I think it will be a desert nearby the river soon.

There's no telling how many of these decrepit mines are out there just one containment failure away from catastrophe. And that's the saddest thing of all. A lot of these mines are a legacy of even worse environmental stewardship than now, just grab the bounty, don't care about what happens downstream.

It will take many years, but due to the physics involved with this kind of pollution, a fair portion of the waste might get diluted in Lake Powell (that's assuming the tailings are properly contained). However, massive remediation would have to be done to the bed of the river because of the heavy metals that will have precipitated into it. So aside from prayers, I think that funding has to be allocated (in this horrible political environment) to do a proper remediation.

I am definitely hoping for the best.

-Aug. 12, 2015: Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy on Wednesday announced water quality tests suggest metal levels in the Animas River have returned to pre-spill conditions. McCarthy also announced that the EPA is taking a hiatus from mine cleanup efforts in other areas of the country after the Animas River spill.

this from the sharp folks who initially under-reported the magnitude of the event by a factor of at least 3 while delaying said report by a day to figure out how to spin it? how come I'm not filled with confidence.

And I find it curious how they seemed to be quicker with the lawyers and release forms than with initial waste handling processes and then remedial actions...

this was no accident

this crosses my mind first thing also. suspicion is not certainty. both possibilities exist.

Rest assured, it was not.

i wouldn't know how to distribute them, but maybe as many gallon bottles of bottled water as people can get in their cars and trucks to take with them to give away if going there. i don't even know if people would want that, but its just a thought that makes sense. of course that's just drinking water.

industrial capacity water purification equipment if someone had that and a way to get it there.

i don't know what is going on to organize what. hopefully someone will do something like that. i wouldn't know how myself, but it seems an obvious thought.

The Gold King mine has been closed since the 1920s and has been leaking this toxic crap down Cement Creek into San Juan River for several decades now, and would continue for hundreds, if not thousands of years if nothing is done to fix the problem .. and there are at least a half million more just like this one strewn throughout the rockies and elsewhere across this continent. How do we go about battling such massive poisoning of our environment? In most cases the original perpetrators are long since dead and the next generations of people are left dealing with the aftermath. To be honest, it would not surprise me one bit if this "accidental" spill was released intentionally.
I live about nine miles downstream from an old open pit copper mine which has been declared an EPA superfund site. Remediation is far beyond their capabilities, and the most they have done is drill monitoring wells and map the plume of heavy metals, acids, solvents, radioisotopes and whatever else that has migrated offsite into our aquifer. The water is unsafe to drink and we are supplied bottled drinking water by the owners of the minesite, ARCO/BP. There is little else they can do to stop the spread of poison.


Wisdom can mean a lot of things.
In the dominant culture a child is taught that money is important, and so his whole life he makes decisions based on money.
But another child may be taught to love the trees and the water, and so the decisions he makes in his life will be very different.
Both children are wise based on what they know.
The child who grows up in the dominant society may make a lot of money acting out his particular wisdom, but he may poison a river to do it.
So, is this ultimately wisdom?

What wisdom? There are markers in Japan that warn people not to build their houses past them because they mark the highest area of a tsunami. People build their hoses past them anyway. Money is a commodity - it allows for easier trade of goods and services. To make it more than that is folly.

Indeed. Wisdom can mean a lot of things, depending on which definition one chooses to subscribe to. One might say that building in an area historically known to be subjected to tsunamis would be unwise, while another might say it is simply part of the cost of doing business, and an acceptable risk. As you know, knowledge or intelligence does not necessarily equate to wisdom.

Where I live is home to the Numu. They have lived quite comfortably in this valley for +10,000 years without ever having once destroyed it. Their understanding and relationship with the earth is very different than most western ideology.

You are correct, money is not the root problem, it is just a convenient, portable, widely accepted device used in lieu of barter. The real problem is the insatiable appetite for money, when millions, or even billions is not enough, when it's value is placed above all other things, including life, limb, and the liberty of others.

I tend to subscribe to the definition of wisdom as learning from the past to avoid repeating mistakes rather than choosing to ignore previous lessons.

Greed, envy, hubris, lust, wrath, apathy - when have any of these not been at the root of most of humanity's problems aside from those caused by sheer insanity?

It's another case of - if the government does it nothing gets said and they try to push it under the rug...

V.