Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Interior Department investigators confirmed that the EPA holds the blame for the catastrophic (yet easily preventable) Animas River spill. The report essentially confirms what most Americans already knew: the government took rushed and careless actions that hurt the environment more than it helped. It has been reported that the EPA didn’t even have an emergency plan in place in case things went wrong.
Government investigators squarely blamed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Thursday for a 3 million gallon wastewater spill from a Colorado gold mine, saying an EPA cleanup crew rushed its work and failed to consider the complex engineering involved, triggering the very blowout it hoped to avoid. The spill that fouled rivers in three states would have been avoided had the EPA team checked on water levels inside the Gold King Mine before digging into its entrance, Interior Department investigators concluded.
… Ryan Flynn who heads up the New Mexico Environment Department, which is running its own testing center, separate from the EPA, spoke with CBS News in August. “We are really frustrated with EPA,” he said. “First and foremost they didn’t tell us about for 24 hours, and that is just unacceptable.”
“There’s no question that they haven’t been taking this as seriously as the state has,” Flynn said.
… EPA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
It sounds like the EPA is making a habit of not responding to things in a timely manner, these days.
