Rep. Rob Bishop says the EPA still hasn’t told the full story about the 2015 Gold King Mine disaster, which spilled 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into waterways stretching across three states, including Utah.
Reports the Washington Examiner:
“A year later, the Obama administration still won’t tell us the whole truth,” House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Accounts of events from Interior and EPA have been inconsistent and artfully misleading. The EPA insists they had no plan to dig out the plug [closing the mine], but they did and without testing.”
“There has been zero accountability” for the incident on the part of the administration, Bishop said. “EPA’s disaster dumped hundreds of tons of pollutants into a river that flows across four states — affecting farmers, treatment systems for safe drinking water and livelihoods, but no one has been punished.”
He said the affected communities “deserve better. They deserve answers.”
No federal employee has been fired for the mine spill. The head of Colorado’s Natural Resources Department, Mike King, resigned in December after clashing with the EPA over the agency’s record of events that said Colorado approved the plan at the Gold King Mine. King said in a letter that he neither approved nor rejected EPA’s plan.
