River Communities, Disaster Science, and the Politics of Water Safety: Understanding Water Quality Debates in the Aftermath of the Gold King Mine Spill

After environmental disasters, scientific claims about environmental risk face a paradox. Impacted communities turn to scientific bodies for safety information, yet scientific findings are often challenged publicly in post-disaster debates. This study explores this paradox after the 2015 Gold King Mine spill in the Animas River, USA. We ask how a river is declared "safe" after such a disaster, by whom, and based on what metrics. We examine how scientific claims about water safety were debated in newspapers in three locations: Silverton and Durango, Colorado, and the Navajo Nation. Drawing on Cash et al.'s [Knowledge systems for sustainable development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(14), 8086-8091. https://do.org/10.1073/pnas.1231332100] key features of science for public decision-making, we find that local debates hinged on issues of salience, credibility, and legitimacy, but these criteria varied in importance across locations. We also argue that these criteria do not sufficiently explain river safety debates. Attention to regulatory and scientific standards used to interpret river safety is necessary for understanding spill responses. Clean Water Act (CWA) standards sidelined public concerns about waterways that fell outside CWA benchmarks. This study highlights the importance of scrutinizing the standards used to deem environments "safe" when producing and communicating disaster science.Key policy highlightsScientific communication after an environmental disaster should be salient, credible, and legitimate.In addition, the scientific and regulatory standards used to deem post-disaster environments "safe" must be scrutinized and their limitations acknowledged.Acknowledging and addressing community-specific concerns and histories - especially those of indigenous communities - is vital in disaster-recovery communication.