Wastewater from Colo. reaches New Mexico

Associated Press

Mustard-colored wastewater laced with heavy metals continues to drain into a river from an abandoned mine in southwestern Colorado at a rate of about 550 gallons per minute, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which caused the spill.

The rate of discharge Saturday was down from about 740 gallons per minute Friday. But three days after the massive spill, the agency said it still didn’t know what the possible environmental and health impacts are.

The agency said it hoped to have a thorough lab analysis of the contaminants – which include lead and arsenic – as soon as Saturday evening or this morning.

“We’re busting our tails to get that out,” Environmental Protection Agency Regional Director Shaun McGrath said. “We know the importance to people to have this information.”

In the meantime, the EPA said it had finished building two containment ponds to treat the yellow sludge. However, the ponds are meant to immediately address the spill, and cleanup efforts likely will take a long time. McGrath could not say whether that means days or weeks.

“This is a long-term impact. The sediment, the metals that are in that sediment are going to settle out to the stream bottom,” he said. “As we have storm surges, as we have flooding events, that sediment can and likely will get kicked back up into the water. We’re going to have to do ongoing monitoring.”

About 1 million gallons of wastewater from Colorado’s Gold King Mine began spilling into the Animas River on Wednesday when an EPA-supervised cleanup crew accidentally breached a debris dam that had formed inside the mine.

The mine has been inactive since 1923.

The plume reached the northern New Mexico cities of Aztec on Friday night, and Farmington on Saturday morning. Local government officials in New Mexico and Colorado have blasted the EPA, saying it didn’t alert communities soon after the spill and that answers have been slow in coming.