Save the Gila River meeting held to make plans to save the last free-flowing river in NM

Gila Conservation Coalition is looking to 2014

By Susan Dunlap, Silver City Sun-News

New Mexico will make decisions that determine the fate of the Gila River and the Gila Conservation Coalition held a meeting Thursday night at the Student Memorial Building at WNMU to begin gearing up to try to save the last free-flowing river in the state.

A group of approximately 30 concerned citizens, ranging from high school students to retirees, gathered in the third floor seminar room on campus to get an idea of what they could do to try to influence the outcome of the Gila River. Led by Gila Conservation Coalition Executive Director Allyson Siwik, the group listened to the options and the upcoming events they can attend to stay informed and make their voices heard.

In 2014 the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission (ISC) will begin to provide reports giving analyses of the different options on the table and will make their final recommendation to the Bureau of Reclamation whether to use federal funding under the Arizona Water Settlements Act to divert 14,000 acre feet of water from the Gila River or to pursue non-diversion conservation alternatives. The federal government has promised to provide up to $62 million in funding if New Mexico opts to build a diversion project. But the Gila River diversion project is estimated to cost $300 million dollars.

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Denver, Colorado: Oil Spill in South Platte River

Oil spill cleanup worker along Sand Creek in Commerce City, CO (NWF photo)

By Anthony Swift, NRDC Switchboard

Colorado officials fear that vast amounts of petroleum have been leaking into the South Platte River from a broken pipeline at a refinery operated by tar sands producer Suncor.

It is not yet clear how long oil has been leaking into the South Platte River, how much has been spilled or what substance was spilled. State officials are currently testing the water on the South Platte River, a major source of drinking water, wildlife habitat and agricultural water for Colorado and the Midwest. Meanwhile, levels of benzene and volatile organic compounds at the nearby Denver Metro Wastewater plant required a partial closure.

Suncor is the oldest tar sands producers, up to 90% of its production comprised of tar sands bitumen. The company uses its Colorado refinery to process some of the heavy tar sands coming from the Express and Platte pipelines. At a time when companies like TransCanada and Enbridge are proposing to build tar sands infrastructure through our rivers and water resources—and some in Congress are trying to speed up the process by skipping environmental review—this spill provides another sad example of what can go wrong with these projects.

The spill was discovered on Sunday morning by Trevor Tanner, a fisherman who saw sheen on the South Platte River and said the area smelled like a gas station. In his account:

I walked several hundred feet up Sand-Creek and there was an oil sheen the whole way and there was even a weird milky chocolaty sludge trapped in the small back-eddy below the confluence.  My fly smelled like gasoline.  My fingers smelled like gasoline.  I could see micro-currents and upwells in the water column that you usually just can’t see.  Something was terribly wrong.

The oily slick on South Platte River contains cancer-causing chemicals

When Mr. Tanner found the hotline number and called it, the spill response coordinator initially wanted him to call back in twenty minutes. On Monday officials from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) arrived onsite and Suncor reported a leak. On Tuesday evening Suncor and EPA officials decided to dig a trench. This afternoon, EPA officials announced that three small booms erected on a bank of Sannd Creek appear to be containing the oil and preventing further contamination.

The extent of the contamination is still unclear. If the leak involves tar sands diluted bitumen, the contamination could be more severe. Tar sands diluted bitumen spills are associated with significantly more submerged oil which cannot be contained by surface booms. Spill responders are still struggling to handle the submerged oil at Enbridge’s Kalamazoo oil spill. However, this spill shows the weakness in spill response and is yet another example of the very real risks inherent in tar sands infrastructure projects.

Anthony Swift is an attorney with the International Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. This piece was originally published at NRDC’s Switchboard blog.