A Deep and Wide Mining Scar in Idaho

This is a pollution story that’s supposed to be over. The Environmental Protection Agency in 1982 declared the 21 square miles around the old Bunker Hill lead smelter the nation’s second-largest Superfund site. Since then, the agency has spent $200 million digging up contaminated lawns, demolishing the smelter site and cleaning up parks, roadsides and schools.

By all accounts, the effort has been a success: In towns like Kellogg and Smelterville, children in the 1980s had the highest levels of lead ever recorded in humans; today, only about 6% show elevated levels. In houses with children--who are most vulnerable to lead’s deadly effects--yards have been dug up and covered with new dirt.

But only now, with the cleanup virtually over, is the true extent of mining’s legacy in northern Idaho being revealed. Sediments contaminated with lead, cadmium, zinc and arsenic have spread far outside the original Superfund site, across an area so large--up to 1,500 square miles of the Coeur d’Alene River basin, from the Montana border to the Columbia River in eastern Washington--that it dwarfs most cleanups attempted by the EPA.

Children living miles away from the Superfund site are being tested, with disturbing results: 11% of those under age 10, and 26% of the 2-year-olds, have lead in their blood above the federal intervention level.

Beaches as far away as the Spokane River in Washington are so contaminated with metals originating high in the Idaho hills that warning signs have been posted against playing in the sand. Children and pregnant women are cautioned not to eat whole fish caught near Spokane.

The fact that the EPA now considers the entire Coeur d’Alene River basin a potential Superfund site sets the stage for a political slugfest of epic proportions.

More than 11,000 people live in the Coeur d’Alene Valley and 300,000 or more across the Washington state line in Spokane. The Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe, which says its historic dependence on the basin’s waters for survival is at risk, has filed a massive federal lawsuit seeking compensation for the environmental devastation.

And at the heart of the basin--and the controversy--is Lake Coeur d’Alene, one of Idaho’s premier tourism destinations, with its stunning azure waters and top-rated golf course.

The lake is clean enough to meet federal drinking water standards, and all but two of its beaches have been deemed unpolluted. Officials estimate, however, that 72 million tons of mining pollutants lie dormant on the lake bottom--with more seeping in every day.

It will take 20 to 30 years to reverse the damage across the entire basin, federal officials say, at a cost of $1 billion--and possibly more than $3 billion.

Nowhere have the complexities of the Superfund law been more apparent than in northern Idaho--where mining pollution dates back to the 1880s, involves scores of companies that long since have disappeared and includes pollution so extensive and intermingled that it would be nearly impossible to trace it to a direct source.

Moreover, the federal government shares part of the blame: The War Department pushed so hard to boost lead production in the Silver Valley during World War II that it dispatched troops to work in the mines. State and federal pollution controls were virtually nonexistent.

GOP Holds Most Political Offices

In Idaho, Republicans hold the governorship, the entire congressional delegation and 90% of the state Legislature. And so the EPA move into the basin is just one in a series of Clinton administration environmental initiatives--ranging from wolf relocation to designation of vast areas of central Idaho as permanent roadless areas--that have been a source of irritation.

Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho) has called for an investigation of the EPA. State officials say they can do the cleanup themselves for little more than the $250 million the mining companies recently offered as a settlement.

“Superfund was intended to clean up 20-acre industrial sites. Superfund is not intended for a 1,500-square-mile region,” said Bret Bowers of Citizens for EPA Accountability Now, organized to fight the Superfund expansion. “The EPA would like people to believe we have this major health concern, when the fact is we should be celebrating the vast gains we have made [inside the existing Superfund site]. . . . We have community leaders up and down the basin saying we know the Superfund process is a mess and we don’t want to go through it.”

EPA officials say they are mystified that Idaho appears to be turning away its only hope of a comprehensive, basinwide cleanup--paid for primarily by the mining companies and federal taxpayers.

Shoshone County, where most of the affected communities lie, has seen its assessed value drop from $1.3 billion to $450 million since the Bunker Hill smelter closed in 1982. The county has the highest child poverty level in the state--approaching 31% of all children--and an unemployment rate of 12.3%.

