EPA crews working on Gold King cleanup find elevated lead threatening birds, animals and, potentially, people

A little toxic-lead pollution in Colorado’s mountains lasts long after jobs go away. Environmental Protection Agency crews conducting Superfund cleanup-prep investigations along Animas River headwaters revealed this week that they’ve found contamination at century-old mine sites at levels 100 times higher than danger thresholds for wildlife. This lead and dozens of other contaminants are spreading beyond waste-rock piles into surrounding “halos” where they are absorbed by plants and then can be ingested by bugs and transferred from the insects to birds to, ultimately, mammals. EPA officials said tissue samples from deer will be tested to assess ecological harm. The lead, measured at concentrations up to 5,000 parts per million, surfaced in the latest round of sampling and study that were spurred by a federal declaration last year of a Superfund environmental disaster linked to the 2015 Gold King Mine spill that turned the Animas River mustard-yellow through three states. Mining that began in the late 19th century, churning out minerals that propelled the rise of the U.S., left tens of thousands of abandoned tunnels leaking acidic metals-laced water into Western watersheds — continuing now when clean water increasingly is coveted. The equivalent of the Gold King spill still happens again and again, every couple of weeks, as thousands of gallons of the acid-metals mine water flows into creeks where few fish or even aquatic bugs can survive...more