of more than 20 smaller projects on the Superfund site, like covering lead-contaminated soils at campgrounds and pulling mining waste rock out of creeks and rivers.

The EPA is also building a waste repository facility — expected to be finished this year — that will store the sludge created by the water treatment plant outside the Gold King Mine, along with waste from future cleanups on the broader Superfund site.

“A lot of these areas have needed to be addressed for a long time, and I’m not sure they would have been had the Superfund process not begun,” Ragland said.

What’s next?

Now the EPA, its contractors and the community advisory group are getting ready to decide how to address the Superfund site’s three major pollution sources.

But “getting ready” to make a decision might mean a two-year process, Churchwell warned.

“That’s just the way Superfund works,” he said.

Progress accelerated in the last three years, thanks to money allocated under the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and a stable project management team, Ragland said.

But federal staffing chaos this year under the new Trump administration has caused setbacks, she said.

For example, work to finish the waste repository was slated to begin in June, but the EPA still does not have a contract to complete the work because of firings, early retirements and reassignments in the agency’s contracting office, she said.

While the Gold King Mine spill was scary, the cleanup work that has followed likely wouldn’t have happened without the Superfund designation it prompted, Ragland said.

To gauge progress, Churchwell will look for the return of trout in streams where the fish have been absent for decades.

Already, there have been signs of improvement in Mineral Creek.

A federal fish survey in 2019 found trout in a stretch of the stream that had been devoid of the species for decades, Churchwell said. A few years prior to that, a community coalition called the Animas River Stakeholders Group had cleaned up waste rock piles near the stream.

The hope for a better future is what has kept Churchwell, Ragland and other members of the community advisory group working to improve water quality in the basin — some of them for decades.

“We’re very focused on the fact that we live here and we want this area to be somewhere we can live and recreate well into the future,” Ragland said.

The metallic color came from the Gold King Mine, near the town of Silverton in the San Juan Range. The abandoned mine had been plugged by an earthen and rock dam known as a bulkhead, behind which orange, highly acidic drainage water accumulated. But after a federal during an unauthorized excavation, 3.5 million gallons of acid runoff rushed downstream over three weeks.

The worker and the EPA came in for a slew of outrage and blame. Alarmed Tribal Nations and towns halted drinking water and irrigation operations; tourists fled the region during the height of tourist season.

But here’s the surprising opinion of Ty Churchwell, the mining coordinator for Trout Unlimited: “Looking back, this can be taken as a positive thing because of what happened afterward.” He sits on a community advisory group for the Bonita Peak Mining District, a Superfund site that contains the Gold King mine.

“We’ve got federal Superfund designation, and it¶¶Òőap the only tool at our disposal to fix this problem,” he said. The “problem” is unregulated hard-rock mining that began 160 years ago.

“I know this isn’t conventional wisdom,” Churchwell said, “but no fish were killed in Durango (30 miles downstream) because of the spill. It was ugly and shocking, but a lot of that orange was rust, and the acidic water was diluted by the time it hit Durango and downstream.”

EPA’s website points out that over 5.4 million gallons of acid mine runoff enters the Animas River daily.

The way Churchwell tells it, water quality and numbers of fish had been declining in the Upper Animas River since the early 2000s. That¶¶Òőap when the last mining operation ended and closed its water treatment plant.

Six months after the news-making spill almost a decade ago, EPA geared up to make sure untreated mine waste would not head for the river again.

Reid Christopher, a 62-year-old former electrician and mountain guide, became the Gold King Mine’s restoration whiz, taking over an old wastewater treatment plant in the area in 2019. Now, he said, only treated water leaves the 11,439-foot elevation mine.

This July, Christopher took me on a tour of the wastewater plant. In a nutshell, cleanup begins when the constantly flowing wastewater gets shuttled into settling ponds.

Christopher then pumps hydrated lime into the water, boosting its pH to 9.25. The high pH unlocks the heavy metals from suspension, and an added flocculant causes the heavy metals to clump together inside football field-sized textile filtration bags.

Clear–surprisingly clean—water streams from the bags into Cement Creek, Christopher said, and the process is so effective he said he’d like to treat the drainage from other major mineshafts in Bonita Peak.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency remains gun-shy about talking to the press. It was deluged with bad publicity following the 2015 blowout, though as Churchwell points out, “it wasn’t the EPA that mined the San Juan Mountains and left their mess behind.”

The messes from abandoned mines, at Gold King and around the entire West, have never received much attention from Congress. Until the Biden administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the EPA depended on annual appropriations. That meant for almost four decades, the agency never got enough money to thoroughly clean up the heavy-metal mine waste flowing out of hard rock mines like Gold King.