“These communities are in extreme disrepair, predominantly retired citizens, low tax base. These people might have a street budget that’s a hundred thousand bucks a year, and they’ve got a 1956 Ford dump truck to deal with it,” said Earl Liverman, head of the EPA’s field office in Coeur d’Alene.

How, Liverman wants to know, are little towns like Wallace, Osborn, Cataldo and Harrison going to deal with lead, cadmium and zinc still washing down off the hills above them? With lead continuously eroding off the riverbanks, lead poisoning their yards, playgrounds and day-care centers, lead permeating the dust in their attics?

“The community’s concerns [about the pitfalls of a Superfund designation] have not fallen on deaf ears. I hear them on a daily basis. My wife hears it; my children hear it,” Liverman said. “But this stuff is ubiquitous throughout the valley, and it poses a significant threat to human health.”

The slopes of the Silver Valley have been probed for ore since the 1880s, with the four largest silver mines in the country still operating there. More than $5 billion worth of metals have been unearthed.

Up through the 1960s, mining firms dumped toxic waste directly into the river. The smelter poured lead out of its smokestack, denuding surrounding hills and depositing fine bits of lead dust on yards, carpets, sofas, roads, roofs and trees for miles. When fire swept through part of the Bunker Hill facility in 1973, destroying many of the filters that took lead out of the exhaust, Gulf Resources and Chemical Co. decided to keep running without pollution controls.

In handwritten notes uncovered later, company executives calculated it would cost them $7 million to compensate any children poisoned by lead--a fraction of what they would earn that year with skyrocketing lead prices. That year alone, the smelter deposited 30 tons per square mile of lead over the surrounding neighborhoods.

A few years later, as the extent of the pollution became known, Gulf Resources transferred most of its assets overseas and declared bankruptcy, leaving behind a $100-million cleanup bill and stranding about 2,000 employees who were owed their pensions.

“You could go down any alley out there and have ‘A Civil Action’ or an ‘Erin Brockovich,’ ” said regional Superfund director Mike Gearheard, referring to movies about citizens locked in battle with corporate polluters. “The only sad thing about going out there now is you don’t get to appreciate the sort of Dickensian quality of the mining buildings that used to cascade down those hillsides: boiling, fuming, spewing fire and smoke.”

Even in the smelter’s heyday, doctors knew exposure to significant quantities of lead could cause reduced IQ, slow growth and development, hyperactivity, miscarriage, infertility, memory loss, stomachaches and hearing loss. Since then, the federal government has reduced the amount of lead that is considered safe by a factor of four. Now, a blood level of as little as 10 milligrams per 10 liters is enough to call for prompt intervention; researchers have documented a higher incidence of juvenile delinquency at levels as low as 2.5.

Marlene Yoss remembers officials coming to her door in the 1970s and asking to test her children’s blood. Arlene, just a baby, had a lead level of 174. Her slightly older siblings measured 122 and 111. “They said we had three walking dead babies,” Yoss recalled.

The mining company settled with the family for several million dollars, but Yoss said the money was never enough to compensate for the health of her children, now in their 20s. “They still have headaches, and their memory: Just remembering things from day to day, a period of time goes by and they can’t remember.”

“Some people call me ‘lead head,’ ” joked a 43-year-old Kellogg man, George, who attended a school half a mile between the lead smelter and the zinc smelter. He remembers playing by the creek, which ran purple during parts of the year. “If you saw your kids playing in what I played in, you’d go out and get ‘em and probably move. I did fairly well till seventh grade, and my grades dropped. . . . Pretty soon, I couldn’t remember anything.”

The Idaho attorney general filed suit against the mining companies for $50 million. But when the Legislature refused to fund the suit, the case was settled in 1986 for $4.5 million, less than 2% of what it cost to clean up the 21 square miles nearest the lead smelter--an area known as “the box.”

