Mine Owner in Toxic Spill Says EPA Forced Him to Grant Access

by:Tad Cronn 

With the EPA already ducking for cover after it turned a once-clean Colorado river a sickening shade of orange, Gold King mine owner Todd Hennis is claiming the EPA coerced him to grant it access to the then-contained toxic chemicals.
Once there, of course, the EPA's team of "experts" managed to spill 3 million gallons of chemical crud into a tributary of the Animas River, turning it a shade similar to carrot puree.
Hennis said that the EPA strong-armed him into granting access by threatening him with $35,000 daily fines.

"When you’re a small guy and you’re having a $35,000-a-day fine accrue against you, you have to run up the white flag," Hennis said.
As further evidence of EPA's incompetence, a retired geologist named Dave Taylor predicted in a letter published July 30 in the Silverton Standard that the project that led to the Animas River spill would fail within 7 to 120 days. The spill occurred on August 5.
Taylor's letter was talking about a larger project to stop waste water from leaking from the Red and Bonita mines upstream. He said he didn't know the EPA was going to include the Gold King mine.

"The EPA was basically deceptive," Taylor told Breitbart. "They were saying we’re going to plug the Red and Bonita mine with a hydrostatic reinforced concrete plug, then we’re going to see what will happen. The Gold King mine was already plugged by someone else years ago with wood timbers, rocks and mud, and it was exfiltrating an unknown quantity of water, and they decided to remove that old plug so they could see the true quantity of water it was leaking."
Taylor added, "It was incompetent and stupid for them to go up to that existing plug and try to remove it without knowing how much water was upstream and behind it and what the hydrostatic pressure was. ... The plug was stable until they fooled around with it. Once they disturbed it, that’s what activated the blowout."
Dr. David Lewis, a former EPA scientist and whistleblower, said there are many similar tales of EPA misconduct, but usually they don't make national news.

In his interview with Breitbart, Lewis discussed the case of dairy farmers who were using EPA-approved sewage sludge as fertilizer and soon found their cattle began to die off because of heavy metals in the sludge. The EPA, rather than taking responsibility for their mistakes, instead fined one of the farmers thousands of dollars a day for allegedly having old tractor tires on his land. 

The EPA then used phony data to determine the sludge was acceptable for farm use, Lewis said.
It's all standard modus operandi for the EPA, which has been running this sort of thug game for decades. Lewis said that since the early Clinton years, the EPA has forced scientific data to conform to its official policies.

"When you take a situation like this – what EPA has done in Colorado – you cannot believe what EPA says about what are the levels of heavy metals in that river," Lewis said. "You can’t even believe what comes out henceforth from any university that’s funded by the EPA."
If global warming isn't on the tip of your brain at this point, you haven't been paying attention.
It's been obvious from the get-go that global warming data has been massaged, fudged and outright fabricated to support a predetermined policy that was always intended as a social engineering project and, for some individuals, get-richer scheme.

That the EPA would forge data on other topics is a logical outcome.
It raises a question of how much of the supposedly scientific data the government churns out on all topics can actually be trusted, from the Census Bureau to NASA.
One of the concerns of the Founding Fathers in creating our government was that the federal system should encourage science and innovation. It's listed under congressional powers in the Constitution and is the reasoning behind patent and copyright laws.
But that assumes the science is being done by private institutions or individuals. Actual government-funded science is different and comes with an array of pressures to find what the government wants to find.
It seems that proper science is yet another duty our current government has turned its back on.