Ep. 04: The Color of Poison

The story of the Gold King Mine spill | On the morning of August 5, 2015, an EPA contractor working at an abandoned mine in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado punched through a plug of debris and released 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater into Cement Creek—a tributary of the Animas River. Within hours, the river had turned a vivid orange. By the time the plume reached New Mexico, water intakes serving the Navajo Nation had been shut off. Farmers watched their irrigation systems go dry. Crops died in the ground.

The Gold King Mine hadn't been active in decades. But abandoned hard-rock mines don't stop producing acid.

This is the story of how a cleanup operation became a catastrophe, why no one was ever held criminally accountable, and what it means when the agency charged with protecting America's waterways is the one that poisons them.

Transcript

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On the morning of August 7, 2015, Linlaria Dixon walked to the edge of her family's farm in Upper Fruitland, New Mexico and looked at her corn. Upper Fruitland sits on the south bank of the San Juan River in the high desert of the American Southwest, where the borders of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet. It's at the northeastern edge of the Navajo Nation and in the heart of the Dinaita, the ancestral homeland of the Danae. The tribe's traditional name for itself. At an elevation of just over 5,200 feet, the landscape is dry, open, and wide, mesa country, with the San Juan cutting through it like a seam. The river is the reason farms like hers can exist here at all. Without the irrigation canals that draw from it, nothing would grow. Upper Fruitlands fields are a symbol of the sustained agricultural effort in this arid land, painstakingly maintained across generations through the careful management of that single water source. Dixon's family has been farming this land for generations. Among the crops they grow is corn. In Navajo culture, corn isn't simply a crop. It's woven into ceremony, prayer, and the calendar of the year, planted in spring and harvested in fall. It's pollen collected from the corn's tassels and offered to the holy people during prayer. The holy people are the sacred beings of Navajo cosmology, not ancestors, but powerful figures whose ongoing relationship with the Dine is tended through ceremony and offerings like corn pollen. It's grown for family, for neighbors, and for the ceremonies that mark the turning of seasons. Corn is the fixed point around which land, spirit, and community turn. That August morning, Linlaria had been monitoring river reports. More than 100 miles to the north, high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, a federal cleanup crew had been working at an abandoned mine, but something had gone horribly wrong. A plume of toxic water was pushing south down the Animus River, turning the water orange gold and carrying dissolved lead, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and iron in concentrations that exceeded safe limits by a factor of hundreds. It had already passed through Silverton, Durango, and Aztec. Now, it was approaching the confluence where the Animus empties into the San Juan, the river that feeds the irrigation canals that watered Linlaria's fields. That morning, the Navajo Nation's Department of Water Resources shut the irrigation canals. The contamination hadn't reached them yet, but they knew it was coming. If the toxicity continued for too long like this, the corn would go without water and die. Over the next two days, Linlaria and her family made what she'd later described as the hardest decision she'd ever faced as a farmer. They chose which crops to save, carrying water in buckets from their home faucets. They sacrificed the rest. Three weeks later, when the canals finally reopened, the harvest season was over. What should have been fields of corn ready for ceremony were bare earth. In the years that followed, Dixon would become president of the Upper Fruitland Chapter of the Navajo Nation and earn a law degree in Indigenous People's Law. But on that August morning, she was just a farmer, watching her corn die. The river that had sustained her family's land for generations had been poisoned by the federal cleanup operation run by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA had come to stabilize a dangerous mine upriver. It triggered one of the largest environmental catastrophes in the history of the American West, instead. Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world and follows what happened next and who was left to deal with the fallout. Silverton, Colorado sits at an elevation of 9,318 feet in a narrow valley carved by glaciers and the Animus River, surrounded by mountains on every side. To reach it from the north, you drop through Red Mountain Pass on a road that hugs cliff edges without guardrails, a stretch miners first carved out of the rock in the 1880s as a toll road, and that wasn't fully paved until 1924. From the south, you climb two mountain passes from Durango, the largest city in southwest Colorado with a population of more than 18,000. The most direct route through the Animas Canyon along the river is too sheer and dramatic for any road. Instead, a narrow gauge steam railroad threads along cliff edges and riverbanks on tracks barely three feet wide, carrying tourists who come purely for the spectacle of the canyon. The river it follows is the Animas. Its full Spanish name, Rio de las Animas, translates to the river of souls. The name dates to 1765, when the explorer Juan Maria de Grivera crossed its south of what would later become the city of Durango. He named it the River of