Simon Lomax writes at EnergyCollective:
Comments from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the recovery and clean-up efforts following Colorado’s historic floods directly contradict the fear mongering of environmental activists who have played politics with this tragedy since the beginning.
The EPA’s Oct. 3 comments are particularly noteworthy given that news outlets like the Denver Post and CNN were clearly misled by the activists’ claims. From Energy & Environment Publishing’s EnergyWire (sub req’d):
“The total reported amount of reported [oil] spills is small compared to the solid waste” that has spilled from damaged sewer lines and household chemicals from destroyed homes, said Matthew Allen, a spokesman in EPA’s Region 8 office in Denver. …
Allen said EPA did aerial surveys in the days after the floodwaters began to recede to try to locate broken oil pipelines or other infrastructure that would cause a large-scale, continuous release, and did not find any. Instead, it has mostly worked to recover gasoline tanks and propane tanks that were carried away by the floods, he said.
“What we’ve really seen is this kind of slow trickle of smaller spills, and all are specifically related to the flood,” Allen said of the oil releases. “It wasn’t user error or improper operations; it all falls in the act-of-God category.” [emphasis added]
Unusual enough to think they’ve done it by mistake. Or perhaps the proper bureaucrats were barred from talking to the media during shutdown?
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Typically, in my experience anyway, the boots on the ground, that is, the folks with dirt under their finger nails are rarely the problem. No one thinks it’s a bad idea to round up errant hazmat after a disaster. As Ross Perot once pointed out (paraphrased), “The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.” What’s unusual here is that the media actually spoke to one of the honest workers rather than the bureaucrats or professional picketers they usually quote.
The water in a flood is pretty nasty. There are all sorts of chemicals, oil distilates, rotting food, raw sewage, etc in the stuff. It does flow downstream, but flooded homes are still steaped in the stuff. That is where it becomes difficult to clean up. You got waterlogged walls (and basements – don’t know if CO is a basement state). And in addition to the crud, the walls start to mold. It would be nice if they could do an Aegean stable and have the river flow through all the homes again, this time with clean water.
From a resident of said area (me, and in jest)…sure helped keep the skeeter’s down having that oil sheen on the ponds and puddles. Yeah, the doom-and-gloomers where howling about the 200,000 gallons of oil spilled while an estimated 1,000,000,000,000 gallons of water flowed through the South Platte Valley. Dilution was the solution to this pollution.
Does anyone think CNN will retract their previous comments. Unlikely, so the activists win by lying.
EPA, like all organisations, obviously includes a small number of people who do sensible work, dominated by a tall superstructure made of those who take credit.