Oops! EPA Accidentally Pollutes the Animas River

Edit: March 18, 2016: BOI Report on the incident. 

Rivers are not supposed to look like this.

Source

Update video on the spill.

For those readers who may be looking at the news, and the recently posted lab data, maybe I can help make some sense out of those numbers.

I am a public health guy.  I love fish and plants as much as anyone else, but I really don't deal with aquatic toxicity.  So looking at the lab results, I see a lot of "metals" that are not the toxic metals to human health I deal with,

By the way...Ignore all the letters by the results.  Those are important, but, for all intents and purposes, the values reported are the values we can assume were actually present at the time the sample was taken.  D, for example means they had to dilute the sample to get it low enough for the instrument to read it without overloading it.  Too much and the instrument's reading goes off the scale, so you dilute it, and then take the result and estimate how much is in there.  There is error put into that result when it is denoted with a "D", but again, these results are so high that potential error is meaningless.

Let's look at sodium for example.  The lab reports a maximum concentration of 11,100 ug/L at the the 32nd St Bridge.

That's 1,110 parts per million, ug/L is ppb, there are 1000 ppb in one ppm.

So I asked myself, 'what is the normal sodium concentration found in freshwater streams?'

Good ol' Google...Sodium looks to be about 5 ppm as a high concentration.  So the sodium is elevated for sure, but less than sea water (10,500 ppm).

Now let's look at the human health concerns.  Assuming there is no cyanide, the primary concern for this water coming from a mine is the heavy metals, and for those, I want to look at just what we call the "RCRA 8."

Looking at the analytical results, it looks like only lead is a really big concern - human health wise.

Source

Let's look at two of the metals.  The others are important, but these two have the highest concentrations and are a bigger deal toxicity wise.

Arsenic looks to be about 1080 at the highest concentration found.  As you can see above, the MCL - U.S. EPA's drinking water standard - is 10 ug/L.  Now remember, that's for drinking the water.  And not just drinking it once, but drinking two liters per day, almost every day, for 70 years.  Drinking a glass of this water would not, based on the lab results shown, be a concern (it would probably taste terrible though).  Potable and Palatable!

Lead...on the other hand...well...

25,600 ug/L at sample location "A72."

The MCL for lead is 15 ug/L

That's 25 ppm of lead in that sample.  See the TCLP results above for lead?  5 mg/L or 5 ppm..

That water, from location A72,  meets the definition of a hazardous waste,  Not that that makes it "toxic", it just shows that the concentration of lead is pretty gosh darn high.

So...dilution will be the solution to pollution here, but this river was heavily contaminated by some toxic stuff, that should have never gotten into this river (call me Captain Obvious).

It will be interesting to see what takes place to the environment as this water makes its way downstream.

Time will tell.