Souls. The darker version of the name, Rio de las Animas Perdidas, the River of Lost Souls, came later. By the 1880s, newspapers were calling it the River of Lost Souls, and the name stuck. The Animus is the reason Silverton exists at all. The valley it carved through the San Juan Mountains is the only route into town. When prospectors arrived in the 1860s and found gold in the river's tributaries, they named the place Baker's Park, and within 15 years it was ringed with camps. Gold brought the first miners, but it was silver that built the town. Thus the name was changed to Silverton. The mountains were full of it, locked inside ore that had to be dug out, crushed, and smelted to extract the metal. Mills went up along the river to crush the rock. Smelters fired up to process what the mills produced. The waste from both went into the water. A century and a half later, the mines were closed and the mills and smelters were long gone. By the time the last mine closed in 1991, the town had already rebuilt its economy around the river itself. Kayakers and rafters, fly fishermen, and tourists arriving on the narrow gauge for the scenery rather than silver came by the hundreds of thousands every summer. For most of its history before that, Silverton's business was whatever could be extracted from the mountains. Silver, gold, lead, zinc, and copper, metals that built fortunes and powered industries far away from the valley. The San Juan Mountains sit above the San Juan Silverton Caldera Complex, a collapsed volcanic system that produced some of the most mineralized geology in North America, concentrating enormous ore deposits in the fractures and faults left behind by millions of years of volcanic activity. Silverton existed because of what was buried in that rock. By the 1880s, the town had become a mining boom town. Hundreds of mines were built across the surrounding peaks. The mountains were bored through with tunnels connecting shaft to shaft, level to level, until the rock was honeycombed with passages. When the ore ran out or a company went bankrupt, the operation was simply abandoned. Equipment was left behind, and the tunnels were left open. This pattern of abandonment wasn't unique to Silverton. It was the standard pattern of 19th century American hard rock mining wherever it happened. Enormous wealth extracted by companies that then dissolved, leaving behind a landscape riddled with tunnels and waste rock piles, and no one obligated to pay for the cleanup. The damage didn't stop when the miners left. Sulfide minerals in the disturbed rock, pyrite is the most common, react with air and water to form sulfuric acid. The acid dissolves surrounding metals, lead, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, copper, and iron are leached from the rock and carried into whatever water is moving through the mine. That acidic, metal-laden water drains out of old tunnels and into nearby streams and rivers. It's called acid mine drainage. Its creation requires nothing more than rain and oxygen, and it continues for as long as there is pyrite left in the rock, which, in the San Juan Mountains, means it has been happening for over a century and will continue for centuries more. By the early 20th century, hundreds of mines above Silverton were producing acid mine drainage, and the Animus River ran orange. Fish populations below town collapsed and they wouldn't return for nearly a century. By the early 1990s, most mines had closed. The last major mining operation in the valley was the Sunnyside Mine, which had operated intermittently since the 1870s. In its modern era, it was operated by the Sunnyside Gold Corporation, a subsidiary of Kinross Gold of Canada. The mine was drained by the American Tunnel, a passage more than two miles long that ran through the mountain and pulled groundwater from the surrounding rock by gravity. That drainage kept the mine's upper tunnels dry enough for continued operation. In 1991, Sunnyside ceased operations permanently. It was the end of more than a century of industrial mining in Silverton. What was left behind was a mountain riddled with tunnels, a river still occasionally running orange, and a rising water table that had nowhere to go but up. When Sunnyside ceased operations, the company entered into an agreement with the state of Colorado to remediate the environmental damage. This seemed responsible, but in practice, it would set in motion a chain of consequences that no one had fully thought through. The centerpiece of Sunnyside's cleanup plan was plugging the American tunnel with concrete dams called bulkheads. The logic was straightforward. Seal the drainage and trap the contaminated water inside the mountain to stop it from reaching the river. The first bulkhead went in in 1996, the second and third followed in 2001 and 2002. For a time, the plan appeared to work. Zinc concentrations in the Animus dropped by 50 to 75%. Fish returned to stretches of the river below Silverton for the first time in a century. The Animus River Stakeholders Group, a coalition of local governments, environmental organizations, and federal agencies, declared the restoration a tentative success. But beneath the mountain, something else was silently brewing. The bulkheads had effectively turned the mine network into a sealed container. Groundwater continued to flow into the tunnels from the surrounding rock, as it always had. But with nowhere to drain, the water table inside the mountain began to rise. It rose through mining tunnels and natural fault lines and fissures in the rock, finding paths that no map had fully recorded. Eventually, it reached mines that had been completely dry for decades. One of those mines was Gold King. Gold King mine had been discovered in 1887 by Olaf Arvid