This presentation will focus on the design and construction of the interim water treatment plant (IWTP) at the Gold King Mine in the autumn of 2015. Considerations such as sludge management, sustainability, and accessibility will be discussed, along with the accidental release event itself from the perspective of how to provide value to the Government and contain costs in the design process while only having 3 discrete days of widely divergent data from which to extrapolate the quality of influent to be expected during operations.