EDITORIAL: EPA slogan: Accountability for thee, but not for me

Thanks to their own incompetence, the busybodies at the Environmental Protection Agency are dining on hearty helpings of crow — with large side orders of arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead and mercury.

On Aug. 5, EPA officials and their contracted charges caused a certified disaster when they released about 3 million gallons of highly contaminated wastewater from a long-abandoned mine near Durango, Colo. Why were they digging into a contained mine that had been safely left alone for nearly a century? To see if it was causing pollution, of course!

They provided the answer by dumping the aforementioned heavy metals into a tributary of the Animas River, turning the waterway a toxic shade of yellow-brown and spreading contamination all the way to Lake Powell. It was precisely the kind of mess the EPA was created to prevent and remediate.

But if you thought the EPA would manage this disaster in exactly the same way it would handle a corporation-caused spill, well, you don't know government.

For starters, the EPA is especially hard on businesses and individuals who fail to report or address serious pollution in a timely manner, thus increasing the environmental damage and complicating the cleanup. But the EPA said nothing about this debacle for 24 hours, never warning downstream users and utilities. As reported by The Wall Street Journal, some state and local officials didn't know there was a problem until they saw the Animas change color and sting anyone who dared touch it. When the EPA finally released data on the spill, the numbers grossly downplayed the severity of the disaster.

There's more: Especially under the Obama administration, the EPA never tires of declaring five-alarm catastrophes and irreversible environmental damage. This doomsday rhetoric is behind every arbitrary, economically harmful regulation the EPA writes to address phantom climate change, from soon-to-come ozone rules to energy policy. The common thread: Doing nothing ensures and worsens disaster. Yet EPA chief Gina McCarthy traveled to the contamination zone to declare that the river "seems to be restoring itself." So Mother Earth can bounce back after all? And so quickly!

The EPA will have a chance to sit at the defendant's table once all kinds of Western water users seek restitution for a totally avoidable mess. The release of the sludge already has affected summer tourism and farming in the region, causing great economic harm. Where the EPA would make a mining company spend millions of dollars dredging the river system for contaminants — thus ensuring pollutants can't settle and become harmless — and pay millions more dollars in penalties, the agency now can be expected to seek the smallest payouts possible.

Will such a humbling experience change the culture of the EPA? Please. The agency's slogan will remain, "Accountability for thee, but not for me."