Nelson, a Norwegian immigrant who'd made his way to the San Juans during the Silver Rush. In the mining camps, they called him the Mighty Swede, a nickname that said something about how closely anyone was tracking the geography of Scandinavia at the time. Nelson staked his claim to Gold King on the slopes of Bonita Peak, the mountain that loomed over Silverton's northern edge and held more mines than any other in the caldera. But he died before he could develop it. His widow sold the mine in 1894 and it operated until 1922 when it was abandoned. For most of the 20th century, it set quiet. The American Tunnel, begun as part of Gold King Mine in 1900 and extended in 1959 to reach the Sunnyside Mine on the other side of the mountain, ran through the same rock and drained the groundwater from the surrounding area. That kept Gold King Mine dry. No water, no acid drainage. When the bulkheads went in, that changed. By 2002, after Sunnyside finished installing the three bulkheads, Gold King had begun discharging contaminated water for the first time in decades. In 2005, a man named Todd Hennis acquired the mine through a foreclosure sale. What he inherited was a mountain that was already flooding. Hennis noticed almost immediately. He began raising the alarm to state regulators, the Animus River stakeholders group, and anyone else who would listen. He worried that the American tunnel bulkheads were driving up the water table and pushing acid drainage out through the neighboring mines. Hennis described himself as a whistleblower, and he wasn't wrong. The contaminated water was coming out of the level 7 addit, the horizontal tunnel border into the mountainside that was the mine's lowest opening to the outside. Initially, it emerged as a trickle, one to two gallons per minute. By 2005, it had reached 200 gallons per minute or more. The abandoned mine that had been nothing more than a historical curiosity quickly became one of the worst acid mine drainage sites in Colorado. The Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, abbreviated as DRMS, documented large volumes of severely degraded water, elevated zinc, cadmium, copper, lead, and iron, acidic enough to dissolve metal on contact. Each of these metals carries its own risks. Lead is a neurotoxin with no safe level of exposure. It causes neurological damage and developmental delays in children, even at low concentrations. Cadmium is a known carcinogen that accumulates in the kidneys and stays there for a lifetime. Arsenic is carcinogenic at chronic low doses. Zinc and copper, at the concentrations found in acid mine drainage, are acutely toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates. For crops irrigated with contaminated water, the metals accumulate in the soil and in plant tissue over time, reducing yields and making crops unsafe to eat. Livestock that drank from affected water sources risk organ damage. The water flowing out of Gold King wasn't just orange. It was a slow-moving chemical threat to everything downstream that drank it, swam in it, or grew from the soil it touched. There was a water treatment plant that could have solved the problem. Sunnyside had operated it as part of its exit agreement with the state, but it shut down in the years following Sunnyside's departure. The circumstances of its closure remain disputed. Untreated acid mine drainage from Gold King began flowing into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animus that runs directly through the old mine district above Silverton, and down into the river itself. In the gorge below Silverton, fish populations that had recovered during the first few years after the bulkheads were installed dropped by as much as 75%. The trout that had returned for the first time in a century disappeared again. The rising water table had finally found its way out through Gold King. The mountain had become an overflowing bathtub, and no one had a plan. The level 7 at it, you'll recall, is the tunnel bored into the mountainside that was Gold King's lowest opening to the outside. It didn't run level into the mountain, but sloped upward as it went further in, gaining roughly 10 feet of elevation for every thousand feet of horizontal distance. This is common in mining engineering. A slope tunnel drains by gravity. Water seeping in from the surrounding rock flows downhill towards the opening and out. As long as that opening, called a portal, stays clear, the water runs out as fast as it comes in and nothing accumulates. But a mine that's been abandoned for decades doesn't always stay clear. Over the years since Gold King closed, rock and sediment had been slowly moving down the tunnel and collecting at the exit. That accumulation is called a debris plug, and it was gradually narrowing the portal. But the internal condition of the tunnel itself and how much the debris had narrowed the portal was something no one had formerly assessed. The American Tunnel hadn't just drained the Sunnyside mine, it had been draining the water table across the interconnected network of mines throughout Bonita Peak, including Gold King. When Sunnyside sealed it with bulkheads, that drainage stopped. The water table across the whole mountain began to rise, pushing more water into Gold King than the partially blocked portal could handle. It slowly filled the sloping tunnel, pressing against the debris plug with increasing force. By the time anyone noticed, the EPA estimated that the water inside had risen 11 feet above the portal, like a reservoir pressing against a crumbling dam. They knew the water level. What they didn't know was how much water that meant since the mine had never been fully mapped. It wasn't a secret that pressure was building. As early as 2009, Colorado DRMS installed a drainage