暗黑爆料

A new government watchdog report published Wednesday says taxpayers are shouldering the burden of cleaning up the nation鈥檚 thousands of abandoned hardrock mines on public lands.

The Government Accountability Office that federal agencies spent $2.9 billion between 2007 and 2018 cleaning up abandoned hardrock mines. Private companies like former owners only reimbursed about $1 billion of that.

The agencies spent the most money鈥攏early $480 million鈥攊n Montana over the 10-year period. They also spent more than $100 million on Mountain West States like Idaho ($298 million), Colorado ($275 million) and Wyoming ($102 million).

And officials from Western states estimated spending an additional $117 million in non-federal funds over the course of the decade to clean up abandoned hardrock mines.

Most of that money was spent addressing environmental hazards like contaminated water.

Public lands agencies and the Environmental Protection Agency identified at least 140,000 abandoned mine features, such as tunnels, but agency officials said there could be more than 390,000 additional abandoned mine features on federal lands not in their databases.

The feds and state governments don鈥檛 have the resources to deal with them as quickly as they鈥檇 like. The GAO鈥檚 Anne-Marie Fennell said some non-profits shy away from helping clean up the mines because of legal liability.

鈥淓ven if these 鈥榞ood samaritans,鈥� as they鈥檙e known, were to come in and they were not the cause of the contamination, they may be in a situation where the entire cost of addressing the contamination may fall upon them,鈥� Fennell said.

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