And because the mess was buried deep in the mountains at elevations from 10,500 feet to over 12,500 feet, the agency couldn’t compete for federal dollars until it grabbed all the environmental disaster headlines of summer 2015.

Even now, said Churchill, and despite available funding, “The EPA has 48 mine-impacted locations in the Upper Animas River and only so many dollars to work with. They have to get the most bang for their buck.”

Commercial use of metals in the sludge might possibly make some money for the EPA. The Colorado School of Mines has taken water samples to see what–if anything—can be retrieved from the mine waste.

But even if mine sludge is worthless, cleaning acidic water at the top of the watershed is worthwhile for every living thing downstream.

For now, Christopher is always looking to hire locals for dirt work and hauling. He said the jobs could last a lifetime.

Dave Marston is publisher of Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org, the independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively debate about Western issues. He lives in Durango.

To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.

The Colorado Natural Resources Damages Trustees approved the settlement — the latest in a of payouts following the spill – Thursday morning.

Federal liability in the contamination comes from the fact that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials triggered the 3-million-gallon Gold King Mine spill. In addition, the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management manage other areas with mines that have also been the source of contamination in the area.

The $5 million will go toward restoring areas damaged by the spill and other contamination left behind in the swathe of southwest Colorado’s San Juan County, Colorado Attorney General spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said in a release.

The area is so contaminated it¶¶Òőap classified as a federal Superfund Site, a designation reserved for the country’s most polluted areas.

“The damage to Southwestern Colorado natural resources remains a matter of great concern,” Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in the release.

The settlement will set aside valuable money “to address these damages and invest in the restoration of natural resources in this part of the state,” Weiser, who is also chair of the state’s Natural Resources Trustees, added.

The $5 million will likely be pooled with other settlements made following the spill, Pacheco said in the release.

The Sunnyside Gold Corporation agreed in late 2021 to pay $1.6 million for cleanup efforts. The company agreed earlier that year to pay $10 million to the Navajo Nation and another $11 million to the state of New Mexico. From southwest Colorado, the Animas River flows south into New Mexico and through Navajo territory.

The mining company and its corporate owner — the Kinross Gold Corporation, based in Canada — also agreed last year to pay another $40.1 million to the federal government and $4 million to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for additional cleanup efforts. In that 2022 settlement, the federal government agreed to kick in another $45 million.

While the seven-figure settlements do add up, the latest $5 million doesn’t amount to much compared to the estimated cleanup costs, Peter Butler, chair of the Bonita Peak Mining District Community Advisory Group.

Butler estimated that cleanup costs in the area could total $300 million, though he acknowledged much of the money goes towards attorney fees and documenting the damage rather than physical cleanup.

“It¶¶Òőap a drop in the bucket,” Butler said of the $5 million. But, he added, it¶¶Òőap still a positive step.

A cleanup crew led by EPA officials inadvertently triggered the Gold King Mine spill. The Denver Post reported after the incident that the agency official overseeing the work knew of the blowout danger beforehand.

The blowout sent at least 880,000 pounds of heavy metals into the Animas River, across three states and the land of two Native American tribes, turning the water a bright orange and raising concerns for aquatic wildlife and farmers downstream.

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They won a ruling that tilts the nation’s legal landscape in favor of controlling water pollution.

This U.S. District Court in Denver last month declares miners must go through a public process and obtain permits before discharging pollutants into waste ponds located near waterways. It is the first federal court case to apply a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court that seepage from industrial waste ponds into alluvial groundwater can be “the functional equivalent” of surface discharges directly into rivers. The federal Clean Water Act prohibits pollution without permits that specify contaminants and become increasingly restrictive.

Colorado lawmakers separately have passed a rule that requires greater efforts to prevent long-term degradation of water before a new mine can open.

These add up to toughening regulatory conditions.

But leaders in Alma and neighboring Fairplay, unlike counterparts in towns that turned into pricey resorts, remain relatively receptive to mining — as long as it doesn’t destroy nature. Mining serves as a counterbalance against a tourism and visitation economy that is transforming western Colorado in a way that makes housing unaffordable. And leaders here see potential if rules are enforced and “reclamation” to restore landscapes finally gets done.

“Mining is part of our heritage, and many people would rather have mining than tourism,” Alma Mayor Saam Golgoon said.

“They argue: ‘Tourism can ruin our community,’ ” Golgoon said, raising concerns that outside marketers will dictate a “brand” for his town.

It is a quandary — 14,271-foot Quandary Peak rises above Alma — reflecting intensifying struggles of communities around the Rocky Mountain West to define their own future.

Mining began here in 1859 during the Colorado Gold Rush and became an economic mainstay leading to statehood.

Back then, few rules applied in a free-for-all scramble for gold.

