Thursday, June 09, 2016

This is a combination of "We're supposed to trust ANY of these people? Why?" and

Why The EPA Should Be Closed And The Leadership Jailed, Part 876:
Environmental Protection Agency worker Hays Griswold was in charge at the Gold King Mine in August 2015 when a three-million gallon flood of dangerous mine waste — including 880,000 pounds of toxic elements like lead and arsenic — poured into Colorado’s Animus River, turning it yellow for nearly a week and poisoning the drinking water source for residents of three states and the Navajo Nation.

But somebody contrived to remove critical details, including Griswold’s name, from an “independent” review of the disaster, according to documents obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. Officials at the Department of the Interior – and perhaps EPA – had access to the draft.
Gee, I wonder how that could have happened?
Griswold was temporarily the On-Scene Coordinator at the mine because the crew’s usual chief, OSC Steven Way, was on vacation and had left orders “not to touch” the mine’s entrance, a draft of the Bureau of Reclamation’s (BOR) review of the yellow flood obtained by TheDCNF shows. The EPA has argued Griswold was following Way’s orders, but neither official has been punished.
Nate Snorteland, an Army Corps of Engineer peer reviewer, had little doubt about what happened.

“EPA immediately began to remove material from the face at the Gold King Mine,” Snorteland wrote in his comments on the draft review, according to the documents reviewed by TheDCNF. “This is a serious oversight or poor decision that may have been the key factor in the blowout.”

Yet the final report omitted those key details.

Two things here: the EPA and Interior screwed with the report, which is disgusting(and what we've come to expect from these bastards);  but WHY did they start removing material?  What was going on in the heads of the idiots giving the orders?

Go read it all, if you have breakables out of reach.

Regardless, no one has been punished for the disaster, which likely will ultimately cost state and federal taxpayers millions of dollars.
Of course.  Because working for a federal agency means never paying a price for screwing things up this badly(or following idiot orders no matter the cost to others).





2 comments:

Sendarius said...

My reading elsewhere indicates that there was an ongoing fight over designating areas of the state a "Superfund" site - which status gives .gov bureaucrats total control.

This "accident" is alleged to have been punishment against the city and surrounding area governments for resisting such designation.

Firehand said...

I've read of the suspicions of that. Everything's probably hidden or trashed, but I wish something concrete could be found, because the people involved in this need to be behind bars.