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Comment by milesskorpen | Hacker News Reader

I think it is in large part because people don't appreciate how much worse it could be. The EPA has been so successful we've become complacent.

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Other would say, "The EPA has been so successful, to keep their budget growing, they have become overzealous."

Are you able to provide an example that would support the claims of these others?

I don't hold a strong opinion myself on the matter as I have not done any deep research, but the EPA enforces the Endangered Species Act and the Wetlands Protection and Restoration. Google either of these with the phrase "Abuse of " at the beginning and you will find many people and organization writing about it. I have read many of these type of articles in different types of publications. One example[1].

I also know a lawyer at the EPA and she tells stories about how, for example, she/EPA is suing 80-90 year old people that owned car washes in LA in the 60's and 70's and had contaminated the soil. I figured that is what Superfund funds were for but I guess those funds are just to clean up corporations that have disappeared, not individuals that owned a small business 50 years ago and can be tracked.

[1]http://publiclandscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/End...

The other problem is, the EPA isn't also all sunshine and rainbows https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/09/us/colorado-epa-mine-river-sp...

To be clear - in that example, a river was polluted by waste that a negligent private company had gathered for decades and then abandoned in an uncapped gold mine -- the EPA was only involved because they were cleaning up what was already a nightmare of pollution. The spill which accidentally released 100k tons of acidic water mixed with mining tails into the river was proceeded by the owners of that mine intentionally releasing over four million tons of actual tailings as part of their regular operating procedures.

The EPA and other orgs are responsible for the cleanup of thousands of polluted areas and superfund sites created by negligent businesses who wantonly polluted and then abandoned their responsibilities leaving it up to their kids and their kids' kids to clean it up.

It's like blaming the dentist for scratching your gums while repairing a cavity. A big dose of, "Well sure, but if you had listened to them in the first place.. "

> It's like blaming the dentist for scratching your gums while repairing a cavity. A big dose of, "Well sure, but if you had listened to them in the first place.. "

Terrible analogy. The EPA knew there was heavy contamination in that mine, and yet decided to drill into the side of the mountain regardless knowing full well the implications of the heavy water getting released. There were other ways they could have gone about measuring and keeping tabs on the toxic build up. Yet they chose the most expedient riskiest solution that backfired spectacularly.

In your analogy, this is akin to the dentist taking a 1/4 inch drill bit to the side of your tooth to measure the cavity damage and spilling about a pint of blood on the floor in the process.

Even if the EPA were negligent in its handling of the operation, fixating on that does seem to miss the point that they were only in that position because a private company created it and left it for someone else to handle. That's also the point you're missing from the analogy.

I don't think it's unexpected that an agency in charge of cleanups like this is going to have some blunders. Should they have handled it better? Fine. But that's not much of a statement.

I think you'd have to make a claim about the EPA's net impact/value to say something interesting here.

The EPA screwed up and basically instead of the acidic water slowly leaking out they caused it burst open and dump all of it in the span of days. There is no disputing that fact.

But interesting, the mine wasn't polluted in the sense of the company dumped chemicals. The mining process simply exposed rock that when it reacts with water, turns acidic. It's a natural process that is simply amplified by the mining process.

Nothing humans do is perfect. The EPA does a vast amount of good.

Do you agree?

I wish we treated people and government like baseball hit stats. Hitting above 600 is a win…

Blaming the EPA for an incident that happened at a horribly toxic mine is like blaming your doctor for your gall bladder exploding while it was being removed for being infectious.

The EPA is in charge of these horrible mines because the previous owners abandoned them to destroy the environment after the profitable stuff was pulled out of the ground.

Cool, so absolve the EPA of any wrong doing?

No. But that specific failure is not an inherent indictment of the mission of the EPA, itself.

That mine is an environmental disaster. Some entity needs to be tasked with containing it or mitigating it--doing nothing is NOT an option. That failure could have occurred whether the mine was under the auspices of the EPA, the Department of the Interior, or the Army Corps of Engineers.

This isn't how we talk on HN.

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