“I AM absolutely deeply sorry this happened,” said the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Gina McCarthy, on August 11th. Her apology came nearly a week after a group supervised by her agency’s employees accidentally released 3m tons of waste water from an abandoned gold mine into Colorado’s Animas river, turning it a sickly yellow shade.
The Animas is a
tributary of the San Juan, itself part of the Colorado river system, which
supplies 25m people across seven western states and two Mexican ones. It also
irrigates 3.5m acres of farmland. The governors of Colorado and New Mexico
declared emergencies on August 10th, freeing state funds to deal with the mess.
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