And hulking gray heaps of mining waste have loomed here for decades across hundreds of acres in South Park, along with scars in delicate tundra on surrounding snow-frosted mountains.

Much of that damage resulted from unregulated mining before 1977, the “pre-law era” of the “wild west,” said Ginny Brannon, director of Colorado’s Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, the state agency charged with regulatory oversight. Because no rules applied before 1977, Brannon said, miners responsible for a portion of that mess aren’t obligated to restore wetlands around Alma and Fairplay — and an estimated 23,000 abandoned mine sites statewide — creating a costly public challenge.

Yet Colorado officials still allow mining, even the strip mining done in this area, where ship-sized dredges raked through wetlands ripping up millions of tons of rock for industrial sifting to extract gold. Gravel miners dig deeper into pits, scouring out material for making concrete. Dozens of trucks roll out each day hauling gravel to Front Range contractors for paving cities and roads.

Laws set no limit on the number of mines. State regulators have issued permits for nine gold-and-gravel mines classified as “active” here, and 45 gold mines statewide, records show, including the Newmont Corporation’s stadium-sized Cripple Creek and Victor pit mine southwest of Pikes Peak. The current rules give mine operators five years after they formally declare a mine closed to complete cleanup and re-planting — a period that can be extended without penalty. Bond money posted by companies is calculated to cover re-vegetation sufficient for a future industrial use — but not a return to natural conditions.

Mining industry leaders long have lamented rules they saw as already too burdensome. But even in a tighter regulatory landscape, some see a robust mining robust mining future in Colorado in Colorado as possible with steady high gold prices (above $1,600 an ounce) and global demands for computer circuitry, jewelry and banking — combined with gravel as a secondary product to make concrete.

“Mining is required for what we like to do in the United States,” said James Murray, an owner of High Mountain Mining, which runs the Alma Placer Mine just south of town. “If it cannot be grown, it has to be mined.”

Local activists began fighting in 2014 after a mining mishap turned headwaters brown, threatening fish and invertebrates. They formed Save South Park, campaigned unsuccessfully against a local rezoning to facilitate a new mine near homes, and pressed government regulatory overseers to get more involved.

“But we couldn’t get anybody from the Environmental Protection Agency or the state to do anything about the damage,” said hotel manager Pam Stone, who coordinated opposition with microbiologist Richard Hamilton, a resident who died in 2016.

“They’re not supposed to pollute when they mine. They’re supposed to put it all back. Nobody ever puts it back,” Stone said. “They leave a big, ugly eyesore mess.”

The activists learned that operators of the Alma Placer Mine were discharging waste into riverside settling ponds without a permit — and filed a lawsuit in .

They hired Boulder-based attorney Randall Weiner as part of their team — and won. Federal Judge William Martinez ruled High Mountain Mining was discharging pollution illegally and ordered the company to pay a fine of $500,000 plus legal costs.

“Colorado and a lot of other states are now going to have to ramp up their efforts to get facilities to get permits. Those permits can become stricter and stricter, with the goal that we end up with water that is fishable and drinkable — the purpose of the Clean Water Act,” Weiner said.

“The fine this judge imposed will serve as a wake-up call to industrial operators around the country within a few hundred feet of important water bodies. Any pollution requires a discharge permit —  even if it flows through groundwater to get into rivers,” he said. “Water in Colorado and around the West is getting scarce. We all cherish this precious resource. So we need to do mining in a way that allows all of us to have our needs met.”

High Mountain Mining officials are appealing the ruling.

One of the lawyers representing townspeople, Western Mining Action Project senior attorney Jeff Parsons, faulted state agencies for laxity. “Even a small operator can cause a big problem,” Parsons said, referring to Colorado’s Gold King Mine blowout in 2015 that turned the Animas River mustard-yellow and other environmental disasters. “At the Alma Placer Mine, the Division of Reclamation Mining and Safety, and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, should have been engaged — and made sure those miners had a permit years ago.”

State mining regulatory program director Russ Means said annual inspections will be done to ensure the Alma Placer Mine operates under an appropriate permit.

“We will be working with the CDPHE on permitting requirements. Certainly, anything that moves forward, it has to protect water,” Means said. “We’ll be working with the industry and other state and local officials to make sure we comply with any regulations we need to.”

Colorado water quality inspectors currently “do not have a mechanism to identify” mining and other industrial sites where companies discharge pollutants into waste ponds along rivers, CDPHE spokeswoman Kaitlyn Beekman said. (A state document shows that, following the federal court ruling, an enforcement official warned High Mountain Mining of “potential violations” for “unauthorized discharge” of “polluted effluent” containing calcium, potassium, sodium and magnesium from ponds into headwaters unless the company applies for a permit by Nov. 4.)