pipe into the partially blocked portal to relieve it. But that intervention was never treated as an engineered system requiring maintenance or monitoring. Regulators relied instead on surface discharge as a proxy for conditions inside the mine, operating under the assumption that if water was draining, dangerous pressure wasn't building behind the partially blocked portal. Over time, the pipe's flow declined and was eventually buried, but no system was in place to track or maintain it. Federal investigators later found that no agency had clear responsibility and no standards existed for managing a site like Gold King, leaving a known risk effectively unmanaged. In June 2014, an internal EPA document, obtained years later through a Freedom of Information Act request, warned that conditions at the site could result in a blowout of the blockages, which would release large volumes of contaminated water and sediment from inside the mine. In May 2015, a new EPA action plan for Gold King repeated the warning. The EPA had put it in writing, twice, that this mine could blow. That means that the disaster that followed wasn't ignorance, it was a failure to act on what they knew. By the summer of 2015, the EPA had been working at a cluster of mine sites above Silverton for several years, attempting to stabilize the ongoing acid mine drainage problem. For most of that time, the crew had been working downhill at the Red and Bonita mine, putting in a bulkhead to control its drainage. The on-scene coordinator, Steve Wei, had deliberately kept the Gold King portal untouched while he figured out how to approach it safely. Wei had spent years on mine remediation work and was fully aware of the specific danger Gold King presented. Before leaving for a vacation in late July, he emailed the heads of the two contractors working at the site, Matt Francis of Environmental Restoration, LLC, the company handling the excavation, and Elliot Petrie of Western Solutions, which was providing technical support. His instructions were precise. No excavation was to begin until the pump was on site and ready to manage whatever water came out. He also told the team to prepare water treatment plans and document all activities during the opening. He knew the water was coming, and his instructions were the difference between a controlled release and a catastrophe. Then he called a Bureau of Reclamation Engineer named Michael Gobla to get an outside assessment before any work began. Gobla visited on July 29th and told the EPA that a blowout could occur under the proposed excavation plan. He asked how it would respond to a sudden release of millions of gallons of contaminated water. He specifically asked the agency to review mine maps and reconsider the entire plan under the assumption that the mine was full. This was not an informal concern raised in passing, but a written technical evaluation from a federal engineer delivered to a federal agency, warning that its plan was dangerous. The contractor working the site had reached the same conclusion. In May, Environmental Restoration LLC's own action plan had documented that conditions at gold mine could result in a blowout of the blockages, releasing large volumes of contaminated water and sediment. In total, that was four warnings: two from internal EPA documents, one from the Bureau of Reclamation, and one from the contractor hired to do the digging. Steve Wei asked an EPA colleague named Hayes Griswold to take over as acting on-scene coordinator beginning August 3rd when he left for vacation. He forwarded Griswold the same instructions he'd sent to the contractors on how to manage contaminated water that may spill from the portal. Then Wei left for vacation. He was due back 11 days later on August 14th. Griswold took over on schedule. On the morning of August 5th, he ordered excavation at the Gold King Portal to begin. The pump Wei had required wasn't on site, and water treatment plans hadn't been prepared. He gave the order anyway. According to documents later obtained through court proceedings, Griswold directed the crew to excavate directly into the face of the plug, the precise action the EPA, Bureau of Reclamation, and contractor had warned against. No one drilled into the mine from above to measure the actual water level, and no one verified the hydraulic pressure behind the plug. Two tests that had been used at nearby mine sites in 2011 and were designed specifically to prevent a catastrophic blowout. A cat excavator owned by Environmental Restoration moved into position on the slope above Silverton. Its operator began scraping at the debris. At 1051 in the morning of August 5th, 2015, the contractor operating the excavator noticed water beginning to seep from the portal. The seep was small at first. It grew quickly. Soon the debris plug gave way, like a cork pulled from a bottle, and the water that had been building behind gushed out. At peak discharge, the drainage was estimated at between 500 and 700 gallons per minute. 