UPDATE | Dec. 18 — The bill was presented to President Joe Biden on Dec. 12. He signed it into law on Dec. 17.
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WASHINGTON, DC — Colorado is one step closer to welcoming qualified, and eager, Good Samaritans to clean up the state's polluting hardrock mines, something that conservation and environmental groups have been pushing toward for years.
Currently, Good Samaritans are legally unable to clean up these abandoned hardrock mines due to a lengthy list of liability concerns. S.2781, titled "Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act of 2024," provides a liability shield of sorts for them to do this volunteer work.
S.2781 passed unanimously in the Senate on July 31 and passed in the House of Representatives on Tuesday. The bipartisan legislation is now headed to President Joe Biden's desk, where supporters hope he signs it into law.
You can read the bill in full below or here.
The bill aims to ease the process for Good Samaritans — which can include state agencies, local governments, nonprofits and other groups — to clean up abandoned hardrock mines, which pose many environmental hazards to communities, waterways and environments. In the past, these groups have wanted to volunteer for this work but ran into a major roadblock: Liability rules would leave them legally responsible for all the pre-existing pollution from a mine, even though they were not previously involved with the property.
The Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act creates a pilot permitting program under the the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that will allow permitted Good Samaritans to work on lower risk projects at historic hardrock mines "without being subject to enforcement or liability under specified environmental laws for past, present, or future releases, threats of releases, or discharges of hazardous substances or other contaminants at or from the abandoned mine site," the bill reads.
Good Samaritans are defined in the bill as people who have not had ownership or involvement in the mine.
The bill terminates the program after seven years, according to the bill's summary on Congress.gov.
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Colorado’s abandoned mines pose many dangers. This program works to protect them
Among the 40 cosponsors on the bill are Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper and Sen. Michael Bennet.
"Thousands of abandoned mines pollute our ecosystems and threaten our watersheds in Colorado and across the West," Bennet said in a press release Tuesday. "This bill will make it easier for our state, local governments, and nonprofits to clean up these mines, reduce pollution, and improve water quality. It’s common sense for Coloradans, and I look forward to President Biden signing it into law."
Hickenlooper echoed his statement.
“Tens of thousands of abandoned mines across Colorado and the West are releasing acid and heavy metals into our water,” Hickenlooper. said “Good faith actors are ready to help clean up these mines. All we have to do is cut the red tape and let them.”
This bill was also supported by the Western Governors' Association. In a letter sent to Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Oct. 21, the group said it has supported these legal protections for Good Samaritans since at least 1995.
“Hardrock mine reclamation is vitally important to the health of western communities and ecosystems and the pilot program proposed in the bill would remove one of the main impediments preventing Good Samaritans, such as state agencies, local governments, nonprofit organizations, and industry partners from cleaning up abandoned mine sites,” it reads.
You can read the full letter below.
In addition, the National Mining Association released a statement from its president and CEO, Rich Nolan. Nolan said Tuesday's passage marked "the final step in securing a key solution to tackle the long-overdue cleanup of legacy abandoned mine sites."
"This bill... has been more than a decade in the making and will encourage the involvement of mining companies, conservation groups and local stakeholders in abandoned mine cleanup without fear of incurring additional legal liability," he said. "I look forward to the president signing this bipartisan bill into law for responsible, much-needed land and water remediation efforts."
Today, hardrock mines across the United States have many regulations and are surrounded by environmental standards and protections. But hardrock mining was common well before these laws were in place and when a mine was no longer needed or usable, the property owners simply left. Most of the state's mineral mining activity predated environmental regulations of the 1970s and 1980s.
"And so as mines are abandoned — they are really just left," Rachel Storm with the History Colorado Center told Denver7 in the fall of 2023. "There was not the same kind of concern about safety that we have today back then. So they just walked away from them, which is why you can drive around up in the mountains of Colorado and find so many random mining structures there."
Some of those abandoned mines have now become the source of polluted waterways and public lands.
The latest estimates have counted about 23,000 abandoned mines in Colorado, though experts say this is a low approximation and there are likely hundreds of thousands of mining features leftover from the mid-19th century into the 20th century.
In November 2023, Denver7 met with the director of the Colorado Department of Mining, Reclamation and Safety's Inactive Mine Reclamation Program to learn more about how Colorado's abandoned mines and the dangers surrounding them.
You can watch that in-depth report below.
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