<\/p>\n
DENVER \u2013 The U.S. Supreme Court asked the Justice Department on Monday to weigh in on New Mexico\u2019s lawsuit against Colorado over a mine waste spill that polluted rivers in both states and in Utah.<\/p>\n
The court asked the Office of the Solicitor General to submit the Obama administration\u2019s views on the lawsuit. The solicitor general represents the executive branch in Supreme Court cases.<\/p>\n
The federal government has a stake in this case because a work crew supervised by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accidentally triggered the 3 million-gallon spill from the Gold King Mine while doing preliminary cleanup work north of Silverton in August 2015.<\/p>\n
The EPA estimates that 880,000 pounds of metals flowed into the Animas River in Colorado, including arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc. It turned the water bright orange-yellow.<\/p>\n
The chemicals flowed into New Mexico and Utah and passed through the Navajo and Southern Ute Indian reservations. The EPA said water quality quickly returned to pre-spill levels.<\/p>\n
New Mexico sued Colorado in June, saying Colorado should be held responsible for the contamination as well as decades of toxic drainage from other mines.<\/p>\n
New Mexico and the Navajo Nation also sued the EPA. Those lawsuits are pending.<\/p>\n
Utah officials are considering a lawsuit against the EPA. Dan Burton, a spokesman for the Utah Attorney General\u2019s Office, said Monday that they haven\u2019t reached a decision.<\/p>\n
Mark Pino, a spokesman with the New Mexico Attorney General\u2019s Office, said New Mexico state officials hope for a quick resolution to their lawsuit against Colorado.<\/p>\n
Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman was pleased the justices asked the solicitor general to present the government\u2019s view because of the EPA\u2019s involvement, spokeswoman Annie Skinner said.<\/p>\n
The EPA has added the Gold King and other nearby mine sites to the Superfund list and is researching cleanup alternatives. A temporary water-treatment plant has been removing pollutants flowing from the Gold King Mine since October 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
N.M. wants quick resolution; Utah may sue, too<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71305,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[304,739,2461,138,303],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-71304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-animas-river","tag-environmental-protection-agency","tag-gold-king-mine-spill","tag-new-mexico","tag-water-pollution"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71304"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=71304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}