The initial Superfund project has cleaned up 1,600 yards in Kellogg and Smelterville. Workers dug out the top 12 inches of tainted soil, capped it with a fabric marker and replaced it with a foot of clean soil.

Parks and schoolyards were treated in a similar fashion. Old waste piles are being picked up and hauled into a 200-acre, 60-foot-tall impoundment area in Kellogg.

The results have been marked: Where 46% of the children inside “the box” had blood lead levels above 10 milligrams per 10 liters in 1988, only 6% are above that now.

But, cautioned Steve Allred, administrator of Idaho’s Department of Environmental Quality: “We have a fragile removal. It will take significant [effort] to maintain it.”

What that means is that most of the contamination wasn’t removed; it was simply moved to areas where people would be less likely to come into contact with it. New problems could erupt as easily as someone digging below the fabric barrier in their yard into still-contaminated soil. Dust blowing in off untreated hillsides and waste piles poses a constant threat of recontamination.

Wes Aamodt, who owns a truck stop in Smelterville, says his property was declared clean when he bought it in 1994. But since then, lead-contaminated dust constantly blows over it, fouling air filters and shutting down his refrigerators. “You can’t have a cafe and have the people eating this dust,” he told the EPA at a hearing last month.

And while local health officials have loaned out industrial-strength vacuums to anyone who wants them, the greatest potential source of human lead exposure, household dust, has not been part of the cleanup.

In the rest of the basin, the worries are worse.

Yards, parks and playgrounds in towns like Mullan, Osborn and Wallace--up the river from the Superfund site--have tested at several times above federal safety limits for lead. A chain of lateral lakes leading into Lake Coeur d’Alene is heavy with lead sediments.

In Burke Canyon, a rustic community that sits astride an old mining creek, several children have elevated blood lead levels. The EPA, even without an official Superfund designation, has moved quickly to try to clean up yards.

“Just half a mile from here, in any direction you go from my house, there are over 70 mine openings. And there’s water coming out of most of them,” said Charles Tirpik, a former miner who retired when he developed a degenerative spine disease.

“It’s all full of lead, zinc. And it goes right into Canyon Creek. . . . They did some [cleanup] work down at the bottom, but it was just a bunch of political mumbo jumbo. I mean, they started at the bottom of the canyon and worked their way up! That’s about like washing your car from the bottom up.”

Down the road, Debra Wilson had her yard replaced when county officials found high blood lead levels in her daughters, ages 4 and 7.

“They say lead can affect learning disabilities. . . . Both of my girls were 36 weeks, and they were both learning delayed, they call it,” Wilson said. “The special ed department says it could be because of lead or because they were early, or a combination of the two. Or it could be nothing.”

Most of the contaminated schoolyards in the basin will be cleaned up by the end of this summer, but officials did little about the interior of schools. That is until Robert C. Huntley, a former member of the Idaho Supreme Court, went to court in March and won an order mandating testing.

Huntley took the order to the EPA, where officials told him they had no funding under the current plan. Next, he went to the governor’s office, the state Department of Environmental Quality, the superintendent of public instruction and, finally, the three school districts involved. All refused to pay for the testing.

So Huntley paid the $6,292 to do the first tests out of his own pocket. The first results are due soon.

“It’s really a Chamber of Commerce-type thing, where we don’t want to admit we have a problem because it would have an adverse effect on tourism,” Huntley said.

EPA and school officials downplay the problem, saying there is little chance of exposure in schools that are mopped twice a day.

“When you drive a car, there’s lead in the battery that’s less than 10 feet ahead of you. That’s a risk factor. In our school district, we do not have an exposure factor with the children,” said Robin Stanley, school superintendent in Mullan.

Local health officials have done everything possible to minimize the risk. Homeowners in yards that haven’t been replaced with clean soil are advised not to grow root vegetables, such as carrots and potatoes. Contractors who dig into contaminated soil after being ordered to halt can face fines of $300 a day and six months in jail. County nurses make regular visits to the schools, conducting puppet shows with frogs (The message: “Keep clean, eat clean and play clean.”). Health officials scrutinize dust collected on doormats for contamination. Once a year, nurses go door-to-door for children’s blood lead screenings.

