(Brent Lewis/The Denver Post/Getty Images)

The EPA has admitted it screwed up, inadvertently breaching a dam which had been holding up a toxic mess of waste water left over from a century of mine tailings.

I’ve been wondering why the owners of the mines which left the stuff behind aren’t responsible for the cleanup that EPA was initiating, and this article at High Country News explains it pretty well.

By 1991, when the last major mine in the watershed shut down, there were some 400 mines in the watershed, many discharging unmitigated discharges into streams.

[snip]

As mining waned in the late 1980s, federal and state regulatory agencies started looking at how to clean up the mess. Superfund, which comes with a big pile of cash, seemed like the obvious approach. But locals feared that the stigma would destroy tourism along with any possibility of mining’s return. Besides, Superfund can be blunt; the complex Animas situation demanded a more surgical, locally-based approach. So the Animas River Stakeholders Group, a collaboration between concerned citizens and representatives from industry and federal and state agencies, was created in 1994 to address the situation. The approach was successful, at first, but then water quality began deteriorating again.

Superfund was again suggested by the Feds and again the locals lobbied against it, worried about declining property values and a potential decline in tourism.

The article details the history of the basin from then to now, and it’s very enlightening. Essentially the author argues that it’s time for Superfund, that such a designation didn’t hurt Durango downstream when it went through similar cleanup, and that Moab, Utah is undergoing the same thing right now and the tourists seem oblivious.