Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) hammered the “knuckleheads” in Congress over the federal government shutdown on Thursday, citing the devastating effects it is having on the state’s flood victims who are still trying to get their lives back together.
“We just had the worst floods we’ve had in the history of the state, so we’ve had issues like 20 million gallons of raw sewage got dumped into our river systems,” Hickenlooper said to ABC News’ Rick Klein. “And so we’ve had flood water — we have E. coli at high, dangerously high levels in many, many places,” said Hickenlooper. “In many ways you couldn’t have a worse time to have a shutdown. I mean it really is a tragic failing on many, many levels.”
After Colorado’s historic flooding which resulted in the deaths of nine people and over $2 billion in damages, much attention was focused on spills from the state’s oil and gas operations — one of the most densely drilled regions of the U.S. — which were inundated by floodwaters last month. But a recent report from the state health department found no evidence of oil pollutants in some of Colorado’s rivers and streams. Instead, they found a tremendous amount of E. coli.
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