SILVERTON — The EPA has stabilized the collapsing mouth of the Gold King Mine, cementing heaps of rock and sediment dug up during mining’s glory days, trying to prevent another blowout and pioneer a solution to the West’s continuing acid metals contamination of coveted water.

And as the feds push through this work, they face once-resistant Colorado communities that are increasingly keen on having a clean watershed.

The action this summer in the mine-scarred mountains above Silverton is raising expectations that, whatever final fix may be made at the Gold King, it will build momentum for dealing with toxic mines elsewhere.

That all depends on Congress lining up funding.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The Gold King Mine can be seen from an adjacent mountain on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The Gold King Mine can be seen from above on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The Gold King Mine can be seen from an adjacent mountain on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.



Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The Gold King Mine can be seen from above on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The water treatment plant for the Gold King Mine is pictured below the mine on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.

Helen H. Richardson, The Denver Post The San Juan Mountains, in the distance, and late summer flowers blooming on Bonita Peak sit high above the Gold King Mine on August 17, 2016 near Silverton, Colorado.



At the Gold King’s timberline portal, an EPA team sprayed gray cement across an area 50 feet high and 30 feet wide to secure entry. Initially, EPA workers crawled into the mine on hands and knees over planks put down to keep them from sinking into orange-hued acid metals muck. They installed cement blocks and a wooden dam to divert a 691 gallons-a-minute toxic discharge.

“You will sink. Kind of scary,” said EPA on-scene coordinator Kerry Guy. “It’s coming from the internal workings.”

Then the EPA team welded steel frames 63 feet deep into a cleared 18 foot-wide tunnel. They buttressed the tunnel deeper, another 67 feet in, drilling in expanding screws, steel bolts and grates. They’re pumping that acid metals discharge through a partially buried pipeline that runs 4,000 feet to a temporary waste treatment plant.

At the plant, EPA contractors — mixing in a ton a day of lime to neutralize a 3.5 pH flow to 8.3 pH — recently sliced open bulging sacks filled with reddish-brown sludge. They spread 3,500 cubic yards of the sludge across a flat area to dry, trying to extend the plant’s capacity to clean Gold King muck.

Generators rattle. A canary-yellow air tube snakes out the mouth as workers in helmets with head lamps hike in.

Down in town, Silverton and San Juan County leaders’ recent about-face — from a tribe-like mistrust of the EPA toward eagerness to get cleanup done at the Gold King and 46 other sites — is becoming more adamant. Some locals say they see economic benefits if mining’s toxic hangover can be cured. And Silverton’s town manager is broadening his appeal to the nation’s most ambitious geologists to make this a hub for hydrology research.

“If there’s ever going to be a commodity here that is as rare as gold, it is going to be water,” said Commissioner Ernie Kuhlman, 75, who has led San Juan County for 32 years and also served as mayor in the midst of his mining career. “Everybody’s working on controlling water. Silverton is just a large headwaters area for the Animas, San Juan and Colorado rivers.

“A lot of things start here in the San Juan mountains.”

He played a key role in the turnaround after years of local opposition to an EPA-run approach to this mess.

“I realized we’re not going to get anywhere fighting,” Kuhlman said, urging swift cleanup now of the upper Animas to a water quality where fish can reproduce.

EPA work at the Gold King is emerging as the most visible and potentially precedent-setting effort to address a toxic mine problem that each day contaminates more than 1,800 miles of streams around Colorado and thousands more waterways across an arid, increasingly populated West that cries for clean water. In Colorado and other states, an estimated 160,000 inactive mines — mostly dormant for decades like the Gold King — ooze acid metals, festering sores on fragile tundra. Near the Gold King, three other mining tunnels spew an additional 528 gallons a minute that isn’t treated as it goes into the Animas River headwaters.

Next, the EPA must officially designate a National Priority List disaster and find a Superfund or other way to cover cleanup costs — action that’s delayed until fall. Then in the Superfund process, the EPA would start studies to find the best way to fix each of the Animas sites.

At issue is whether final cleanup should rely on water plants, costing up $26 million each, to treat mine drainage perpetually, saddling future generations with huge bills — or aim for a more complicated “bulkhead” plug approach that could contain acid muck inside mountains, perhaps using pressure sensors to give early warning of blowouts.

