Friday morning at nine, I was visited by Dr. Lura Tradkrammer, Division Director, Office of Water, US Environmental Protection Agency. My clients don’t come more agitated and anxious than she was. I could feel the tension and apprehension exuding from her as she forthrightly positioned herself in the chair directly in front of my desk.
“Mr. Collins,” she timorously declared, “I’ve heard a lot about you, and frankly I was – and remain – highly skeptical of your alleged talents.”
“So why are you here?” I asked.
“Because the Administrator ordered that the Deputy Administrator recommend that the Assistant Administrator for Water Quality instruct the Deputy Assistant Administrator of my Division to require that I see you.”
“Okay,” I observed, “you’ve done that. Here I am. Leave if you want to. I’ll tell anyone who asks that we had a productive, frank and completely confidential exchange.”
A significant moment transpired as she considered my proposal. “No,” she finally replied, “as long as I’m here, what the hell – I guess I might as well avail myself of the towering intellect who is purported to be the smartest person in Washington DC.”
“It’s a lot,” I confided, “like being the tallest building in Baltimore.”
“Baltimore?’” she exclaimed. “That stinking, polluted garbage pile? Do you have any idea what the average per capita toxicant carcinogen load is in that Godforsaken hell hole?”
“Considerably lower that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Ohio or Detroit, Michigan,” I remarked, “not to mention the entire states of New Jersey, Delaware and Louisiana.”
“True,” she admitted. “But Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, New Jersey, Delaware and Louisiana all have considerably more class than Baltimore.”
“Obviously, hon,” I admonished, “you have never eaten Bertha’s mussels in Fells Point.”
“Mussels,” Dr. Tradkrammer sniffed, “are animals. Like many of the dedicated civil servants at the EPA, I am a vegetarian.”
“So was Hitler,” I observed. “What can I do for the United States Environmental Protection Agency today?”
“Make that,” she corrected, “EPA Headquarters.”
“Oh really?” I shot back. “How so?”
“Because Region 8 screwed up, not us here in Washington,” she explained. “We never authorized excavation above the Gold King Mine adit.”
“An adit,” I sought to clarify, “being that entrance to an underground mine which is horizontal or nearly horizontal, by which the mine can be entered, drained of water, ventilated, and minerals extracted at the lowest convenient level.”
“Correct,” she agreed. “They are sometimes also used to explore for mineral veins. You have to realize, Mr. Collins, that for decades, Headquarters has been trying to get the abandoned hard rock mineral sites in Western Colorado declared Superfund sites. But the local tourist industry wouldn’t hear of it! Oh, no – that would impinge on the image of Colorado as a pristine Rocky Mountain High Shangri-la! If only those naive tourist knew the truth – azure Prussian blue pools of cyanide used to extract gold ore, purple mountain majesties blown apart inside with dynamite and percolated with sulfuric acid, spawning underground lakes of poisoned water contaminated with lead, arsenic, cadmium and a witches’ brew of other heavy metals! If those rich fools knew what they were really dealing with, going to play in the burbling streams and rapids of Colorado, they’d save themselves the air fare and the huge guide fees and go play with their fiberglass kayaks in the Hudson River.”
“But then,” I observed, “they would be much less likely to shell out big time bucks for the Sierra Club and its ilk, wouldn’t they?”
“Probably,” she conceded. “Planet Earth is going to hell in a hand basket, thanks to the egregiously stupid and pathetically fecund species of great apes that have fortuitously infested it, engendering the Sixth Great Extinction, the ongoing Holocene Extinction, an event which promises to surpass even the asteroid impact of the the Cretaceous, the volcanic cataclysm of the Triassic, and the solar-driven climate change of the Ordovician!”
“Tragic,” I agreed. “Too much fornication, accompanied by excessive parturition, with no commensurately responsible cogitation makes the human race look rather worse than rats. We’re obviously doomed, especially the sprawling, benighted and bereft populations of abject losers spawned by teeming legions of ignorant, moronic women popping out five or ten babies apiece in third world countries where they’re at it so thick and stinking a person can’t turn around and spit without hitting a pregnant woman bringing more woe and misery into the world.”
“It’s not them! You men are all rapists!” she shouted. “It’s your fault!”
“Spoken like a true feminist,” I needled. “I assume you support Hillary Clinton for president.”
“Damn right I do!” she growled. “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing,” I assured her. “What happened at Gold King Mine, anyway?”
“Maybe the bozos from Region 8 who were there know what went down,” she grumbled, “but damned if anybody down at 2777 Crystal Drive in Arlington has a [expletive] clue! The best we’ve gotten out of them is that they were trying to tap the tailings pond and accidentally breached the dam, but nobody here believes them. It just doesn’t pass the laugh test!”
