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All We’ve Surveyed: Five Years After the Gold King Mine Spill

A gold-tinted river flows.

By Laura Paskus Five years ago, crews reopening an abandoned mine in the mountains of southern Colorado breached a containment wall, spewing three million gallons of mining waste into a tributary of the Animas River. Given the mine’s alpine location—which averages 15 feet of snow each year—fieldwork is limited and conditions can change drastically between…

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Superfund Site in Socorro

Our Land Eagle Picher Cherri 3

March 8, 2019 – For this month’s installment of Our Land, environmental correspondent Laura Paskus travels to Socorro and a Superfund cleanup site where a plume of toxic groundwater from an old battery plant is seeping underneath homes. The Eagle Picher site has been a federally designated cleanup project since 2007, and the state has…

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