Pete McKay, a commissioner in Colorado’s San Juan County, looks at the site where the Gold King Mine breach occurred, north of Silverton, Colorado.

Nearly a week after the Environmental Protection Agency accidentally breached a store of chemical-laced water from an abandoned mine in southwest Colorado, toxic water continues to spill at a rate of 500 to 700 gallons a minute, EPA officials said Tuesday.

The agency is treating the toxic water as it pours out, said David Ostrander, a regional emergency response director for the EPA.

Colorado, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation have declared states of emergency. And the Colorado governor, John Hickenlooper, visited the contaminated river on Tuesday, speaking to residents in Durango who have been barred from using the Animas River because of the spill.

“We take this is as a catalyst,” Hickenlooper said, adding that there are thousands of abandoned mines in the West. “I think our goal here is to really focus on what we can do to make sure that those mines where we know we have a serious problem — how can we accelerate the remediation and make sure that something like this never happens again?”

— New York Times News Service