Instead of a pure, sparkling stream of water, an opiate for tired mind and jaded nerves, what do you see? A murky, gray stream of filthy, slimy, polluted water, a cesspool for the waste of man.
—Durango-area farmer, 1937
BONITA PEAK’S ROCKY CREST GIVES WAY TO A SLOPING CARPET OF GREEN. The tundra, spattered with blue, red, yellow, and lavender wildflowers, is particularly verdant this summer of 2015, helping obscure the violent origins of these mountains, the San Juans of southwestern Colorado. Here are huge plates of quartzite bent upward; a land of ancient lakes of bubbling lava, eruptions, and volcaniclastic mudflows. Twenty-seven million years ago, a vast chamber of magma collapsed, leaving behind what geologists now call the Silverton Caldera, rife with fractures that were later filled with minerals to become veins of gold, silver, and zinc ore. The caldera is shaped roughly like a human heart, with Mineral Creek running along the west side, the upper Animas River the east, Cement Creek slicing through its center, and the small town of Silverton on the southeast end, where the three major streams converge before continuing southward like a massive vein linking mountain peaks with the high desert.
Bonita Peak rises up just above the center of the caldera. Piles of yellow-ochre earth that look like a giant gopher colony cling to the slope here and there, the remnants of mining prospect holes and piles of waste rock mined from the earth years ago.
On one of those piles, on the morning of August 5, a yellow CAT excavator paws gingerly and jerkily at dirt and tundra as workers in orange hard hats and neon-green vests watch. At approximately ten-thirty a.m. a stream of water spurts from where the excavator digs. It looks a lot like that opening scene in the Beverly Hillbillies when Jed strikes oil with a gunshot to the ground, only this isn’t oil and it doesn’t even look like water—it’s bright orange. The excavator operator pulls away from the slope. One of the workers pulls out his phone and starts filming.1
Within minutes, the little spout grows into a fountain and then a roiling torrent of thick, Tang-colored water. As the workers look on, stunned, the water roars over the edge of the mine waste-rock dump, carrying tons of the metal-laden material with it, crashing into the gently gurgling stream of the north fork of Cement Creek, far below, but not before a fair amount of it inundates one of the work vehicles, a black Suburban, filling it up with orange muck.
“Should we get out of here?” one worried worker asks.
“Oh, he’s going to be pissed,” another answers. “This isn’t good.”
“What do we do now?” someone else asks, shocked yet oddly calm, as though a household plumbing project had gone awry.
The workers are staffers and contractors with the Environmental Protection Agency who, in the moments before the catastrophe, were investigating the Level 7 portal of the Gold King Mine, which had been drilled into the side of Bonita Peak back in 1900. The agency will later estimate that three million gallons of water—enough to fill four and a half Olympic-sized swimming pools, or to supply twenty-one families for a year—blasted out of the mine over the course of minutes. Only this isn’t just water. It carries with it some 880,000 pounds of metals: zinc, cadmium, aluminum, arsenic, and, mostly, iron hydroxides, giving it the electric-orange color that will captivate and horrify onlookers near and far. It has been backing up underground behind debris for years, the pressure building, until, finally, on a sunny day in August, a heavy equipment operator facilitates its escape.
A wall of water and sludge, we’ll call it the slug, careens into Cement Creek, swelling it into a raging cataract. It blasts past the ghosts of the old Gladstone townsite, rushes through Silverton and into the Animas River’s chilly, clear water, instantly staining it orange.
Forty-five miles downstream, in the town of Durango, hundreds of people frolic on or beside the Animas River’s green waters, which ply the town in two. Stand-up paddle boarders skim the smooth, deep water on the north end of town. Anglers, resembling wader-clad symphony conductors, rhythmically swing their oversized batons in the boulder-studded, trout-rich water south of town.
In the middle of town, back behind the high school, a couple dozen bikini- and shorts-clad teens and twenty-somethings lounge about in the grass of “Paradise Cove,” drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from cans as a stereo blasts pop tunes and tubers float by, holding bologna sandwiches high to salute their fellow revelers.
They are oblivious to the orange menace creeping toward them from the mountains. During the first hours after the blowout, EPA officials that know about the event apparently think that the slug will dissipate as it travels downstream, that the sludge will drop out en route, and the terrible color will become diluted. They are wrong.
The prow of the slug moves quickly through the deep canyon that the Animas has carved through the gorge below Silverton, moving alongside the narrow gauge tourist railroad whose tracks sit just above the normally emerald green and frothy whitewater of the river’s class four and five rapids. Some twenty-four hours after the orange spurt of water appeared up at the Gold King, the slug charges out of the narrow granite gorge into which Robert Redford and Paul Newman jumped in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, passes under Baker’s Bridge, and creeps into the Animas Valley above Durango. At about the same time, word of the disaster reaches the general public in Durango—or at least that’s when I notice it on my Twitter feed as I sit in my home office on the morning of August 6, pounding away on a story about the methane pollution emanating from the San Juan Basin gas fields south of here.
“I gotta see this,” I say to my half-empty coffee cup. I run out to my car and drive to the nearest bridge over the Animas in Durango. The water here is its usual placid green. A handful of boaters and tubers float by obliviously. So I continue north into the broad, flat-bottomed Animas Valley, carved and scoured of rock and boulders by a glacier some ten thousand years ago. I pass by my second cousin’s ranch and constructed wetlands, my aunt and uncle’s house, my cousin’s house, and my grandparents’ old farm, where I spent a good portion of my childhood. It’s been a good year for rain, and the fields are all green, the cottonwoods lush.
About six miles north of town, I turn onto Trimble Lane. When I was a kid, this part of the Animas Valley was a big, open field. Now there’s a golf course here, and Dalton Ranch, a community of McMansions stacked up between the river banks and the highway. I drive past them to a little turnout by the bridge and stroll towards the river. Turbid, electric-orange water, utterly opaque, sprawls out between the sandy banks, as iron hydroxide particles thicken within the current like psychedelic smoke.
At about that same moment, unbeknownst to me, Bill Simon, who probably understands the mining-related pollution problems in this watershed better than anyone, is scurrying down to the river a few miles upstream, at Baker’s Bridge, to take some water samples. “What struck me was the intense color,” he says, later. In the days to come, that distinctive shade of orange will strike a lot of other people—millions of them, in fact—too.
Within a few hours, the river through town is empty, an eerie sight on a hot August afternoon. The bridges across the river, on the other hand, are crowded with people milling about, waiting for the slow-motion disaster to unfurl in the dark green water below them. I amble among the little clusters of people,