Federal authorities have confirmed for the first time that a criminal investigation into the 2015 Gold King Mine spill is underway, saying their probe involves the U.S. Attorney’s Office and came at the request of members of Congress.
The announcement Monday came from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) as it released letters sent to lawmakers about the status of its work to analyze the disaster. Documents reviewed by The Denver Post on Monday indicate the probe has been in progress for nearly a year.
Jeffrey Lagda, spokesman for the inspector general’s office, said the OIG is working with the U.S. Attorney’s Office on the criminal investigation. It was “based on requests from several members of the House and Senate,” he added.
“I cannot comment further,” Lagda said.
Officials declined to say Monday specifically when the investigation began, but an Aug. 17, 2015, memo from the inspector general’s office — the EPA’s internal monitor — to top-ranking EPA officials makes mention of the beginnings of the criminal probe.
“We will request documents, and interview relevant managers and staff in (the region and at national headquarters) and elsewhere as necessary,” the memo said, outlining that the OIG’s office of investigations would be working on the review. The investigations division handles criminal investigations for the OIG, including of employee misconduct.
Word of the criminal investigation remained out of the public view, however, and Republican members of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs have been pushing hard for a criminal review of the EPA-caused Aug. 5, 2015, spill near Silverton.
In May, the committees’ chair, U.S. Senators John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and John McCain, R-Ariz., sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch formally requesting a criminal review of the EPA’s role in the disaster. On Monday, both applauded news of the probe.
An EPA representative said she could not comment on an ongoing investigation and referred questions to the inspector general’s office. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado also declined to comment.
“I hope this investigation uncovers who is at fault and holds them responsible,” Barrasso said Monday in a statement. “We will be watching closely.”
In a June 29 letter to Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, the inspector general’s office said a number of investigations into the spill “have been underway.”
Gardner said Monday in a statement that he appreciates the criminal review and urged the expedited release of a full report on the disaster. He added: “I look forward to a response to my questions surrounding EPA’s insufficient and untimely recovery efforts immediately following the spill.”
In recent letters to members of Congress, the OIG wrote: “There is investigative material that we cannot reveal in any report about our program evaluation until the investigation reaches a point where the U.S. Department of Justice and the EPA’s OIG’s Office of Investigations inform us that we may do so. Many of your questions to us, including those that go to the heart of what you asked us to address, directly implicate and will have to be answered in part by investigative results that are not currently releasable.”
The Gold King’s site coordinator, Steve Way, retired in June. He was on vacation the day of the spill, and fellow EPA coordinator Hays Griswold oversaw the work that caused the massive, 3 million-gallon wastewater release.
The spill sent more than 880,000 pounds of metals cascading through three states and American Indian land. The U.S. Department of Interior, which conducted an independent investigation of the Gold King disaster on the behest of the EPA, found the spill was preventable.
Also Monday, the EPA released a 23-page retrospective report on the Gold King and its efforts since the incident to restore and protect impacted communities.
The agency said that as of July 15 it has dedicated $29 million in response efforts and for continued water quality monitoring. Officials say they are also evaluating more incident-related expenses and that they are working to expedite the distribution of those funds.
“We have been responsive in terms of doing the cleanup and demonstrating how we’ve done the cleanup,” Mathy Stanislaus, EPA’s assistant administrator, told The Post in an interview Monday.
He added that 68 claims that have been filed against the EPA, which include a mixture of individuals, businesses and local and state governments, are pending review.
Since the Gold King disaster, the agency has launched additional consultation, coordination and technical review prior to remediation work at mine sites. Stanislaus said contaminants from hard-rock mining pose a major risk but that the EPA is only have to tackle a “slice” of the problem.
The retrospective explains that the estimated 160,000-plus abandoned mines in the West pose costly and complex challenges. The agency said it is committed to pursuing those responsible for the waste and that it supports requests from President Obama to create a fee program to help foot the bill.
“The public should not have to bear the costs of cleaning up the contamination,” the report says.
A year after the Gold King spill, the EPA says it is working on more permanent solutions to tackle mining drainage broadly and in the areas around the Gold King. The mine and 47 other surrounding sites are part of a proposed Superfund listing in San Juan County.
Wastewater discharge from the 48 mines is estimated at 5.4 million gallons a day and has been blamed for the destruction of trout populations downstream.
The National Wildlife Federation on Monday proclaimed “no meaningful effort has been made” since the Gold King spill to address the ongoing threats from hundreds of mines across the country. Jim Lyon, the federation’s vice president of conservation policy, called for legislation to stop the clock from ticking toward another similar catastrophe.
Stanislaus said the universal problem is broader than the EPA and is being examined from many federal levels.
“I think the EPA can only take on an extremely small subset of the abandoned mine situation,” Stanislaus said. “We only get involved in the highest risk situations where you have this high risk (to) ecological and public health.”
