Opinion: The day the Animas River ran orange with pollution may have been the start of something beautiful

It was the summer of 2015 when the Animas River in southern Colorado turned such a garish orange-gold that it made national news.

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 Environmental Protection Agency employee breached the plug 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’s 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’s 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.

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