Silverton, Colo. • The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found a place to store sludge from a treatment plant cleaning up wastewater from a southwestern Colorado mine.
The Durango Herald reported Wednesday a landowner agreed to let the EPA store the sludge at an existing mine waste pile a few miles from the plant. The plant was running out of room for sludge.
The plant was installed in 2015 after the EPA inadvertently triggered a 3 million-gallon spill of wastewater from the Gold King Mine north of Silverton. The spill sent a yellow-orange plume of toxic heavy metals into rivers in Colorado, New Mexico and Utah and on American Indian lands.
Wastewater is still flowing from the mine.
The EPA designated the area a Superfund site in 2016 but hasn’t announced long-term cleanup plans.