Environmentalist critics contend Colorado’s mining rules and enforcement remain too weak, allowing harm to high-country forests (including Bristlecone pines up to 2,000 years old), mountain tundra and streams.

Here in Alma (North America’s highest town at 10,361 feet above sea level) and Fairplay, few residents dispute local school teacher-turned-lawyer Wendy Kerner’s assessment that the huge mining waste heaps choking waterways “uglify” an otherwise picturesque area. Kerner pointed from the balcony of her home at a mining pit, heavy machinery and waste pond recently — “so blatant, so exploitative of the environment,” she said. “We accept more and more degradation because it is happening gradually. We become used to what we see, almost complacent. And so it continues and diminishes the natural environment.”

But, meanwhile, Colorado’s broader resort tourism and mountain home construction boom is accelerating, overwhelming communities across the western half of the state. Residents increasingly cannot afford to live where they work. As town after town is transformed, residents of Alma and Fairplay also are bristling against “too many people,” traffic and commercialization.

They see what happened in Breckenridge, 17 miles north over Hoosier Pass, and other Summit County resorts. Once a mining hub, Breckenridge, with its ski slopes, now ranks among the world’s ritziest resorts for millionaires.

Mining isn’t done much anymore. Property owners recently banded together and rejected a proposed gravel mine. Historic mine remnants around Breckenridge now serve mostly as a visitor attractant with resort marketers touting rustic facades of “.”

And uprooted workers — including police officers, firefighters, teachers, bus drivers — come looking for houses they might afford in Alma and Fairplay. The historic blue Fairplay-Valiton hotel recently became a dormitory for workers.

A “Don’t Brecken-ize Fairplay” bumper sticker and t-shirt depicting a miner who declares Fairplay to be “Not Breck” reflect local sentiments. Mining culture endures.

A few years ago, miners here helped create the reality TV show “Gold Rush.” Episodes filmed around Fairplay “generated a lot of interest,” town treasurer Kim Wittbrodt said. Panning for gold in South Platte headwaters “became a sort of bucket-list thing to do.”

Record numbers of hobbyists, including semi-professional gold-seekers, pay $10 at the town hall for panning permits. They wade through creeks scanning for gold flakes. Permit numbers have increased from 641 in 2019 to 1,191 in 2021, town records show.

Yet profits from gold mining vanish. Taxes paid by mining companies in Park County, where the population has more than doubled from 7,174 in 1990 to 17,626, seldom surpass $200,000 a year — less than 1% of total revenues, records show.

Day-to-day economic survival depends more and more on tourism and housing construction.

The future is shifting toward meeting the demands of well-heeled newcomers who build fancy second homes, which “pays the bills,” said Ken Kerkela, an electrician and longtime resident. An avid hunter, Kerkela said housing development and population growth is causing far greater environmental harm than mining — displacing elk and bighorn sheep and destroying habitat.

Mining for economic balance would be tolerable, he said, “as long as they do it right.”

The mining opposition group Save South Park has disbanded for now.

But newcomers increasingly seek pristine views from their property, landscapes like those where native Utes hunted before settlers drove them out. They welcomed toughening rules for mining.

Fairplay Mayor Frank Just envisions the creation of a “100-acre “river park” as a central amenity, a project local leaders painstakingly have planned for 10 years. It requires reclamation of mined lands.

Just pointed to an estimated 9.7 million tons of mine waste heaped south of town that some residents reckon will never be removed.

Locals remain relatively powerless, despite the court victory, Just said. “Whatever we would wish or desire is really a moot point,” he said.

“We as a community, for the most part, we have relegated ourselves to accepting that we are a mining community. We cannot dictate to miners to the point of saying ‘you cannot continue.’ ”

However, the best mining companies have shown restoration can be done. “They’ve turned ground that was just a mess into very nicely landscaped, groomed areas that were planted” to hide scars, he said. “We expect, as the years progress, that this will be done.”

A Park County master plan prioritizes open space, wetlands, wildlife, river flows healthy enough for fishing, agriculture and rural character.

For retired legal services company owner Bob White, the argument that better-regulated mining could help avert ruinous tourism and over-development “is a legitimate one.”

Yet White has settled on “more people over the mining industry and its trucks.”

The house he’s building on a mesa looks out on gravel piles from dredging in wetlands. He hears machinery, sees white glare from industrial light. He went to Denver to meet gravel mining executives and learned miners are planning to extract enough rock to fill a 28-ton truck every three minutes for another 40 years.

He has protested repeatedly with county officials, invoking master plan priorities. He purchased a 1,400-acre ranch, protected it under a conservation easement that prohibits mining, and sold it back to the community.

Compared with mining, “I don’t see a downside to having more people,” White said.

“More people might bring a few more amenities, like a better grocery store. I don’t mind some growth. I’d take that any day, rather than having to drive between gravel trucks, hear their backing-up beepers every day, and watch their dust blow across the valley.”

The federal government will kick in another $45 million as well.

Under the finalized settlement, the company and its Canadian owner, Kinross Gold Corporation, will pay the United States $40.1 million and another $4 million to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for cleanup efforts, Environmental Protection Agency spokesman Rich Mylott said in a release.

Cleanup is needed in the broader Superfund site, in southwest Colorado’s San Juan County. That site includes dozens of abandoned mines, which are polluting the area’s waterways but it¶¶Òőap also the location of the 3-million-gallon spill at the Gold King Mine, which EPA officials triggered.

The Gold King Mine is just one of more than 50 “major mining” locations within the district, Mylott said.

Although, the spill connected with the mine is likely the largest single case of pollution in the area.

Then the federal government will contribute another $45 million toward cleanup efforts in the area, the release said. In exchange, Colorado and the federal government will drop their claims against the mining companies, which have also agreed to drop their claims against the United States.

Already, cleanup efforts have cost more than $70 million, The Denver Post previously reported. Sunnyside also agreed to a $1.6 million settlement in December and to the Navajo Nation and $11 million to New Mexico, downstream of the mines and spill site.

The Gold King spill sent at least 880,000 pounds of metals into the Animas River, through three states and across two Native American tribes.

Sunnyside officials said in December that the company wasn’t responsible for the 2015 spill. Rather, the company installed concrete bulkheads downstream from the mine, which raised water levels in the area, worsening the spill that the EPA officials caused.

“This settlement addresses the cleanup responsibility of the private mining companies and the federal government and ensures that site cleanup work will continue,” Larry Starfield, acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, said in the release.

Cleanup work includes stabilizing mine waste and mitigating contamination of surface water, the release said.

The agreement, which isn’t yet finalized, stipulates that the money must go toward restoration projects within the , attorney general spokesman Lawrence Pacheco said in a news release. It would also release the corporation from additional liability with the state moving forward.

The $1.6 million settlement marks the latest in a series of such agreements stemming from the Gold King Mine spill. to pay $10 million to the Navajo Nation and $11 million to New Mexico.

The newly announced settlement doesn’t amount to much money when compared to the millions that already have been spent in the area, said Peter Butler, chair of the Bonita Peak Mining District Community Advisory Group. Most of that money went toward attorneys and consultants trying to determine liability rather than actual cleanup efforts, he said.

“I think all the different parties spent close to $70 million in the last five years,” said Butler, a Durango resident. “Not much cleanup effort, though, almost all study. And there’s been almost no improvement in water quality.”

Butler added that he’s not surprised the settlement is so small. Part of that could be, he said, because Sunnyside has cooperated well with cleanup efforts. Another part of that could be because of the complicated liability issues surrounding the Gold King Mine spill.

A cleanup crew led by the Environmental Protection Agency inadvertently triggered the 3-million-gallon spill and The Denver Post reported in 2016 that the agency official overseeing the work knew of the blowout danger well beforehand.

The spill sent at least 880,000 pounds of metals into the Animas River, through three states and across the land of two Native American tribes.

“It¶¶Òőap an interesting, tangled web of liability up there,” said Marcel Gaztambide, who also sits on the advisory group with Butler.

The Sunnyside Gold Corporation did not own the Gold King Mine nor was the corporation responsible for the 2015 spill, Gina Myers, director of the company’s reclaiming operations, said in an email.

Rather, Butler said, Sunnyside installed concrete bulkheads downstream from the mine, which raised water levels in the area, making the spill worse.

For those in the area in August 2015, the spill was horrifying, Gaztambide said.

“The entire river turned bright orange,” said Gaztambide, who was not in town at the time. “There was a lot of concern for the fish in the river system.”

And there was more concern still for the farmers downstream whose crops rely on that water, Gaztambide said.

“But for the folks that knew the most about the Animas River, it wasn’t a big surprise,” Gaztambide added. “We’ve known about the problem of acid mine drainage for a long time.”

He called the 2015 blowout a symptom of a much larger problem of abandoned mines in the area. Research into the environmental damage caused by the spill and the other mines continues, Gaztambide added, so it¶¶Òőap difficult to say whether $1.6 million is enough.

For context, Butler said the EPA is currently cleaning drainage coming out of the mine, and operating that treatment plant costs about $2.5 million a year.

“So $1.6 million wouldn’t even run that for a year,” he said.

Still, Gaztambide said the money can be put to good use in what amounts to a massive cleanup project within which much work remains.