3 million gallons, the equivalent of roughly five Olympic swimming pools, left the mine in 50 minutes. The water was a vivid turbid orange gold, thick with suspended metal particles. It poured off the slope and into Cement Creek before moving downstream and entering the Animus River at Silverton. The workers, unharmed, watched the toxic sludge flow down the mountain. EPA supervisors weren't notified for approximately one hour after the blowout, and downstream residents weren't notified until nearly 24 hours after the blowout, by which time the surge had already reached Durango, Colorado, a city of more than 18,000 people, 47 miles. Downstream. The Animus River runs directly through the heart of downtown Durango. It's central to the community's identity, a place for kayaking, paddleboarding, tubing, and fishing. In summer, the river is full of people. Whitewater rafting attracts visitors from across the country. But on the evening of August 5th, 2015, Durango residents began noticing that something was wrong with the water. As the toxic plume arrived from the north, Jonathan Thompson, a journalist with Western environmental publication High Country News, described it as tang that was mixed too thickly. The water Thompson was seeing was opaque, an unnatural orange gold that left stains on the rocks at the river's edge. The La Plata County Sheriff closed the river to recreational use within hours. Residents were warned to keep pets away and livestock were moved away from riverbanks. Well owners in the floodplain were told to test all of their water before drinking or bathing. The plume continued moving south with the flow of the river. Brandon Francis, a Navajo Education Resource Coordinator at the New Mexico State University Agriculture Science Center in Farmington, later coined the phrase that stuck in the community after the spill. He called it the Cantanamis River. By August 7th, the water had reached Aztec, New Mexico. By August 8th, it was at Farmington, home to roughly 46,000 people, the largest city in its path. The city shut off its municipal water intakes from the Animus and operated on reserves. By August 10th, the leading edge of the plume had reached the San Juan River in New Mexico and the territory of the Navajo Nation. Water quality sampling along the route documented the scope of the contamination. At a monitoring point 15 miles upstream from Durango, lead levels came in at 100 times the safe limit for drinking water. Iron was measured at 326 times the limit. Arsenic and cadmium also exceeded standards. These weren't measurements taken at the source of the spill. They were taken nearly 20 miles downstream after dilution had already begun. The EPA's initial public estimate of the spill volume was 1 million gallons. The actual volume was 3 million. That discrepancy would later become a focus of congressional scrutiny. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper declared the affected area a disaster zone. New Mexico Governor Susanna Martinez, after viewing the river from a helicopter, followed suit. She declared a state of emergency and said she was prepared to pursue legal action against the EPA. On August 8th, Navajo Nation President Russell Bagai declared a state of emergency for the San Juan River Valley and formally activated the nation's Commission on Emergency Management. Despite all these actions, by the morning of August 12th, seven days after the blowout, Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the EPA and the head of the agency responsible for the disaster, still hadn't visited the site. As a result of the spill, tourists stayed away and businesses built around river recreation watched the season collapse. Individual damage claims were filed with the EPA, but the EPA said it couldn't pay them. They explained that federal law barred it from compensating private individuals for losses caused by the government's own actions. The irrigation canals that carry water from the San Juan River to Navajo farmlands in New Mexico can be closed on command. On August 7th, the same morning Lin Laria Dixon walked out to look at her corn, crews from the Navajo Nation Irrigation Office did just that. It meant that roughly 12,000 acres of crops lost their water supply in the middle of growing season. Alfalfa was being cut, corn was in the ground, melons and produce were weeks from harvest. An estimated 2,000 Navajo farmers and ranchers depended on the San Juan River for irrigation. A full week after Navajo Nation shut its irrigation canals, the EPA finally agreed to send tanker trucks to deliver agricultural water to affected farms. But the logistics were difficult. The Navajo Nation covers 27,000 square miles, and getting water to dispersed farms across that territory quickly enough to make a difference wasn't possible. By the time some farmers received their deliveries, their crops had already died. Dwayne Yazi, then the Navajo Nation shipwrocked chapter president and a longtime farmer, described the specific cruelty of the calculation forced on his family. They lost their alfalfa fields. With other crops, corn melons, they had to decide plant by plant what could be saved. He described that process as heartbreaking in a way that stayed with him for years. When Laria Dixon hauled water in buckets from her home faucet, she chose her plants one by one, deciding which might survive and which would be left to die in the sun. The next year, some farmers replanted, but others didn't out of fear that the contamination persisted even after the EPA's assurances that the water was safe. A farmer named Alan at City described what it was like trying to sell crops the following season. He compared the perception of contamination to grease that stays in a pan even after you've cleaned it. You think it's gone, but you're not sure, and neither are your customers. Part of what made the EPA's assurances so difficult to absorb was the language barrier. Many of the scientific units used to communicate safety findings, parts per million, micrograms per liter, the standard vocabulary of heavy metal monitoring, have no direct equivalents in the Navajo language. Brendan Francis ran community-facing water tests as part of the Gold King Mine Spill Denay exposure project. He described the translation problem as a fundamental break in the chain of communication between agencies and the communities they serve. Some of what federal officials were saying, in the most technical terms, simply didn't carry cleanly from English into Navajo. And for many