Roger’s View From The Hills

     If you have not seen the pictures of Durango Colorado you are just not paying attention.  The clear clean running mountain Animas River is now a dirty orange filled with lead, copper, heavy metals, and arsenic.  How did this happen?  The ENVIRONMENTA PROTECTION AGENCY!  Typically an agency that purports to know more than anyone else about what is good for the environment, started to dig around the plug of a retention waste pond from a gold mine.  The mine having been shut down since the 1920’s.  The goal was to clean up the hazards.

     Well once again we see that a group of bureaucrats with unlimited power have no shred of common sense let alone the knowledge of how to do anything right.  What will come of it?  Well they said they were sorry.  If anyone else did this it would be front page news for the next six months, individuals would be criminally investigated and prosecuted.  Companies would be heavily fined.  And a host of ‘experts’ would come tell them how to fix the problem.

      DO YOU THINK ONE EPA EMPLOYEE WILL LOSE THEIR JOB OVER THIS?  If you do you are just not paying attention to how the government operates.  Statements have been made by the EPA that wildlife will not be harmed in a major way.  HUH!!!!

     Cities along the river depend on it for drinking water.  Wells near it are showing up orange.  This is a disaster that will play out for years.  But it is in a long string of government disasters.

      Citing the endangered status of a spotted owl the lumber industry in Oregon and Washington was devastated.  Towns that relied on over 50 to 75% of their economies were devastated.  Yet the spotted owl is doing fine in second growth timber once real science is utilized.

      Due to the loving to death our national forest, parks, and federal lands the one hundred plus years of fighting every fire, limiting lumber production, and stopping grazing, coupled with housing being built in hazardous areas, the west is burning up.

     Add to the mismanagement a drought, and the fire conditions are more severe than ever before.  Plus throw in the caveat that failure to remove diseased timber and allowing the pine beetle to run non stop, we are set up for more fires than has ever been considered possible.

     Take the one fire out west.  The standard science that predicts fire behavior estimated that the spread of this fire under the conditions would take seven days to reach the point it did.  It did this in five hours.

      In California a judge has held up a ban on hobbyist gold prospectors from using small dredges to recover gold.  The happy by product is that it removes the mercury that is still in the streams from the gold rush in the 1800’s.  Yet the government is spending three million dollars to have a commercial dredge that does do damage used to clean up mercury and the expectation that only one million dollars in gold will be recovered to offset the costs.  This that the hobbyist was doing for free and not doing lasting damage.

     Have you looked at the chart that a power company now has to negotiate in order to do business?  What was a simple three to four step process is now so complicated that I don’t see how the government even understands it.  But you will see it on your electric bill.

      So now one area has made it illegal for a home owner to go off the grid in order to be self sufficient and orders everyone to be hooked up to every government mandated utility available.  Government intelligence indeed.

      So far I have not seen any politician advocating the dismantling of the EPA or any other agency that can now dictate how you do anything.  Remember the EPA just approved itself the authority to regulate everything including the mud puddle in your back yard.

      Also remember that if you disagree and oppose the draconian regulations that an agency creates, they will come after you with a Swat team.  Ask Mr. Bundy.  Or don’t pay your taxes, unless you are Al Sharpton.

     Good luck Durango, I hope the EPA has a regulation to make the river clean itself up.