October 15, 2015 04:19 PM UTC

Crested Butte Begs Denver Post, GOP To Shut The Hell Up

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• by: Colorado Pols

An opinion piece in yesterday’s edition of the Crested Butte Chronicle and Pilot from editor Mark Reaman addresses a recent small spill of treated sediment from an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund cleanup site above that historic mining town. More to the point, Reaman discusses the over-the-top response to the spill from Republican politicos and sensationalist Denver media, who were hoping to score more gratuitous political points off their perpetual bête noire after a vastly worse accidental minewater spill in August. Excerpted, though it’s definitely worth reading in its entirety:

Let’s start with the reassurance that the town of Crested Butte’s drinking water was never contaminated from a “spill” at the Standard Mine last week. If you drank the water from the tap a month ago, it would be pretty much the same water the day of the incident and every day since…

The town water experts, Rodney Due and David Jelinek, were made aware of the incident at the end of the business day Tuesday. They were initially under the impression that about 2,400 gallons of alkaline water spilled into the creek. They calculated that given the amount of water running in both Elk Creek and Coal Creek, the dilution would present no danger for the town. Add in that it would ultimately end up in a 10-million–gallon reservoir and be treated, and the town water guys and the EPA folks were confident there wasn’t much to worry about…

Then politics and the media came into play. And things blew out of proportion. I was informed of the incident and its qualifiers late Wednesday night. Early Thursday morning, we put out a notice on our Facebook page. We described it as a small spill that appeared to have no threat to human health. We promised details as they became public.

That Facebook post was shared and copied to Colorado politicians and various newspapers around the state. Within two hours of our Facebook notice, Republican congressman Scott Tipton’s office had sent out a press release banging the EPA and touting some “Good Samaritan” legislation he supports in mine cleanup work over the EPA. In other words, a politician pounced on a minor situation in our backyard to make political hay for himself and his political stands. Disappointing but not really surprising these days.

That Tipton release was then used as the basis for an article in the Denver Post that made the front page and was circulated widely on Facebook. That article appeared to be written to reinforce Tipton’s position and cast great fear over the town’s drinking water situation. As a guy who has been in the business a long time and has probably written a few things people think sucked, I know that the media can suck sometimes. The Post article sucked. [Pols emphasis]

The story of the small and comparatively benign spill of treated water above Crested Butte last week rapidly mushroomed into “another EPA disaster in Colorado,” as conservative usual suspects as well as plenty of honest low-information social media sharers shared the story as it was being reported by the Denver Post. In addition to Rep. Scott Tipton, Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman glommed on to the coverage, decrying that “the EPA wants to zealously regulate Colorado’s resources but refuses to be accountable for their own activities.”

As Reaman continues, this nonsense detracts from the necessary work being done by the EPA to protect communities from mining’s toxic legacy–in Crested Butte, in Silverton, and across the West today:

And guess what? It’s not the EPA’s fault. It’s the fault of slack regulation and greedy mine owners who walked away from poison mines after they sucked out the money. The EPA has been working hard for years to clean up a toxic mine discharge at the old Standard Mine. If they weren’t up there, that toxicity would be leaching more into the watershed today. So for politicians like congressman Tipton to bang the EPA for tackling a problem not of their making is just stupid and opportunistic. It’s politics. And the Denver Post fell into the political cesspool with that article. That was too bad because it scared some people who live here…

This incident was an example of our small town being used as a pawn to sensationalize a politician’s position against an agency he apparently does not trust and a Denver paper’s ploy to help him, while sensationalizing a story to sell more papers and make people scared. [Pols emphasis]

In the end, these politicized rushes to frighten the public and blame the people who are trying to help, do an enormous disservice to the public. The citizens of tourism-reliant Crested Butte must fend off damaging misinformation about their water quality that could hurt their bottom line. Others are spun into anger at the agency charged with protecting the environment on the strength of 180-degree misinformation and exaggeration–from politicians they should know not to trust, but also from major media outlets they should trust.

From Scott Tipton’s office to the newsroom of the Denver Post, this really needs to stop.