Silverton’s Superfund Cleanup Continues

Many can recall the Animas River turning bright orange, signaling what appeared to be a major environmental disaster in 2015, with the Gold King Mine spill. Nearly 10 years later in the Gold King Mine, as well as many other mines in Silverton, remain an active Superfund site. You’re watching the Local News Network brought to you by Tafoya Barrett and Associates and Sky Ute Casino Resort. I’m Sadie Smith. After the spill, many of the mines were assigned to the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund Project. A Superfund is a federal program in the United States designed to clean up hazardous waste sites.

Bonita Peak Mining District is, it’s actually an area in the headwaters of the Silverton Caldera, and so it’s not just one site. A lot of Superfund sites are one site, but this is multiple sites, and there’s probably in the county, over 300 draining adits.

Nearly 10 years after the spill, restoration efforts are still ongoing, and Trout Unlimited has teamed up with the Environmental Protection Agency to manage the cleanup efforts. Trout Unlimited, a water restoration organization, formed a community advisory group, or CAG, with local experts to best address the cleanup.

There are several former mining experts in our group. We have a number of geologists. We have people who worked in either the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service. We have biologists, social scientists. So we have all kinds of expertise that lends itself well to a very diverse Superfund site.

As the CAG evolves, its role is becoming more significant in shaping the cleanup efforts.

This year, we’re actually stepping into a really new kind of era in the CAG in that we’re looking at, we’re starting to form work groups around specific sites and specific issues where we become more involved than most of the community advisory groups at Superfunds in terms of hearing what kinds of remediation solutions might be possible and how those fit with community desires. It gives the community the opportunity to let the EPA know what our ultimate goals are, not just for remediation, but also for restoration 20 to 30 to 50 years into the future.

The CAG’s influence extends to critical decisions about site remediation.

CAG members have had a chance to look at, they have what they call an interim record of decision. And so the first interim record of decision was done in 2019 for this Superfund site, and there were about 20 something sites on which EPA was doing actions. We heard about that. We commented during the process of when things were going on. Sometimes some of our CAG members had useful information because they had historical information about a site.

The CAG is essential for community voices to be heard in order to influence the decisions being made by federal agencies regarding our communities.

Politically, it’s a time of upheaval. Nobody seems to know quite where the country’s going, and so I think seeing things that you can locally, hopefully influence for the better of where you are and where we’ll be in the future is a good place to be.

One of the ultimate goals of the project is to improve water quality all the way from Silverton to Durango to make that entire stretch of the Animas River clean enough to support a thriving fish population, an indication of a very healthy river, which has not been the case for more than 100 years. The CAG plays a vital role in shaping the future of our environment, and local voices matter. More information on the cleanup can be found on the Trout Unlimited website. For more information about this and other stories, visit durangolocal.news. Thank you for watching this edition of The Local News Network. I’m Sadie Smith.