Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. President, I want to begin by thanking my colleague the senior Senator from New Mexico Tom Udall for the incredible leadership he has shown on this issue. I know it is something near and dear to his heart and something he absolutely and truly cares about. We have had a good team working on this over the course of the last couple of months. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado has been a great contributor to this effort. Congressman Ben Ray Luján of northern New Mexico has taken a leadership effort on a similar effort in the House, and today we are joined by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon on this legislation as well.

As many folks know, in August a large plume of bright orange mine waste spilled into the Animas River, which leads into the San Juan, and polluted the Four Corners region from Colorado to New Mexico and through the Navajo Nation.

If you take a look at this photo, which was shared with me by the president and vice president of the Navajo Nation, this is not what you want to see when you look at the river that you take your drinking water from or the river that you use for irrigation or the place you go fishing or recreate and kayak on. This is not how our mountain streams in the Southwest are supposed to look. I think visually this got the attention of people all around the country as to the scope and scale of this problem.

After the mine spill, I toured affected communities in New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. I met with impacted residents, including farmers in Aztec and Shiprock, San Juan County leaders, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, Vice President Jonathan Nez, and the attorney general, Ethel Branch. In the Southwest, water is by far our most precious resource, so you can imagine the kind of impact this disaster had on our communities.

My colleagues in the Environment and Public Works Committee and the Committee on Indian Affairs have now held hearings to investigate the Environmental Protection Agency's actions which led to this spill and to seek to bring proper oversight to the Agency's response. Last week, the Department of the Interior released a report of its independent technical evaluation of the EPA's action. The evaluation found that the EPA did not properly appreciate the engineering complexity of trying to clean up the Gold King mine and that it could in fact have prevented what we see here.

I share the anger and frustration that not only my colleagues but, more importantly, our constituents have expressed over this terrible accident. It is why Senator Udall and I have introduced separate pieces of legislation specifically to make these communities whole. We need to continue to demand the EPA act with urgency to protect the health and the safety of the affected communities and to repair the damage inflicted on this watershed. That is our first and top priority.

We are doing a disservice to the American people by not also taking action to address the thousands--thousands--of other similarly contaminated abandoned mines that literally litter the West and are leaking toxins into our watersheds--into the watersheds that provide drinking water and irrigation to our communities all across the West.

There are estimates that 40 percent of western watersheds have been polluted by toxic mining waste and that reclaiming and cleaning up abandoned mines to make this right is going to cost tens of billions of dollars.

This latest disaster was all too familiar for those of us from the Four Corners region and to many people around the West. Back in 1975, in an even larger accident than the Gold King blowout, a tailings pile near Silverton, CO, spilled 50,000 tons of tailings laden with toxic heavy metals into the Animas River Watershed--the watershed that drains from Colorado into New Mexico, into the San Juan and through the Navajo Nation in Arizona as well.

In 1979, a breached dam at a uranium mill tailings disposal pond near Church Rock in New Mexico on the Navajo Nation sent more than 1,000 tons of solid radioactive waste and 93 million gallons of acidic liquid into the Rio Puerco.

Disastrous blowouts and spills like these are easy to see. They get the media's attention, but the toxins leaking silently out of thousands of abandoned hard rock mines are doing even more damage to our watersheds each and every day.

For decades before the spill, the Gold King mine actually leached water laced with heavy metals and sulfuric acid into Cement Creek, which is a tributary of the Animas. Over the last 10 years, an average of 200 gallons of highly polluted water each and every minute, or more than 100 million gallons per year, flowed out of this mine and into the Animas River via Cement Creek. The Gold King and other abandoned mines in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado continue to pollute the Animas and the San Juan Watershed as we speak.

Beyond the immediate cleanup of the Gold King spill, it is high time we as a Congress overhaul our abandoned mine cleanup policies to make future disasters less likely and to address the thousands and thousands of abandoned mines that are polluting our watersheds.

The Navajo Nation, which was perhaps most affected by the Gold King mine blowout, has more than 500 abandoned uranium mines. Last month, I met with officials at the Navajo Abandoned Mine Lands Reclamation and Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Office and learned about their efforts to clean up these literally hundreds of sites. I visited a large uranium tailings disposal pile in Shiprock--in the town of Shiprock--that sits close to the San Juan River.