In a statement, Attorney General Phil Weiser called the settlement a “step in the right direction to address the damage suffered in southwest Colorado and the Four Corners region.”

If the settlement is finalized, Colorado Natural Resources Trustees will use the money for projects meant to restore damage from the 2015 spill and other hazardous releases in the area, Pacheco said.

The agreement itself will be filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Denver, starting a 30-day public comment process. The judge overseeing the case will then consider the agreements and comments submitted before deciding whether to accept the settlement.

SALT LAKE CITY — There are hundreds of thousands of abandoned hard rock mining sites or features scattered throughout the West, and federal and state officials are nowhere close to identifying those that potentially pose a hazard to drinking water.

The Gold King Mine spill in Colorado, which released a torrent of ugly mustard-colored pollutants that contaminated waterways in three states and the Navajo Nation, was a visually graphic reminder from five years ago of how much of a threat and expense these abandoned mines pose.

Hundreds of legal claims were filed against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — which had oversight of the mine’s remediation when it breached — with Utah settling its lawsuit just this month with the federal agency over Gold King Mine.

In the agreement, the EPA said it would initiate a preliminary Superfund assessment for a trio of sites in Utah, including two former mining districts in Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood canyons, which are home to hundreds of legacy mines scattered on a patchwork of both public and private land.

Their existence in the canyons is an uncomfortable and threatening specter, since the Wasatch Canyons provide 60% of the Salt Lake Valley’s drinking water, hailed as one of the most pristine resources because it comes from a natural reservoir of snowpack and rushes from treatment to tap in just 24 hours.

But mine debris and waste rock in those canyons have already created impairment problems for aquatic life due to the contaminants of copper and cadmium, the latter of which is a carcinogen. Zinc has also been determined to be a threat to aquatic life in Little Cottonwood Canyon.

Erica Gaddis, director of the Utah Division of Water Quality, said the standard for cold water fisheries is much stricter because the animals exist in the water 24/7. The contaminants, she stressed, are not testing at levels of concern for drinking water standards.

But some people fear it is only a matter of time that the legacy waste from hard rock mining in the canyons will filter into the creeks at such levels that drinking water is compromised beyond the ability for treatment plants to handle, whether it is the water itself or washed down sediment.

“I am concerned this is a problem that has been ignored for too long,” said Salt Lake County Councilman Richard Snelgrove.

“There are a lot of questions and solutions are long overdue. I am pleased that the EPA is looking at this as a potential Superfund cleanup site. It is obvious that not all is well in that canyon.”

Snelgrove said he is an avid hiker and especially likes to venture into the more remote Cardiff area in Big Cottonwood Canyon.

“On a personal level I cherish these mountains. They are some of our crown jewels, not only for Salt Lake County but the state of Utah.”

He was up there three years ago and was startled to see abandoned mine waste and rusty colored water trickling over it, eventually winding its way into Big Cottonwood Creek.

“Rusty water comes out of those mine shafts, flows over these tailings that nothing will grow on and then flows into our drinking water for Salt Lake County.”

The property owner is alleged to be Salt Lake City, which in its watershed plan in 1999 identified metal contamination from legacy mine sites as a problem that merited a remediation plan to be put into place by 2001 — nearly 20 years ago.

That plan is not in place.

“Salt Lake City has some explaining to do on their property. They need to clean up their trash heap,” Snelgrove said.

Laura Briefer, director of the Salt Lake City Division of Public Utilities, said what Snelgrove is seeing is likely waste rock, not tailings. And while the city owns chunks of property in the Cardiff area, Briefer said she could not say if the property Snelgrove is referencing is city-owned without doing a site visit.

“We don’t have tailings in the Wasatch Canyons,” she said, adding there are mine tunnels that may be leaching water, but their risk in Big Cottonwood Canyon has yet to be assessed and drinking water standards are being met.

Yet despite the watershed plan from 1999 dictating a mitigation effort in place for the canyons, Salt Lake City doesn’t appear close to knowing the extent of the problem on the very property it owns.

“I am not aware of Salt Lake City owning property with mine waste in Cardiff or in Little Cottonwood Canyon. We would need to survey the property to understand and confirm property ownership,” Briefer said, even though state mining officials told the agency city- owned property had mine openings in Cardiff.

Briefer said the city still needs to confirm what the state agency informed them.

The EPA announcement that it would initiate Superfund site investigations at legacy mining sites in the canyons came as a surprise to Briefer, she said, but the city welcomes the review.

“I think this is a good outcome to the settlement,” she said. “But often these investigations do not lead to a Superfund assessment. We would be surprised if it did.”

But Snelgrove said there needs to be greater action to remediate these sites in more remote areas that may pose a risk.

