The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will reconsider whether to pay farmers, business owners and others in three states for economic losses caused by a mine waste spill that US government crews triggered in 2015, the agency’s leader said on Friday during a visit to the site.
EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, who toured Gold King Mine with Colorado lawmakers on the eve of the incident’s second anniversary, said he told people to resubmit claims rejected by the administration of former US president Barack Obama.
It was not clear if the agency could pay on its own or how much of the potential payouts would need to be approved by the US Congress.
Photo: EPA
The spill sent 11.3 million liters of tainted wastewater from the old gold mine into rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, causing an estimated US$420 million in economic damage.
The EPA has designated the area a Superfund site to pay for a broad cleanup.
Stretches of waterways turned an eerie orange-yellow, and the rivers were temporarily off-limits for agriculture and water utilities, as well as fishing and boating — important contributors to the area’s recreational economy.
The EPA has said water quality has returned to the conditions before the spill.
Native American reservations along the rivers were also affected.
Pruitt, who had promised to visit the mine during his confirmation hearing earlier this year, said he has sent letters to people whose claims were rejected by former Obama’s EPA.
In January, the agency said federal law prevented it from paying claims because of sovereign immunity, which prohibits most lawsuits against the government.
The “EPA should be held to the same standard as those we regulate,” he said in a statement. “The previous administration failed those who counted on them to protect the environment.”
It is uncertain whether the White House and Congress are willing to pay for any of the economic losses, although the Republican Party has been most vocal in demanding that the EPA make good.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees