The EPA spill in Colorado was not a bug but a feature.

The EPA's long range plan was to build a Superfund Site at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  They needed a spill to make that happen.  They got it.

Guess what's going to happen next?



Meanwhile Democrats and environmentalists are rushing to the EPA's defense and pointing the fingers everywhere else.

The EPA says they're sorry and it won't happen again ... so that's allright.

Bud Norman

All those companies that have been heavily fined and whose executives have gone to jail for lesser contaminations surely didn’t intend to despoil the environment, after all, and we can reasonably assume that they also felt awful about it. The EPA’s apologists will likely argue that it was acting for the greater good, rather than than greed that motivates those nasty old miners, but we would note that mining industry also serves an essential and arguably more important service than the EPA and that the EPA’s employees are at least as well compensated and as a typical Colorado miner. The consequences of of governmental incompetence can be just as devastating as those of corporate incompetence, although usually more so, and deserve even harsher condemnation.

When a corporation encounters one of those unfortunate things that can happen when you’re moving heavy machinery around toxic materials, there’s an EPA and a Justice Department and a Federal Bureau of Investigation and an environmental left around to make so those responsible are held to account, but if it’s the EPA and the federal government that’s spilling three million gallons of toxic waste into a river and turning it a sickly orange and the environmental left is rallying to its defense there’s no real incentive for them to avoid such screw-ups in the future.

Did we mention that the mine closed in 1923? And that when a private company pollutes the ground with toxic chemicals, heavy metals such as cadmium, copper, lead and arsenic the EPA and the environmentalist run around with their hair on fire? The EPA has assured us that even everything's fine now:

Only one of 108 fish died after being placed in cages in the Animas River, and wildlife officials have said there appears to be no danger to animals drinking from the river.

And the EPA doesn't have to worry about the government going after them; they ARE the government.

Unlike BP, which was fined $5.5 billion for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the EPA will pay nothing in fines for unleashing the Animas River spill.

“Sovereign immunity. The government doesn’t fine itself,” said Thomas L. Sansonetti, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s division of environment and natural resources.