“It’s no secret,” I commented, “that Region 5, is, ah… shall we say…”
“Totally mobbed up!” she interjected.
“I was about to say, actually, that Region 5 more or less marches to the beat of its own drummer,” I replied.
“How very diplomatic,” she superciliously japed. “I suppose you defecate in the euphemism.”
“Well, yes, that’s true,” I pressed on, “but nevertheless, what I was driving at here is that I had no idea that Region 8 played, in a manner of speaking, fast and loose like a bunch of fat-[expletive], drunken cowboys, as it were.”
“As they say at EPA Headquarters,” she confided, “you can tell a person from Region 8. But you can’t tell them very much.”
“You mean, they’re arrogant?” I surmised.
“Arrogant?” she snorted. “That’s putting it mildly. They come here to Washington and do you know what they do? During the technical and regulatory meetings, they hit on the women!”
“My God!” I exclaimed. “Those guys are obviously a bunch of cads!”
“Guys?” she snickered. “If it was just the guys, maybe it wouldn’t be so damned annoying. Listen, Collins, these Region 8 weenies think they know it all. They make the regional agents from places like New Jersey, Chicago and Alaska look like genuine ladies and gentlemen.”
“Somebody call Ripley,” I exclaimed.
“No [expletive] kidding, Kilroy,” she affirmed. “It’s not like Headquarters ordered them to go out and dig around with their back-hoes and bulldozers at the Gold King Mine, I can assure you.”
“What do you suppose their motivation might have been?” I asked.
“No-Year Money!” she spat.
“You mean Superfund?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she confirmed. “These days getting Congress to appropriate money for EPA Headquarters national operations is tough enough. Obtaining congressional appropriation increases for the EPA Regions is tougher than convincing fundamentalist Southern Baptists that Jesus Christ didn’t ride around on dinosaurs. All the regions are trying to get more Superfund sites, because they know they don’t have to beg Congress for Superfund money. And that’s why the other regions are all so jealous of Regions 5 – because it already has the most Superfund sites.”
“So you… hypothesize,” I surmised, “that those Region 8 cowboys were out there trying to substantiate a strong enough argument to get the Gold King Mine declared a Superfund site?”
“Well,” she derisively snorted, “you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that one. And it certainly would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”
“So if Gold King were declared a Superfund site, Region 8 wins,” I noted, “but the descendants of the Colorado miners who live around that area lose, because their economy today is exclusively dependent on tourism, and who wants to hike, raft or picnic at a latter-day Rocky Mountain version of Times Beach, Love Canal or the Valley of the Drums?”
“Exactly,” she agreed. “So when Region 8 tried to get Superfund sites declared in Silverton, the town where the Gold King Mine is located, back in April of 2014, the town said no way, no how, get lost. So the situation ended up with Region 8 sneaking around behind everybody’s back, trying to prove Gold King should be declared a Superfund site.”
“And in fact,” I pointed out, “they essentially succeeded. It’s going to be pretty hard for anyone to argue that the Gold King doesn’t deserve Superfund status now that the world has seen what spilling three million gallons of its waste water can do.”
“Region 8 succeeded all too well,” she acknowledged. “The town of Durango, which is downstream from Silverton, where Gold King is located, has announced they want the entire town of Silverton declared a Superfund site.”
“Holy Remediation,” I responded, “think how much No-Year Money Region 8 could get if that happened.”
“As much as all the precious metals in the Gold King mine – and all the other mines in Sliverton – were ever worth,” she speculated. “Probably even more. And there’s evidence that Region 8 was planning something like this, too. Last year, they floated a proposal to plug the Red and Bonita mine portals in Silverton, and did so this July.”
“And EPA Headquarters approved that?” I gasped.
“We don’t…. micromanage… the Regions,” she protested. “Headquarters Office of Water receives hundreds of action notifications every year. Our staff is constantly playing catch-up reviewing them.”
“At least,” I observed, “The Administrator has declared a moratorium on similar… um… experiments. Has the Office of the Inspector General looked into any of this?”
“Headquarters IG has sent out some investigators,” she revealed, “but strictly under the radar, to shadow some of the Region 8 people who were involved in Red, Bonita and Gold King. Didn’t do any good, though – when they arrived in Silverton, they reported back that Region 8 IG agents were following them around. Meanwhile, the states of Colorado and New Mexico, as well as the Navajo Nation, are screaming bloody murder and demanding billions of dollars – from EPA Headquarters. So, in light of all that, Mr. Collins, what would you advise?”