older Navajo residents, who were more likely to speak Navajo as their first language, that gap made the message even more difficult to understand. The cultural damage was harder to measure. For the Navajo Nation, the San Juan River is more than irrigation water. It is part of the spiritual order of daily life. The Navajo concept of Hojo, a state of balance, beauty, and harmony, describes the relationship between people, land, and water. When the river turned orange, it disrupted that balance. Carleta Chief, a Navajo scholar of environmental science and director of the Indigenous Resilience Center at the University of Arizona, led a research team assessing the spill's impacts on Navajo communities in the years that followed. Her findings documented what the contamination meant beyond the measurable. The San Juan River, she explained, is a complete system in Navajo cosmology. The farming, the ceremony, the relationship between people and the land are interconnected. The spill ruptured that web of connection. In January 2017, the EPA announced it couldn't pay any of the 73 individual damage claims that had been filed after the accident. The federal government can't be sued without its own consent, so the EPA said that legal framework barred it from paying compensation to farmers who'd lost crops, ranchers who'd lost livestock, or business owners who'd lost revenue. 73 claims, all rejected. There's a temptation in a disaster involving a government agency making an obvious mistake to tell a simple story. The government screwed up. The government is responsible, the end. That story isn't wrong in this case, but it leaves out the historical context that made the mistake possible. Let's start with the mining companies. More than 140 years of extraction had left the San Juan Mountains riddled with over 400 abandoned mine sites. The companies that extracted enormous wealth from those mountains didn't pay for what they left behind. When the ore ran out, they simply closed up and left, meaning cleanup became someone else's problem. The legal framework that permitted this is still on the books. The General Mining Act of 1872, signed when Ulysses S. Grant was president and the American West was being actively colonized, imposes no royalties on hard rock mining on federal land and no requirements that companies set aside funds for cleanup. A mining company can extract hundreds of millions of dollars from federal land, go bankrupt, and leave a contaminated site for the government to manage. This isn't a rare occurrence. The government accountability office has estimated that there are up to 500,000 abandoned mine sites across the United States. Colorado alone has approximately 23,000. When Sunnyside ceased operations in 1991, it took steps that appeared to be responsible. But its plan to plug the American tunnel with bulkheads had a fatal flaw. Sealing the drainage from a mountain full of interconnected tunnels raises the water table throughout the network, forcing acid mine drainage out through any openings. The Gold King Level 7 added had been dry in 1996. By 2002, after the bulkheads were installed, it was discharging heavily contaminated water. By 2005, its acid drainage was one of the worst in the state. Barry Rabb, a longtime Silverton resident who'd worked underground in the American Tunnel, described the outcome as entirely predictable to anyone with underground experience. Blocking a mine's drainage causes the water to back up and find another way out. It's basic hydrology. According to the EPA's internal documents, the agency knew more than a year before the blowout that Gold King Level 7 added could fail catastrophically. The Bureau of Reclamation had warned the EPA directly to reconsider its excavation plan, specifically asking how the agency would respond to a sudden release of millions of gallons of contaminated water. On-scordinator Steve Wei had recognized the risk and paused the excavation, but his replacement, while he was on vacation, Hayes Griswold, ordered the excavation to begin anyway. The EPA's own internal investigation, published less than a month after the blowout, identified the failure to analyze water pressure within Gold King as the critical error. There was also no emergency response plan for a blowout, including containment equipment. Finally, downstream communities, states, and tribal nations weren't notified until the day after the spill. The Bureau of Reclamation later conducted its own investigation into the disaster. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was asked to peer review the report. One core reviewer, senior geotechnical engineer Richard Olson, refused to sign the review unless his written dissent was included. In Olson's view, the failure wasn't just a technical mistake. It was rooted in deeper breakdowns inside the EPA, in communication and decision making, that the report did not fully explain. His dissent was included when the report was published. Then there's the town of Silverton, and this is the most painful part of the story. In the early 1990s, before any of this happened, the EPA had moved to designate the Upper Animus watershed as a Superfund site, a federal designation reserved for the country's most contaminated locations, which comes with legal obligation and dedicated funding to force a cleanup. That designation would have given the agency the tools to proactively address the acid mine drainage problem, including the dangerous pressure building behind Gold King's portal. Silverton said no. The town's economy had collapsed when the mines closed, but was slowly rebuilt through tourism. That economy was what Silverton was protecting when it blocked the Superfund designation after the Gold King spill. It had been doing that since the early 