Begaye: Administrators to blame for mine spill

GALLUP

Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said Thursday he’s not disappointed in the U.S. Department of Justice’s failure to pursue criminal charges against an Environmental Protection Agency employee who may have triggered the Gold King Mine Spill, because the employee was acting on orders and the blame ultimately belongs to the higher-ups.

Begaye issued the statement after the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado Wednesday declined to charge the unnamed employee after reviewing documents from the EPA, according to the Associated Press.

The president noted that he holds higher-level employees of the EPA responsible for the three-million-gallon rupture that tainted waters in three states.

“The engineers and those in administrative positions were informed through documentation from hydrologists and others that these mines were unsafe,” Begaye said.

The president said he didn’t want blame for the spill that impacted Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah to fall on ground-level employees.

“For these administrators not to address this, not to alleviate or minimize the pressure that had built up in these mines, is not the fault of the person sitting in the tractor or backhoe,” Begaye said. “It was the administrators who had these documents that were aware of potential explosions and the pressure that had built up. They knew about this and they did nothing. They allowed a single worker to sit in the backhoe and start to clean out the area.”

The president insisted that EPA administration had been made aware of the threat.

“It’s the people that received the report who had the authority to make a decision to address it immediately; those people are ones that need to resign from their offices,” he said. “They need to be prosecuted because they affected not only the whole valley but also the Navajo Nation.”

According to AP reporting, the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General disclosed that it recently presented evidence to prosecutors that the employee may have given false statements and violated the Clean Water Act.

Office spokesman Jeffrey Lagda said the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Colorado declined to pursue a case against the employee. Instead of prosecution, an investigative report will be sent to senior EPA management for review, Lagda said.

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