“Throw Region 8 under the bus,” I recommended. “Going forward, EPA Headquarters must View With Alarm every shocking revelation about what went on, not just at Gold King, but everywhere in Silverton, and, if the connections can be made, in Colorado or all of Region 8. It is imperative that blame be placed as far away from Washington DC as possible. Identify as many scapegoats in Region 8 as you can and see to it that they are convicted in the court of public opinion as quickly as can be managed.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” she acknowledged. “In Silverton, they’re saying that if private miners had done this instead of the EPA, they’d be tarred and feathered.”
“As might be expected,” I observed. “Has Region 8 issued an official press release yet?”
“No,” she replied, “it looks like they’re still trying to figure out what to say.”
“Beat them to the punch, then,” I exhorted. “Carefully worded press releases and congressional testimony must imply, with plausible deniability, that all the questionable ideas and actions which lead to the Animas River turning the color of cholera diarrhea originated Denver, not here inside the Beltway. EPA Headquarters needs to strike the dismayed tone of a parent who has been informed by the police that their teenage child has been caught dumping meth lab waste in the town reservoir. As far as EPA Headquarters knew, Region 8 was well behaved and honest – how could Headquarters have possibly been aware of such outrageously bad conduct if it had been constantly and consistently lied to?”
“All right,” she murmured, tapping notes into her laptop, “then what?”
“Then EPA Headquarters should launch a full-scale witch hunt in Region 8,” I advised. “I assume at least one environmental contractor was involved. Do we know who that was?”
“So far,” she said, “Region 8 has fingered Environmental Restoration LLC of Fenton, Missouri.”
“As we know,” I reminded her, “one of the primary functions of federal contractors is to take the blame for federal employees’ incompetence and mistakes.”
“True,” she nodded, “that’s part of their traditional role.”
“Therefore,” I concluded, “the federal contractor is the low-hanging fruit. They should be the first to be vilified and excoriated for all the consequences, and, of course, subsequently banned from doing business with the federal government. Headquarters should rope-a-dope Region 8 by joining them in the expected chorus of blame directed at the contractors, then start asking inconvenient questions about who hired such bumbling fools in the first place. In order for EPA Headquarters to remain blameless, it will be necessary that an impressive number of heads roll in Region 8.”
“Okay,” she shrugged, “after the witch hunt, we’ll have a Star Chamber kangaroo court for the political appointees, then offer them the usual opportunity to resign. But what about the Region 8 federal employees?”
“True,” I acknowledged, “they will require a more… subtle… approach, since it’s impossible to fire a federal employee, no matter how much of an idiot they are. But effective methods to make them quit do, in fact exist. Members of the Civil Service selected for punishment should be placed in a windowless room by themselves and assigned specially devised busy work which constantly reminds them of how the whole world holds them responsible for what happened to the Animas River. The lights in those rooms should be attached to the usual EPA-mandated energy saving motion sensors, but the sensors should be set to require extreme, violent motion to reactivate the lights and the cycle should be set for five minutes.”
“So they have to get up and do jumping jacks for thirty seconds every five minutes just to keep the lights on so they can complete their two hundred and ninety-seven page Special Environmental Incident Assessment forms,” she chuckled. “Yeah, I like that.”
“Members of the SES,” I recommended, “should be transferred to the most desolate and dreary outposts of Region 8; and considering that Region 8 contains Nevada, Wyoming and both of the Dakotas, I’m sure there will be plenty of places to choose from. Once they get there, they should be given assignments supervising the lowest ranking staff that can be found, and put in charge of the least significant projects available. Since members of the SES live and die by their vaunted curriculum vitae, just looking at their transfer orders should be enough to get almost all of them to quit outright. The few that remain will have to look forward to putting several years of meaningless paper pushing out in the middle of nowhere on their resumes.”
“I must say, Mr. Collins,” she admitted, “you’ve proved that you’re pretty intelligent for a man, especially for one who regularly pollutes himself with meat toxins and probably drinks alcohol.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I replied. “But you know, not that I have the least compunction about crucifying them for the Animas River incident, I sort of feel sorry for those poor devils out in EPA Region 8. Gold King was proposed for Superfund status in 1994, for Christ’s sake. If those pig headed morons in Silverton hadn’t been so obsessed with their image as a pristine mountain tourist destination, it’s dollars to doughnuts this ridiculous tragedy would never have occurred.”
“Doughnuts, Mr. Collins,” she proclaimed as she slapped shut her lap top and made ready to leave, “are loaded with trans-fats, high-fructose corn sugar, artificial flavorings, chemical preservatives and bleached flour made from genetically engineered organisms!”