National challenge of leaking mines dwarfs Colorado spill

Problem throws spotlight on policy

Melanie Bergolc walks along the banks of Cement Creek in Silverton, Colo., Monday. The area is a few miles downstream from the Gold King mine, where a wastewater accident several days earlier allowed water contaminated with heavy metals to pour into the creek that feeds rivers critical to survival on the largest Native American reservation in the United States and across the Southwest. - photo by Associated Press

AP10ThingsToSee Mine Heal — Melanie Bergolc walks along the banks of Cement Creek in Silverton, Colo., Monday. The area is a few miles downstream from the Gold King mine, where a wastewater accident several days earlier allowed water contaminated with heavy metals to pour into the creek that feeds rivers critical to survival on the largest Native American reservation in the United States and across the Southwest. - photo by Associated Press

SILVERTON, Colorado — It will take many years and many millions of dollars simply to manage and not even remove the toxic wastewater from an abandoned mine that unleashed a 100-mile-long torrent of heavy metals into Western rivers, experts said Thursday. Plugging Colorado's Gold King Mine could simply lead to an eventual explosion of poisonous water elsewhere, so the safest solution, they say, would be to install a treatment plant that would indefinitely clean the water from Gold King and three other nearby mines. It would cost millions of dollars, and do nothing to contain the thousands of other toxic streams that are a permanent legacy of mining across the nation.

Associated Press

Associated Press