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Mr. William C. York-Feirn 4 bulkhead, flowed down Cash Gulch to Summerville and through the ditch in Mr. Cole's back yard. I went down to the valve and saw that it was in line with the pipe and completely wide open. Without touching the valve, I went inside the mill building and up to the mill office, where COM, Inc.'s Mill Superintendent, J. Wayne Tatman, could be seen through the office window talking on his telephone. Knocking on the office door, I summoned Mrs. Fraser's brother outside of his Mill Superintendent's den, and suggested that he follow me if he wanted to find out where the water that flooded Summerville originated. As soon as Mr. Tatman walked out of the lower door of the Gold Hill Mill, he realized that the tailings pond was half empty and a short exp]etive issued from the Mill Superintendent's mouth. Proceeding down to the location of the decant line valve together, I showed Wayne Tatman the fully opened valve, which he then proceeded to close in my presence. After discussing the effect of this incident, I suggested that he should take some basic courses in remedial valve turning. I also remember commenting derisively about the dozens of valves in the mill that he would have to master. I left the mill around 11:45 a. m. and drove to Longmont. Because of the three or Four feet of freeboard in back of the Hazel A mine's bulkhead, it probably took approximately four hours for the water inflow from the tailings pond to overflow the bulkhead. Since the mill had not been operated for over three years, and the mill water in the tailings pond had long since evaporated, there were not great concentrations of reagents or chemicals in the tailings pond. The water pumped from the Cash mine to the tailings pond in the previous four days was not the highly acidic, yellow mine water that occurs at the air-water interface where an unsealed mine portal discharges to the environment. The Cash mine water was clear and probably relatively free of any harmful mineral constituents because it had not been standing in the mine workings for more than a few month's time. Most of the water had probably flowed into the mine workings during the previous couple of months. The water sample results that Wayne Tatman refers to in his December 12, 1991, Response Letter have absolutely no relevance to the quality of the Cash mine's water, since that sample was taken in 1983 from the portal of the 125 foot level which is no longer a source of water discharge. This Cash mine water from the mill tailings pond storage area overflowed the Hazel A bulkhead and combining with melting snow reached the ditch in Mr. Cole's back yard around 2:00 a.m. or 2:30 a.m. Because of the distance that this water had to travel as it flowed down Cash Gulch to Summerville, and the relatively large amount of snowmelt that this water flow would have picked up along the streambed, it is not likely that a water sample taken at that time would have disclosed extremely high metal concentrations. I therefore do not believe that this one-time discharge had any deleterious affect on the quality of the surrounding surface or ground water.