1990s when the EPA first proposed the listing. Many residents worried that a designation would deter potential tourists. It was a reasonable fear, but it proved to be the wrong calculation. After the blowout, Mark Esper, editor of the Silverton Standard and the Miner, said the town had suffered the bad publicity anyways, not because it tried to fix the mine, but because the problem had been left unaddressed for so long. Community opposition was effective, and the EPA backed away. Without Superfund authority, the agency could only do limited work at the mines. The comprehensive remediation that might have addressed Gold King's worsening conditions didn't happen. In the months following the blowout, the governments and communities that had been harmed began preparing lawsuits. The list of plaintiffs was long. The states of New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado, the Navajo Nation, the Southern Ute Tribe, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, individual farmers and ranchers, rafting companies, and property owners. The EPA's response was to acknowledge responsibility for triggering the spill while arguing it couldn't legally pay anyone for it. This wasn't just a cynical legal maneuver. The Federal Torts Claims Act and the doctrine of sovereign immunity create legal barriers to suing the federal government. Courts have sometimes interpreted certain government decisions as discretionary functions, professional judgment calls immune from liability, even when those judgments turned out to be catastrophically wrong. The EPA invoked this doctrine. Everyone sued anyway. All the cases were consolidated in April 2018 in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. The federal government moved to dismiss all of them. In February 2019, the court rejected the motion to dismiss, finding that the plaintiffs had stated viable claims and that discovery should proceed. Over the next several years, attorneys for the plaintiffs took more than 50 depositions and obtained internal EPA records. Through that process, they built a detailed picture of what had actually happened on August 5th, including confirmation that Hayes Griswold ordered excavation directly into the plug, despite explicit written warnings. During discovery, the plaintiffs also unearthed gaps in the agency's own documentation, missing field photos, overwritten files, and deleted or unpreserved data logs that plaintiffs argued should have been retained once the spill became the subject of litigation. A federal judge sanctioned the EPA for failing to preserve evidence in the case, concluding that the agency had not met its legal obligations to retain potentially relevant documents. Settlements accumulated slowly. In August 2020, the EPA settled with Utah. Utah had originally sought $1.9 billion, it received $3 million for clean water projects and a commitment of $360 million in abandoned mine remediation work within the state. In January 2021, Sunnyside Gold Corporation and its parent company, Kinross Gold of Canada, settled with New Mexico and the Navajo Nation for $11 million and $10 million, respectively. Both settlements were structured as no fault, meaning Sunnyside and Kinross paid to resolve the litigation without admitting that their bulkheads had caused the increased drainage into Gold King that led to the blowout. In 2022, Sunnyside and Kinross paid an additional $45 million to settle with Colorado. That same year, the EPA agreed to pay about $31 million to the Navajo Nation and roughly $32 million to New Mexico. Combined with earlier settlements, the Navajo Nation's total recovery from all defendants exceeded $40 million, while New Mexico's total approached $50 million. On top of that, more than $200 million had been committed through the Superfund program for long-term cleanup and remediation. Despite the catastrophic environmental destruction of the Gold King blowout, no individual was ever criminally charged. In October 2015, eight miles north of Silverton, the EPA built a temporary treatment plant to filter ongoing drainage from Gold King and nearby sites before it could reach Cement Creek and the Animus River. Today, the plant is still running as an interim solution, treating roughly 300 gallons per minute of contaminated water. Decades of superfund work have spent more than $75 million, but overall water quality improvements in the river have been minimal. Despite the persistent contamination, recreation has returned. Rafting, kayaking, tubing, and even swimming are once again common, with commercial outfitters operating trips and locals and visitors continuing to float. People do fish in the river, but health officials caution that heavy metals remain in the water and in fish tissue. Eating fish from affected stretches is safe only in small amounts, and children, pregnant people, and frequent eaters are advised to avoid it. Agencies also advised avoiding drinking untreated river water. Even so, the Animus has regained much of its role as a recreational and cultural hub while remediation and monitoring continue. What's needed is a permanent water treatment facility capable of treating ongoing drainage from multiple sites indefinitely. Building and operating it would cost tens of millions of dollars and require sustained federal commitment. That commitment hasn't materialized. For decades, Congress considered good Samaritan legislation that would let nonprofits, community groups, and local governments clean up abandoned mines without being held liable for downstream contamination. In December 2024, that legislation became law as a pilot program. The EPA can now issue permits for select low-risk cleanup projects, shielding participants from liability under the Clean Water Act and Superfund