On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency denied $1.2 billion in claims stemming from a 2015 toxic wastewater spill in a creek that feeds a river in Colorado.
According to Reuters, farmers, ranchers, river-running raft companies and others filed the claims against the EPA, after the spill was accidentally triggered by the agency at the defunct Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado, a spill that fouled waterways in three states.
The EPA said in a statement that it federal law grants immunity to government agencies if something goes wrong as a result of actions taken by its employees.
The spill happened in August 2015, when an EPA contractor breached a tunnel wall while trying to slow seepage of pollutants from the mine, unleashing somewhere in the neighborhood of three million gallons of orange-colored water containing heavy metals such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury that spilled into a creek that feeds the Animas River and then traveled downstream into the San Juan River in New Mexico and across Native American lands before reaching Lake Powell in Utah.
The EPA decision, Reuters reports, drew angry responses from elected officials in the affected states.
“We are outraged at this last-ditch move by the federal government's lawyers to go back on the EPA's promise to the people of the state of New Mexico - and especially the Navajo Nation - that it would fully address this environmental disaster,” three Democrats from New Mexico's congressional delegation - Senators Tom Udall and Martin Heinrich and Representative Ben Ray Luján - said in a joint statement.
Colorado’s two U.S. senators, Democrat Michael Bennet and Republican Cory Gardener vowed to introduce legislation to ensure the EPA will pay any legitimate claims.
“It is extremely disappointing that the EPA has categorically rejected every single claim filed under the Federal Tort Claims Act,” Bennet said.
The EPA said the decision can be appealed to the federal court system within six months.