If you look at this map, this is the San Juan River. This is the community of Shiprock. We have the high school, the fairgrounds, and the residential area all around a permanent tailings disposal site--something that is going to require stewardship for literally hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Melvin Yazzie, a senior reclamation specialist with the department, also took me through an abandoned uranium mine site in the Red Valley Chapter of the Northern Navajo Nation. Carrying a Geiger counter, he showed me the abandoned mine and a nearby house that was constructed using materials contaminated with radioactive materials.

Here we see Mr. Yazzie with his Geiger counter. This is obviously no longer occupied, but it gives us a sense of the impact to members of the Navajo Nation, some of whom literally have their homes built with the spillover, the rock materials that came out of these mines, and live with that irradiation each and every day.

The Navajo Government is doing its best to address this legacy of uranium mining and milling, but they do not have anywhere close to enough resources or funding necessary to clean up the waste from decades and decades of uranium mining.

A large reason why the Navajo Nation lacks adequate resources and why communities all across Indian Country and the entire West are dealing with pollution from abandoned mines and lack resources is that we have not updated our Federal laws on hard rock mining in 143 years.

During the era of manifest destiny, the Federal Government encouraged Americans to settle newly acquired lands in the West by passing laws--laws like the Timber and Stone Act of 1878 and the Desert Land Act of 1878, laws like the Homestead Act, which my grandparents took advantage of. Some of these laws gave away public lands and resources to private users with no strings attached and often no price tag attached.

The General Mining Act of 1872 came along during this era of unrestrained western expansion. It allowed individuals and companies to claim ownership of minerals in the public domain--minerals owned by us as a nation, such as gold, silver, copper, uranium, molybdenum, and others--simply by locating a mineral source, staking a claim, and paying $5 for an acre of land. Miners did not have to consider environmental impacts or make any plans to clean up the waste, which has created the pollution and contamination we confront today. This law drew thousands of people to the West. My father and my mother's father both made a living working in hard rock mining. But shortsighted policy also left behind a scarred legacy on our lands.

Unlike other 19th-century western settlement laws which have long since been reformed or replaced, the Mining Act of 1872 remains on the books today. While developers of resources such as oil, natural gas, and coal all pay royalties to return fair value to taxpayers for our public resources, hard rock mining companies still mine publicly owned minerals for free--for free--and we still don't have a plan to address a century of pollution from abandoned mines.

We desperately need to bring our mining laws out of the 19th century and into the 20th century. That is why I am joining my colleagues--Senator Udall of New Mexico, Senator Bennet of Colorado, and Senator Wyden of Oregon--to introduce legislation to reform our outdated and ineffective Federal policy on abandoned mines and on hard rock mining. Our legislation will require that reasonable royalties and fees from hard rock mining be used to create a dedicated funding stream for cleaning up mine waste. A reclamation program will allow States, tribes, and nonprofit organizations to collaborate on projects to restore fish and wildlife habitat affected by past hard rock mining and to repair watersheds that are the very center of our economy in the West, the source of our essential agricultural and drinking water supply for western communities up and down the spine of the Rockies.

This legislation will also reform the permitting process for new mines. Hard rock mining companies will need to protect water and wildlife resources and provide financial assurance that they can actually fund reclamation cleanup and restoration efforts after their mines close so that in the future we don't have this legacy of abandoned hard rock mines.

These are simply, commonsense reforms--reforms that, frankly, Congress should have adopted decades ago.

I appreciate the value of the hard rock mining industry. My own family has benefited from it, and I recognize that the industry continues to provide good-paying jobs in States throughout the West. Some mining companies are already stepping up to help clean up old mining waste sites. I look forward to working with industry stakeholders to find practical ways to bring our policies into the 21st century. We cannot wait for more disasters like the Gold King mine spill for us to act. We cannot continue to do nothing while thousands of abandoned hard rock mines drain toxic metals into our rivers, water supplies, and our drinking water each and every day. We must come together and press forward for pragmatic reforms to our outdated Federal hard rock mining laws.

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