There are hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines out West. Many hold tens of billions of tons of waste containing arsenic, asbestos, cadmium, cyanide and mercury.
For decades, the dangers of abandoned mines have been well understood, but a mix of political inertia and lack of funds has stymied efforts to clean up the problem.
"This is a problem everyone has known about and we all predicted there would be a catastrophic failure at some point," said Mark Williams, a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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