“The mine openings are still open the way they were left 100 years ago. When it comes to health and safety issues, that is not a good excuse,” he said. “The magnitude is enormous and the consequences are enormous, so we can’t have the attitude of, ‘Nothing to see here, just move along.’”

Mark Allen, founder of Protect and Preserve American Fork Canyon and the executive director of the American Fork Canyon Alliance, agrees with Snelgrove.

“It is kind of a termite problem. If there is a barn burning down, everyone races to put out the fire. But if a termite is eating at the foundation, it is out of sight and out of mind.”

Allen, frustrated over heavy metals contamination at former mine sites in American Fork Canyon, petitioned the EPA to conduct a site assessment of their risks on the heels of the Tibble Fork Dam release in August of 2016.

A $7.3 million rehabilitation project to drain the lake inadvertently triggered a large release of metals-laden sediment into the north fork of the American Fork River.

The result was a significant fish kill and metals pollution that threatened many downstream communities.

Allen said he believes the Tibble Fork release was many times more severe than Gold King Mine, but because it wasn’t as visual with the yellowish iron oxides in Colorado, and was contained in one geographical area, it didn’t garner the same attention.

“(Gold King) was an extremely visual event of pollution. It was so graphic,” Allen said.

Gaddis said the Tibble Fork release has largely been settled, with monitoring that has gone on in subsequent years showing concentrations of contaminants at levels that adhere to federal standards.

The EPA, at Allen’s request, is continuing to review the upstream threats posed by legacy mines that through streams and creeks deposit the metals in sediment that can be washed downstream.

Ryan Dunham, the EPA’s site assessment manager for the American Fork Canyon review, said the agency concluded the mine sites did not warrant a large scale cleanup, although another branch of the EPA is continuing to work with the state and private property owners such as Snowbird to mitigate recreational threats.

Signage and fencing have been put up to keep ATV enthusiasts off the tailings and to warn of potential exposure.

Snowbird voluntarily implemented its own program to address issues at Mary Ellen Gulch, is conducting sampling and will be granted a water quality pollution discharge permit for the site — at the resort¶¶Òőap request — which adds another layer of regulatory oversight.

Gaddis said that particular permit program where property owners can be identified and there is active work on the property will roll out in the future under guidance from the EPA.

She added that one of the biggest hurdles in addressing mine waste is mapping the sites, identifying the owners and determining the priority at which they should be mitigated.

A 2020 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office explored the breadth of the problem, uncovering some sobering statistics that should give one pause.

Consider:

The Bureau of Land Management estimates that based on current staffing and resources, it will take 500 years for the agency to complete an inventory of abandoned hard rock mines and features on its land.

The EPA estimates that based on current databases there are more than a half million abandoned hard rock mining sites on BLM, National Park Service and Forest Service lands.

In 13 Western states that include Utah, the inventory puts abandoned mine sites at about 246,000 within their borders, but estimates are likely that the number is at 620,000.

As of July 2019, the actual environmental hazard costs of the 25 most expensive mining and mineral processing sites ranged from $50 million to $583 million per site, and the EPA has been working on some of these for more than 20 years.

The costs are staggering to the federal government, to states, to private property owners.

EPA spent $2.9 billion through fiscal years 2008 through 2017 to identify, clean up and monitor hazards at abandoned hard rock mines. The 13 Western states included in the report spent a collective $117 million in nonfederal funds during the same time period, with California, Colorado and Idaho spending the bulk of that — 86%, according to the Government Accountability Office report.

The EPA said to its knowledge, no federal agencies or the states have a comprehensive dataset that could provide the extent of the problem associated with what¶¶Òőap called “mine influenced waters” throughout the country or in the West. Those waters generally contain dissolved metals or metalloids which may include lead, copper, silver, manganese, cadmium, iron, zinc and mercury, among others.

It added that elevated concentrations of these metals in surface water and groundwater can eliminate their use as drinking water or aquatic habitat.

Additionally, through its Superfund program, the EPA tracks approximately 500 hard rock mining and/or mineral processing sites across the country, which represents less than 0.1% of the abandoned hard rock mining sites.

Against that backdrop, Allen said he believes more needs to be done.

“Kennecott has worked hard to clean up what they own, but that mindset needs to move up to the canyons,” he said. “Nobody has budgets to clean up our watersheds so they just pretend it is not an issue. 
 It is like playing pin the tail on the donkey. Nobody wants to be the donkey.”

Gaddis said her division has been working closely with the Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining to launch an inventory later this year that will specifically work to document discharging mines in the state of Utah, with numbers that are not known at present.

”After the Gold King Mine spill happened, we got a lot of inquiries if this were problematic in Utah,” said Steve Fluke, administrator over the mining division’s Abandoned Mine Reclamation Program.

