The Environmental Protection Agency has a knack for releasing things en masse.
Last year, it was 3 million gallons of toxic wastewater from the Gold King Mine above Silverton. And last week, it was tens of thousands of emails related to the spill, some of which were requested by media outlets across the country under the Freedom of Information Act.
The EPA posted 29,126 links to PDFs on Friday. But good luck sifting through them. There is no site index and the links are not labeled, meaning anyone wanting to inspect the records must open each link and review the documents, one by one.
A small sampling of the documents shows casual communications, like where to meet for dinner, to more serious matters, such as summaries of congressional hearings held in response to the Aug. 5 spill.
If the Herald’s sampling of about 50 emails is any indication of the larger picture, many of the emails consist of EPA employees copying and sending news articles about the spill to one another.
An EPA spokeswoman did not respond Wednesday to an email seeking comment on the purpose of the documents or whether they would be made more searchable.
Mark Horvit, executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a nonprofit that compiles large databases and government documents, said he’s seen emails distributed in electronic formats that are more easily searched than PDFs.
Horvit was traveling Wednesday and was unable to access the site using his cellphone and a Wi-Fi connection, so he wasn’t able to say whether the EPA may be intentionally making it difficult to search the documents.
“Sometimes agencies will do huge dumps instead of releasing the targeted things that people are interested in because it can make it harder for people to find,” he said.
But at least the documents have been made public, and anyone who wants to spend time opening random links to gain insight into the environmental mishap can do so by visiting http://bit.ly/2aPbnJ2 and scrolling down to July 29, 2016, and clicking on the FTP site. One bit of caution: It takes a while to load pages.
Let us know what you find buried in the emails.
shane@durangoherald.com
