A team of US regulators investigating contamination at a Colorado goldmine accidentally released a million gallons (3.8 million liters) of orange-hued waste water containing sediment and metals into a local river system, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday.
I think we need more information about this from a mining expert.
So Tim, just how easy is it to accidentally release a million gallons of waste water into a river? I am not being difficult, I am just trying to understand how much incompetence is required for this level of screw up.
Well, it’s a pretty ghastly cock up, that’s fer sure. But it’s also easy enough to do if people don’t quite know what they’re doing.
The actual effect on the river will be to make it an odd colour for a few days as the bolus moves downstream and that’s about it. Few dead fish n’that but nothing all that serious.
It wasn’t cyanide run off from a gold mine or anything.
Perhaps they were related to Del Boy, and had read about his Peckham Spring Water escapade…
It probably went something like this…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9nNpACDjEw
What are the odds of anyone being prosecuted then for this little bit of contamination? Anyone going to get fired?
It’ll be another example of Leftist law – they were trying to do good and didn’t mean to cause any harm so its not fair to punish anyone, whereas a private sector business that did exactly the same was doing it in the name of profit so they deserve to have the book thrown at them.
@Tim
‘But it’s also easy enough to do if people don’t quite know what they’re doing.’
I just love this sentence. It can describe so many situations found in life.
Yep, chances of prosecution: nil.
The EPA is now obliged to classify its employees as a pollutant.
My guess is they bypassed a treatment unit in order to ascertain whether it was working properly, and forgot to put it back online again.
It’s all in the numbers, isn’t it? About 4000m3. Must be mostly water or it wouldn’t flow anywhere. It’d just be a heap of sediment on the ground. It’s about the equivalent of an inch & half of rainfall on a square kilometer. Whatever’s in the sediment must be present in the geology of the locality, anyway & the catchment area of the river’s going to be in the hundreds of km2. So the equivalent of a California back country showery afternoon.
Yawn.