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Mr. William C. York-Feirn 3 Explaining once again to Mr. Tatman that the decant line would sand up if it was not flushed periodically, I then opened the valve completely before shutting it to the point that it was bazely cracked open. Before leaving for Boulder, I told Mr. Tatman to close the valve after a few hours; but not before the decant line was thoroughly flushed from one end of the pond to the other end. When I left the Gold Hill Mill, the valve was barely cracked open, and there was at least three, and possibly four, feet of freeboard behind the Hazel A mine bulkhead. Summerville was in no eminent danger of inundation from anything that I did to keep the tailings pond's decant line in an operable condition. At this time, the weather was turning cold and windy, and snow was expected during the night. A two or three inch snowfall did occur that night in the mountains. The next morning, October 25, 1991, around 8:45 a. m., I received a telephone call from COM, Inc.'s on-site Mill Superintendent, J. Wayne Tatman, informing me that he had received a call from Dick Cole in Summerville who had reported a large volume of water flowing through his back yard. Mr. Tatman said that he had driven down to Mr. Cole's house and seen the water before returning to the mill and calling me. Assuming that the Cash mine water line had frozen and broken during the night, I immediately drove to the upper gate of the Cash mine's access road. When I reached the Haze] A mine adit's portal around 10:00 a.m., I observed a flood of water pouring out of the mine. About this same time, Wayne Tatman's son Jimmy Tatman came down the hillside from the mill. He walked into the adit, wading through about a foot of water, to within a few feet of the bulkhead and comment on it being "like Lake Hazel A in there." We discussed the likelihood that the check valve in the submersible pump that COM, Inc.'s employees had installed behind the bulkhead had failed, and that the water pumped from the Cash mine had filled the Hazel A mine and was overflowing the bulkhead. I then proceeded down to the Cash mine hoist house and shut off the pump and drained the water line back into the mine shaft. After locking up the hoist house, I walked over to the Who Do mine and down Cash Gulch almost to County Road No. 89. Then I hiked up the lower Cash mine access road to the Hazel A mine portal. This took almost a full hour. At this point, I observed that water was still pouring out of the Hazel A mine, and immediately concluded that the Cash mine pump could not be the source of the water overflowing the bulkhead because it had been nearly one hour since I had shut off the pump. In addition, I knew that the Cash mine pump could not possibly produce the volume of water that was pouring out from behind the Hazel A mine's bulkhead. Hurrying to my truck at the Cash mine access road's gate, I drove to the azea below the Gold Hill Mill, where I could see that the weeds in the pond were now quite visibly sticking out above the water. Over half of the water stored in the tailings pond had obviously drained out of the pond through the decant line, overflowed the Hazel A mine