For almost 40 years, the federal government’s been trying to clean up contamination around a former mine, in the high country…
(Old Minturn Mine vxr :36)
The EPA now says it’s ready to release some of the land involved, turning it back over to the public. Regulators say more than 5 acres of the Eagle Mine, just outside Minturn, no longer need intensive environmental cleanup. That mine operated for nearly a century, before shutting down back in 1984. The EPA says the land there is contaminated with heavy metals, arsenic, copper, and lead… and that contamination killed a lot of fish downstream in the Eagle River. It also threatened Minturn’s drinking water supply. The EPA’s been working there for decades trying to clean things up, and now it says it’s OK for regulators to scale back the work on part of that site, with regular inspections planned going forward.