US clears way for cleanup of Colorado mine after huge spill
DENVER — A Colorado mine that spewed 3 million gallons of contaminated wastewater into rivers in three Western states was designated a Superfund site Wednesday, clearing the way for a multimillion-dollar federal cleanup.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally added the inactive Gold King Mine and 47 other nearby mining-related sites to the Superfund list. It also included nine other sites in California, Indiana, Louisiana, Montana, New York, Ohio, Texas and West Virginia and Puerto Rico.
A federal crew inadvertently triggered the Colorado spill during preliminary cleanup work at the gold mine in August 2015, sending out a mustard-yellow plume that tainted rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
The EPA estimates that 880,000 pounds of metals flowed into the Animas River in Colorado, including arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc.