The Heritage Foundation takes the closest look to date of the Gold King Mine spill, and in a paper published this week debunks what they say is the EPA’s “fake accounts” of the disaster.
It’s a step-by-step take down of what EPA officials claim, and the evidence that contradicts those claims.
EPA accounts have constantly shifted. Within moments of water bursting from the mine, a crew member recorded video capturing his conversation with another.
They recorded their surprise at the blowout as they had been digging “so high.” Apparently, they were so surprised that they took the time to immediately make another video in which they again appeared surprised, as they had been digging “really high” above the mine—“about 20 feet up,” they claimed.
Now, with the inspector general’s most recent telling, the excavator bucket has somehow moved from “20 feet up” to “inadvertently” within a foot or two of the plugged mine entrance at the time of the disaster. It was not “inadvertent.”
Author Rob Gordon points out gaping holes throughout the EPA’s own fiction, and says that without being challenged, “the message will be that misleading, deceiving, and lying works, and that bureaucrats need not follow the laws they enforce on others.”
EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has inherited not only an environmental mess, but also the mess created by an agency more interested in its narrow self-interests than truth. Pruitt now has an opportunity to send a message that would ripple far beyond the EPA.