“We’re still trying different approaches at different sites,” said EPA program director David Ostrander. “Water treatment plants are effective but they’re costly. … It’s not going to happen tomorrow. This is a big mining district. There are a lot of problems.”

Area residents are making sport of the federal bungling after the Aug. 5, 2015, mishap where an EPA-run crew working to assess options for opening the Gold King accidentally triggered a 3 million-gallon blowout that turned the Animas River mustard yellow. Silverton’s Golden Block Brewery serves a commemorative “EPA IPA” — “muddy-looking beer designed to replicate the color of the river” — and town leaders recently staged “Superfund Days,” which included a run where participants were doused with yellow, brown and orange powder.

But Silverton and San Juan County leaders last month said they’re mostly pleased with EPA progress at the mine, though federal muzzling of front-line crews and access restrictions have impeded close-up inspection.

Outstanding issues include locals seek assurances water treatment will continue until final cleanup is done; a demand for reimbursement of $90,000 they spent — “They did pay one tithing, and promised more,” Kuhlman said; and a desire to close off an ore heap used by motorcross riders along the Animas.

Yet positive relations have developed, overriding what some see as a gummed-up bureaucracy where Washington, D.C., officials tediously review and approve every utterance.

“We’re into this thing where they are controlling the process,” said San Juan County Commissioner Pete McKay. “The EPA has been very easy to work with. We have a good rapport on the mitigation needs. This is showing us we are on the right path working with the EPA.”

A commissioner since 2000, McKay said he’s always favored the EPA and the idea of protecting the environment.

“But even though we are shooting for the same goal there are these difficulties,” he said. “We’re trying to change the agency’s approach in the future … and use the Gold King as a template” for cleanups of other leaking mines.

A solution based on plugging likely would be controversial. State-backed bulkheads installed near the Gold King Mine “are what started this whole problem,” Commissioner Kuhlman said, referring to the plugs in the American Tunnel of the Sunnyside Mine, which backed up mine muck and doubled discharges from mines in the area — setting up the Gold King blowout. A bulkhead installed in the adjacent Red and Bonita Mine hasn’t been closed.

The appeal is that holding water inside mountains means the acidic muck, which forms when natural water leaches minerals exposed by mining, does less harm.

Silverton manager Bill Gardner said groundbreaking hydrology research could be done and that this could help diversify the local economy. Gardner recently accepted an invitation to speak to Geological Society of America on “shifting public policy in acid mine land remediation.”

Scientists must establish a new paradigm, Gardner said.

“Plugging can be good, but not good if we don’t have a sophisticated understanding of the underground water movements and groundwater interaction with the surface,” he said.

“With what’s going on at the federal level, are we going to get this site a National Priority Listing, and then get no funding? That would be a sin. The EPA said they are definitely going to do a hydrology investigation.

“And what should a healthy environment up here be? What parts of the Upper Animas River could support trout in the absence of acid mine drainage? … We need a dorm up here, a lecture hall and a lab.”

Environmental advocates in Washington point out that legislation to encourage work at old mines by reducing Clean Water Act liability after partial cleanups, and to create a national mining cleanup fund, has stalled.

“The mine cleanup resources and expertise now being focused on the Silverton area should be mirrored at the hundreds of thousands of abandoned metal mines around the west. Unfortunately, they won’t be,” said Earthworks spokesman Alan Septoff.

“This type of effort costs money. Until there’s dedicated revenue for metal mine cleanup, only disasters like Gold King create the political will to make resources available.”

When mining in the Animas basin fizzled around 1991 with the closure of the Sunnyside, so did town spirit. Today amid industrial tourism, with daily trains from Durango bringing visitors and ATV and jeep groups roaring across tundra, a schism has emerged in Silverton over how much “motorized recreation” is too much.

San Juan County Commissioner Scott Fetchenhier, a geologist, serving with other local leaders on a planning committee with EPA and state health officials, had not seen the shored-up Gold King portal. But Fetchenhier praised the EPA for giving locals “a seat at the table” as promised and sampling more soil and water, including creek tests planned during low-flow periods in September when contaminant concentrations can surge.

“It’s good to see progress,” Fetchenhier said. “We may have been pretty wary at first but we’ve endorsed this.”

The local interest in cleaning the Animas watershed is intensifying because “everybody is just a little more aware” after the Gold King disaster, he said.

“Before, some people downstream didn’t know acid metals were draining into their water.”