Your Government at work – Todd Hennis v. The United States of America

 From the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

I recommend joining the NCLA.  It defends civil liberties and has no agenda - unlike the ACLU.

Here is the case summary.

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On the morning of August 5, 2015, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dug away tons of rock and debris that blocked the portal of the Gold King Mine near Silverton, Colorado. By breaching the closed portal of the mine, without taking proper precautions or obtaining the owner’s permission, EPA triggered a massive blowout that released over 3,000,000 gallons of acid mine drainage and 880,000 pounds of heavy metals onto the private property below and into the waterways downstream (including the Animas River). It took the form of a bright, yellow-orange toxic sludge, and the pollution lingers to this day.

Easily one of the largest environmental catastrophes EPA ever created, the incident became known as “the yellow river seen round the world.” NCLA filed a lawsuit, Todd Hennis v. The United States of America, in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, challenging the government’s physical invasion, occupancy, use, taking, and contamination of Mr. Hennis’s property.

In conducting its catastrophic failure at the Gold King Mine, EPA, the very agency entrusted to protect the environment, violated its own directives, protocols, and procedures, while also ignoring well-understood risks of a flooded mine under pressure. For essentially every decision they made that day, the EPA employees erred. Shortly after EPA caused the Gold King Mine blowout, NCLA’s client, Todd Hennis, verbally authorized the government to temporarily use a portion of his property for an emergency staging area for equipment and supplies, recognizing that time was of the essence to mitigate the environmental disaster of EPA’s own making.

Rather than thank Mr. Hennis for his quick cooperation and compensate him for the use of his land, EPA took advantage of him. Without so much as a phone call or email to Mr. Hennis, EPA constructed a $2.3 million dollar water treatment facility on a concrete slab on Hennis’s property. Worse yet, EPA has repeatedly refused—across three presidential administrations—to pay him anything for the privilege. Mr. Hennis never granted EPA permission to construct a water treatment facility on his property, nor did he authorize EPA to occupy, use, and pollute his property indefinitely. Yet that is exactly what the agency has done.

Since November 2015, EPA has continuously treated the discharge of acid mine drainage from the Gold King Mine at its water treatment plant, thereby taking Mr. Hennis’s property without just compensation. EPA’s water treatment operations also involve the storage of mine waste, solids, and other contaminants on Mr. Hennis’s property, again without paying to do so. The government has thus seized his real property in violation of his most basic Fifth Amendment constitutional rights.