Chris Wood interview: an opportunity on mines

Animas River after abandoned mine spill: looking for a solution.

Chris Wood recently appeared as an interview guest on the popular Denver outdoors radio show, Terry Wickstrom Outdoors. Chris spoke with Terry about the threat posed to trout rivers and water supplies by abandoned mines, which leach a toxic brew of zinc, cadmium, arsenic and other heavy metals into many rivers and streams in the West. In fact, some 40 percent of headwaters in the West are impaired by abandoned mine pollution.

There ticking time bombs leach poison into our watersheds, day in and day out, and sometimes rupture, as the nation witnessed with the Gold King Mine near Durango, Colorado, which turned the Animas River a sickly mustard color.

There's a solution, Wood told listeners--Good Sam legislation, which gives qualified "Good Samaritan" cleanup groups like TU the legal protection to undertake these complicated, costly cleanups.

This is perhaps the best year in many years, Chris noted, to make progress and pass Good Sam legislation--there's bipartisan support for this approach. Host Terry Wickstrom, who also publishes an outdoors column in the Denver Post, featured the abandoned mine issue in his next column and echoed TU's call for passage of Good Sam. 

Check out the interview and make your voice heard at TU's Action Center: