SILVERTON – The streets of Silverton buzz with summer tourists in late July. Passengers disembark from the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad, duck into gift shops, sip beers at saloons and snap photos of the jagged peaks that surround the historic mining town.
Few are thinking about the Gold King Mine spill, even as its 10-year anniversary approaches.
Even locals living near the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site – created in the wake of the 2015 disaster – rarely dwell on it.
On Aug. 5, 2015, Environmental Protection Agency contractors breached a collapsed mine entrance at the Gold King Mine.
About 3 million gallons of acidic mine drainage laced with heavy metals poured into Cement Creek, sending a plume of orange water down the Animas and San Juan rivers before settling in Lake Powell over a week later.
Images of the Animas River colored a toxic, synthetic-looking shade of orange-rust made international headlines and drew the globe’s attention to Silverton and the legacy of environmental contamination left by the mining boom in the West.
“It was a literal tsunami of not only national, but international press,” said DeAnne Gallegos, spokesperson for San Juan County, Colorado.
In days following, it was confirmed that the actual environmental damage was minor. No fish died and the water quality retained no long-term effects.
“It was more of a visual emergency than it was a real environmental disaster,” said Ty Churchwell, mining coordinator for Trout Unlimited and secretary for the Community Advisory Fund.
The spill, he and others said, brought long-overdue attention to an invisible crisis: the legacy pollution from hundreds of abandoned and inactive mines discharging heavy metals into the watershed year-round.
“It wasn’t a fish killer, but yes, people were impacted,” Churchwell said. “Businesses shut down. Tourism slowed. Tribes were hurt.”
The immediate response was marked by uncertainty and concern – not only for the environment, but for the community’s reputation and economy, said Anthony Edwards, Silverton’s representative on the Community Advisory Group.
In the months following, Silverton’s leaders wrestled with whether to accept a Superfund designation, a term considered to be politically fraught in the tourism-dependent town.
The spill pushed the region’s move toward the unanimous acceptance of the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund site designation a year later.
Many residents worried that a Superfund designation would bring disruption, recalling the experience of other mining towns where extensive cleanup efforts had upended daily life and threatened tourism.
Still, the community took proactive steps to educate itself and advocate for its interests, which proved a turning point.
Local leaders studied the experiences of other Superfund towns, distributed books about environmental cleanups, and sent a detailed letter to state and federal officials outlining their concerns and recommendations, Edwards said.
That collaborative approach helped shape how the Superfund designation was implemented in Silverton: The cleanup efforts were kept outside town limits to minimize the potential negative effects.
It’s been one of biggest successes in the years after the spill, said former Mayor Molly Barela. Silverton is not directly associated with the Superfund site or the presence of toxic pollutants.
Several business owners said the memory of the spill is no longer on visitors’ minds. All agreed it’s rare for a customer to bring it up.
Gallegos said those successes are credited to the community’s advocacy.
“It was kind of a dance of just trying to figure this out,” she said. “And I’ve always said, once you sign up for a Superfund with a community, you are in a decades-long arranged marriage with a federal agency.”
And despite early fears, the tourism industry did not experience the expected decline after the Superfund designation.
“In some ways, it’s helped us,” said Scott Fetchenhier, San Juan County commissioner and Silverton business owner. “We have EPA people staying in town. They’re eating in the restaurants, buying liquor at the liquor store and stuff like that.”
Since the designation, the EPA has completed surface water and soil sampling, built a water treatment plant below the Gold King Mine and prioritized about a dozen sites for early cleanup actions.
Major stabilization work has been completed at the Red and Bonita Mine, and more than 80 waste piles have been assessed.
In recent years, the agency entered the remedial investigation phase – a comprehensive study to guide long-term cleanup decisions. Mitigation work has been completed or is nearly done at 21 of the 48 identified mine sites, according to the EPA’s five-year review.
“They either redirected water around mine tailings or somehow made those sites less toxic to the environment,” said Chara Ragland, chairwoman of the Community Advisory Group.
The EPA also constructed a waste repository, which is now nearing completion after delays caused by a lapsed contractor agreement.
The Gold King Mine remains the only site where contaminated water is actively treated. The water treatment plant, at the base of Bonita Peak near the American Tunnel, was built just months after the spill. It extracts metals such as lead and arsenic from the water and turns them into a solid sludge.
The treated versions of these metals are completely safe, Churchwell said. So safe that they could be disposed of at the Bondad Landfill if it weren’t so costly to transport.
Despite nearly $140 million spent, some locals question the pace and impact of the cleanup.
“In 10 years, what have they done? They’ve moved a lot of dirt,” Barela said.
She and others pointed to the success of the now-defunct Animas River Stakeholders Group, a coalition of regional citizens and agencies that had made steady progress cleaning the watershed before the Superfund site was established.
“That was everyone in the Four Corners – including the Southern Ute Tribe, Silverton and Durango – coming together,” Gallegos said.
The Stakeholders Group dissolved after the Superfund designation and was restructured into the Community Advisory Group, the community’s main point of contact with the EPA.
For some, the scope of the Superfund site feels too broad.
Of the 48 sites included in the Bonita Peak Mining District, just four – the Gold King, Red and Bonita, American Tunnel, and Mogul Mines – account for the majority of metal pollution, and only the Gold King is currently treated.
Fetchenhier said his original belief – that the Superfund should have focused solely on the most polluting mines – has only been reinforced.
Churchwell and others say progress has been slow largely because of the limitations of the Superfund framework itself.
“It’s the only legal mechanism by which we can clean up abandoned mines like this,” he said. “Whether we like it or not, that’s the tool. Without it, we’d just be nibbling at the edges.”
Last year, the Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act of 2024 – aimed at addressing pollution from smaller mines not covered under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act – was signed into law.
Originally introduced in 1999, the legislation allows eligible parties, or “Good Samaritans,” to obtain remediation permits for abandoned mines where no responsible party remains to be held accountable for the cleanup.
Previously, any entity that attempted to clean up historic mines with ongoing acid or heavy metal drainage assumed full legal liability for the pollution. The Act provides liability protections to such entities to encourage remediation efforts at these neglected sites.
Churchwell credited the final passage of the Act to the attention the 2015 Gold King Mine spill brought to the issue of hard rock mine contamination and the limited legal tools available to address it.
While the law offers an important alternative mechanism for mine cleanup, Churchwell said it only complements the work being done under the Bonita Peak Superfund designation.
Mine sites already included in a Superfund are not eligible for Good Samaritan permits.
But that is still not nearly enough, Edwards said.
“The Superfund program, as currently designed, isn’t always a good fit for Western mining districts with complex land ownership and environmental issues,” he said. “We need a better way to clean our watersheds without imposing unnecessary burdens on local communities.”
There’s bipartisan support for addressing the legacy of mining in the West, he said. But small towns like Silverton often lack the population, and subsequent political power to drive timely change.
Meanwhile, concerns about the stability of the program are mounting. Several CAG members cited federal workforce reductions and political uncertainty as major threats to continued progress.
“They were supposed to have the repository finished at the beginning of this summer,” Ragland said. “That didn’t happen because they couldn’t get a contract signed.”
Still, there are signs of improvement. Fish have returned to stretches of Mineral Creek where none lived before.
“This is a long-term project for a lot of us,” Ragland said. “The idea that the EPA should have swooped in and fixed everything in 10 years is unrealistic.”
Fetchenhier put it more bluntly: “The federal government ain’t gonna get anything done quickly.”
Even so, many in Silverton remain committed to the process, however imperfect.
“If you could sum up the last 10 years in one word,” Fetchenhier said, “it’d be ‘patience.’”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
