Colorado's floods have killed at least eight people and damaged some 18,000 homes – will the region also suffer a lingering legacy of pollution from fracking operations that were inundated in the disaster?
Groups opposed to fracking have raised the alarm over images of storage tanks shifted off their foundations at oil and gas drilling sites.
In the short term, at least, neighbours of those wells should probably be more concerned about sewage and toxic spoil from old mining operations.
"From a public health perspective, the caution to the public is to avoid contact with contaminated floodwaters," says Mark Salley, communications director with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
Crude oil concern
Raw sewage is the biggest worry, as several wastewater treatment plants were flooded. For the most part, people should be safe if they keep out of the floodwaters, but three rural communities are being warned to boil drinking water.
Floodwaters may also be contaminated with toxic waste washed from tailings left by gold and silver mining, says Linda Figueroa, a wastewater engineer at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. "There's a lot of abandoned mine sites in the Colorado mountains." However, she expects the problem to quickly dissipate once the flood recedes.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is now assessing the status of flooded drilling sites. In a statement issued on 18 September, it said: "Most locations observed to this point have found tanks and well pads to be intact and in place, but teams are still early in their assessment work".
Most of the drill sites flooded had already been fracked, and were actively producing oil or gas – so chemicals added to fracking fluids should not have been on site.
The main concern is crude oil stored in tanks near the wells, in particular a report that one tank, from a site operated by Anadarko Petroleum, has released almost 20,000 litres of oil into the South Platte river, south of the town of Milliken.
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