Impacts of Colorado's Animas River Mine Waste Spill

The images of the 300-million-ton-mine waste spill in Southwestern Colorado’s Animas River looked dreadful. Colorado State University Dept. of Fish, Wildlife and Conservation Biology’s Dr. Will Clements says the long term impacts on especially the lower portions of the watershed will likely be small.

 

Clements: “I have seen some of the metals data that the EPA reported of the upper section and those are indeed strikingly high concentrations — well above what would be considered safe concentrations for protection of aquatic life. What I haven’t seen is those same data of looking at the downstream regions near Durango — I’m not sure those data exist. But my expectations would be — based on the flows coming out of Cement Creek and the sources of these metals is are pretty small relative to the Animas River proper downstream that I don’t think we will see the massive fish kills that have been some suggestion about in the popular media. The good news is about stream ecosystem is that they are fairly resilient and given that you have source of clean water and a source of potential recolonization from these clean tributaries that coming into Animas River that these systems do recover fairly quickly. Even when you have these episodic, catastrophic pulses of metals, they do have the potential to recovery very quickly. If — this is all predicated on the hypothesis that the they will control that upstream source — that that is not going to continue to leach high-concentrations of metal into the system.That is a important consideration — there was this big pulse of metals that came through there. If that has been resolved and that is not longer leaching metals into the system, I think that there is every opportunity that this stream can recover very quickly.”