“There is not a comprehensive inventory in this state or frankly any other state. 
 But there are not a lot of flowing mines in the state because it is so dry. There are naturally more in the Wasatch. In the Wasatch, we have noticed mines that have some pretty significant flows.”

The work done by the mining division thus far has revealed 29 mines discharging water or mine waste in the Wasatch Mountains, but it is not conclusive. Overall, Fluke said there are an estimated 16,000 hazardous mine openings in Utah — counted as a hole in the ground greater than 10 feet deep — of which about 6,500 have been closed.

Fluke said he noticed two collapsed mine adits, or what appear to be, while hiking in Cardiff that he brought to the attention of other state agencies and the EPA.

“I would not want to say they are ticking time bombs waiting for a Gold King Mine incident, but they need to be looked into,” he said. “Who knows what it would take to break them?”

Gaddis agreed the abandoned mines in the Wasatch Canyons pose potential problems.

“Certainly the discharging mines in the Wasatch where we have impaired water quality, that is a concern for aquatic life,” she said.

Beyond inventory challenges and limited budgets, Gaddis said states encounter mine contamination instances that don’t rise to the level of federal intervention at a heightened level under the Clean Water Act.

American Fork Canyon, for example, didn’t warrant cleanup action under federal standards, with the EPA site assessment manager adding that sampling in the years after the Tibble Fork release demonstrate good water quality overall.

The GAO notes that until the 1970s, mine operators were not required to remediate the land after a mine’s resources had been exhausted, so they could just walk away.

While government entities and conservation groups, for example, may want to step in to initiate a cleanup, that means assuming liability — and those stringent liability rules hinder voluntary efforts.

Worries over liability prompted the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest Service to express concern over any proposed land trades after it identified private lands involved in the deal that contained legacy mine sites. A Forest Service memo from 2019 said the agency would not acquire any lands in the Wasatch Canyons with mine tunnels or parcels with waste rock piles greater than a half-acre in size.

The exit of the Forest Service from those portions of the swap, which was part of a proposed federal designation, was a setback for negotiations.

Forest Supervisor Dave Whittekiend said abandoned hard rock mines are a problem in the forest.

“The Cottonwoods and American Fork is where we have had the biggest issue with contamination of heavy metals,” he said.

Remediation has been encouraged through something called the good Samaritan program in which the EPA enters into settlement agreements with volunteer parties willing to do cleanup work without taking on the liability.

The administrative guidance, some critics say, is not strong enough to ward off liability under the Clean Water Act so it has its limitations absent a narrowly tailored federal legislative fix.

But so far, the EPA has entered into three settlement agreements that did not require a Clean Water Act permit and is currently working with a good Samaritan on a Colorado abandoned mine for potential remediation.

Snelgrove said it is imperative agencies and people work together to solve the mine waste problems in the canyons and conquer these hurdles.

The councilman, who represents all county residents through his at-large seat, said Salt Lake County has to be one of those entities doing more. Earlier this year, when the county updated and adopted its general plan, which includes issues needed to be tackled in the canyons, Snelgrove voted against it.

His objections? He said it did not adequately address canyon threats such as wildfire risk and mine waste remediation.

“My concern was raised two or three years ago when I hiked the Cardiff area and it was accelerated with the EPA announcement of possible Superfund designation,” he said.

“If the attitude prevails of there is nothing to see here and we kick the can down the road — instead of it being a problem for 1 million people in this valley, it will be a problem for 2 million people in the decades to come — and it will be a problem for our children and grandchildren.”

The Durango Herald Wednesday that Sunnyside Gold Corp. sent the EPA a letter saying the company isn’t responsible for pollution flowing from inactive mines in the area.

The EPA wants Sunnyside to help pay for some of the initial investigations into the Bonita Peak Superfund cleanup, citing the company’s previous mining activity there.

The EPA says it will review Sunnyside’s letter before deciding its next step.

RELATED: EPA sets long-term goals for Superfund site created by Gold King Mine spill

The Bonita Peak Superfund project includes the Gold King Mine, source of a 2015 spill that polluted rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah. An EPA-led contractor inadvertently triggered the spill while excavating at the mine entrance.

Information from: Durango Herald, http://www.durangoherald.com

The Durango Herald that the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site assessment released Thursday didn’t find any risks to people working or hiking, hunting or fishing there. However, it found a risk of exposure to lead or arsenic for children at four camping sites along the Animas River and at three mine sites used as recreational staging areas.

Most of those sites are set to be worked starting this summer.

The agency designated the Superfund site after it inadvertently triggered a spill at the Gold King Mine in August 2015. The spill released 3 million gallons of wastewater, polluting rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

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Information from: Durango Herald, http://www.durangoherald.com