Voluntary Program Hasn’t Been Successful

There is one thing almost everyone can agree on: No one knows what the real lead exposure is because relatively few children have been tested under the voluntary program. Health officials recently raised the payment made to those who agree to blood tests from $20 to $40 to increase participation.

“There’s a long list of things that are far greater risk [to children] than heavy metals,” said state Sen. Jack Riggs, a physician who believes the EPA’s efforts outside the existing Superfund site should be limited to a few isolated areas along the Coeur d’Alene River. For example, Riggs said, “there is older housing in the Silver Valley where lead paint is an issue. You can’t just automatically conclude that it’s all from meandering sediment.”

The political and legal issues surrounding cleanup of the entire basin are formidable. In addition to jockeying over Superfund designation, there is the issue of how to assess legal liability. While Gulf Resources easily could be blamed for much of the pollution inside the box, at least four major companies and 22 minor companies are targets of the EPA’s massive $1-billion liability lawsuit for pollution throughout the basin, scheduled to go to trial early next year.

The companies argue that 100 or more mining operations have generated waste over a period of a century or more, much of it long before there were environmental regulations prohibiting it. Much of the pollution stopped in the 1960s, a full decade before the Superfund law even was adopted, they say. And most of the companies that mined during the worst pollution years are long gone.

“We don’t really know who’s responsible for which materials. You’ve got a hundred different mining companies, and the ones who happened to survive are the ones who are being blamed,” said Holly Houston of the Mining Information Center, which represents three of the four major mining companies still operating in the basin: Hecla, ASARCO and Sunshine.

Instead of spending $1 billion on cleaning up soil all over the basin, Houston said, the EPA should be finding children who have been exposed to lead, finding out where their exposure came from and stopping the problem at the source.

What about, the EPA counters, those children who haven’t been exposed yet? The families who have not yet moved into a contaminated house?

EPA officials believe a recent federal appeals court decision gave them authority to begin Superfund cleanup throughout the 1,500-square-mile study area, wherever mining pollution has reached. It may be more practical, they admit, to set up individual cleanup sites in the areas of worst contamination.

And Washington Gov. Gary Locke has stepped into the fray, signaling the state’s reluctance to depend solely on Idaho to clean up waters that flow across state lines.

Washington’s stake in the issue is becoming increasingly clear. Last year, the U.S. Geological Survey found in the Spokane River--about 70 miles from the heart of the mining district--some of the highest levels of metals ever recorded in freshwater fish in the state. In February, the EPA completed tests showing that levels of lead and arsenic at several beaches along the upper river pose a health risk.

Warning signs have been in place on those beaches for at least a year. But last week, a young Spokane family was swimming along the shore, escaping the oppressive heat of a July afternoon.

“I didn’t even see the sign,” said Michele Caudill of Spokane, whose children, ages 2, 8 and 13, were splashing each other along the river’s shallow bank.

If she had read it, it would have told her to avoid muddy soil that might cling to clothing, toys, hands or feet; to wash hands if mud gets on them; to avoid breathing any dust from around the river; to wash any toys, shoes or clothing that have been in contact with shoreline soils before entering her home; to avoid eating without washing her hands; and to clean out her car if any soils from the riverbank got tracked into it.

Caudill shrugged. “When we were kids, we were in this river every day.”

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Poison Spreads

Mining contamination has spread far beyond the original Superfund site, to include the Coeur d’Alene River basin and into eastern Washington. Below, lead levels in select locations:

River Rd.: (1,410/million)

Harvard Rd.: (357/million)

River at state line: (70/billion)*

North Idaho College: (204/million)

Harrison Beach: (1,250/million)

Elk Creek: (12,100/million)

Wallace City Park Monument: (3,170/million)

*Concentrations of zinc. All other measures are of lead

Sources: Environmental Protection Agency, Washington Department of Environmental Quality