laws. A proposal to impose royalties on hard rock mining on federal land so that new operations contribute to cleaning up what old ones left behind has been debated repeatedly. It hasn't passed, and so the General Mining Act of 1872 remains largely intact. In the meantime, the Animus River continues to carry elevated heavy metal concentrations during storms and snow melt. Fish populations have recovered partially, but not to the numbers scientists were hoping for before the blowout. The farmers market in Shiprock, New Mexico, within the Navajo Nation, finally reopened in 2018, three years after the spill. When it did, vendors posted both local monitoring data and EPA-sponsored test results alongside their produce. Some Navajo farmers still stagger their planting schedules differently than they did before 2015, spreading their crops across the growing season so that if another contamination event comes, they won't lose everything at once. Linlaria Dixon still grows corn. But she told researchers that the river's hojo, its balance, has been disrupted. And that balance, she said, doesn't simply restore itself when the water quality improves. The Gold King mine disaster is different from the environmental crimes in most episodes of this podcast, and it's worth explaining how. The EPA didn't have an intent to harm. It wasn't cutting corners to save money. The workers on the slope above Silverton on the morning of August 5th were trying to help by stabilizing a dangerous mine before it got worse. But instead, the man who understood the risk went on vacation, and the man who replaced him didn't follow the safety procedures that existed specifically to prevent it. And when the EPA was held to account, it invoked sovereign immunity and emerged with no individual having faced a single criminal charge or lost a day of pay. That's one lesson, but it isn't the hardest one. The hardest one belongs to Silverton, a town that had already watched one era stripped away from him, the mining era, the reason it existed, made a decision to protect the new one. Tourism was what it had left with the narrow gauge railroad, the scenery, the river full of kayakers. The community thought it understood what a super fund designation would do to all of that, so they pressured the state of Colorado to block the federal regulatory tool that might have caught the problem in time. They made their choice, and it's one the community is still living with. The people downstream didn't get to be a part of that decision. The Navajo Nation didn't get a seat at the table. The farmers along the San Juan River who grow corn for ceremony absorbed the consequences of a decision made 80 miles away and 20 years earlier. In the five years after the spill, Linlaria Dixon became president of the Upper Fruitland Chapter of Navajo Nation. She enrolled at the University of Oklahoma and earned a Master of Legal Studies in Indigenous People's Law, graduating in May 2020. Her father didn't live to see her graduate. Larry Williams died at the Farmington hospital in February 2018 after staff failed to provide a Navajo interpreter and missed the signs of the infection that killed him. Somewhere in the San Juan Mountains, contaminated water is still flowing through abandoned mining tunnels in the dark. The temporary water treatment plant is still running. Most people can only hope this won't happen again. But Linlaria Dixon is not hoping. She's standing up, farming, leading, studying. She's prepared to fight for the future of this land. The 2015 Gold King Mine blowout released more than 3 million gallons of acid mine drainage into the Animus and San Juan rivers, carrying an estimated 800,000 pounds of heavy metals through Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah and the territory of the Navajo Nation. It remains one of the most significant inland water contamination events in U.S. history. The Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site, created in the aftermath of the spill, encompasses 48 mine sites in the mountains above Silverton. Remediation is ongoing. As of 2026, no comprehensive permanent treatment solution has been constructed. No individual was criminally charged in connection with the blowout. The EPA settled all civil litigation by 2024. Total settlements across all defendants are estimated at over $200 million, with additional hundreds of millions committed to remediation. No settlement included an admission of wrongdoing by the EPA. The General Mining Act of 1872, which imposes no royalties or cleanup requirements on hard rock mining companies operating on federal land, remains in effect. There are an estimated 500,000 abandoned mine sites in the United States. If you want to support the organizations working to address abandoned mine drainage in the American West, the Animus River Stakeholders Group and the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining, and Safety both publish information about ongoing work. The Navajo Nation Water Rights Commission and the Danay Exposure Project have published community resources about ongoing monitoring of the San Juan River, available through the University of Arizona Superfund Research Center. Other groups involved in watershed protection and advocacy in the region include the Bonita Peak Community Advisory Group and the San Juan Citizens Alliance, which works on river conservation, policy, and long-term water quality monitoring. You can learn more about all these organizations and find links to donate at EcosidePod.com/slash organizations. Ecoside is an independent narrative podcast. Each episode tells the story of environmental harm, who caused it, and who paid the price. These are stories about what humans do to the natural world and what it takes to reckon with it.