War of Words Prefaces EPA Decision on Superfund Site

Environmental Protection Agency employees assigned to clean up heavy metals contaminating the Silver Valley are being compared to terrorists.

A newspaper columnist joked that EPA employees should be shot on sight.

Such are the sentiments in this Idaho Panhandle community as the EPA decides Wednesday whether a Superfund site here should be dramatically expanded. Superfund is the agency’s list of the nation’s most dangerously contaminated areas, which are eligible for federal cleanup.

“The money with Superfund comes with the stigma of Superfund,” said Connie Fudge, a leader of the Shoshone Natural Resources Coalition, a business-dominated group that wants the EPA to declare the area clean and go away.

Business and political leaders want to build on a nascent tourism economy and help the crippled mining industry rebuild.

That puts them at odds with federal and state regulators and some Silver Valley residents who believe that much contamination remains, posing a health hazard.

“The EPA is our only hope for this community being cleaned up,” said Barbara Miller, leader of a local environmental group that is pushing for the EPA to complete the job.

A century of mining and smelting released lead and other dangerous metals into the Coeur d’Alene River Basin. The river carried those metals into Lake Coeur d’Alene, and then into Washington through the Spokane River.

In 1983, the EPA declared a 21-square-mile area around Kellogg a Superfund site. Since then, it has spent more than $200 million to clean it up. Lead-contaminated soil in people’s yards was replaced. Giant heaps of mine tailings along Interstate 90 were capped.

On Wednesday, the EPA is expected to announce its plan for cleaning up mining waste along 150 miles of the Coeur d’Alene River basin--1,500 square miles, from the Montana border to Washington state. That would create the nation’s largest Superfund site.

It would take an estimated 20 to 30 years to complete the job, which would involve everything from removing lead dust from people’s homes to dredging contaminated beaches of the Spokane River.

The complexity of the issues, and incomplete scientific studies, produce wildly varied opinions on the need for this work.

Area political and business leaders have argued that the Superfund designation could be death for the region’s economy. They also believe that the remaining health risk is small, and that state government should oversee any remaining work.

“There is no documentation of health problems,” said Fudge, who moved to the area a decade ago with her husband, a mining company executive.

But scientists working on behalf of environmental groups--primarily citing federal studies from the 1970s and 1980s--see a population at high risk of lead poisoning.

“The need for medical care is of an emergency nature in my professional opinion,” said Dr. John Rosen, a lead-poisoning expert from Montefiore Hospital in New York City who has long been involved in this issue.

“Why have they allowed children to live where it will damage their brains permanently?” complained Tina Paddock, a former resident of nearby Wallace who fled the area and now lives in suburban Portland, Ore. “They embrace a dead industry and deny what it did to them and their children.”

Caught in the middle is the EPA.

The agency has been attacked as arrogant and unconcerned with the depressed economy of northern Idaho, an area where anti-government and anti-environmentalist sentiments run deep.

Fudge contended that the EPA, in its haste to blame mining for lead contamination, hasn’t put enough emphasis on automobile exhaust, paint in old homes and natural lead exposure.

There have been no comprehensive studies on lead levels in the blood of current residents, Fudge said. Limited studies indicate the contamination problems are far less than in the 1970s, when up to 75% of tested children had elevated levels of lead in their blood.

But the EPA believes health hazards remain, especially for children and pregnant women, said Marianne Deppman of the EPA’s regional office in Seattle. The expanded work in the Silver Valley would include a comprehensive health risk study.

Some of the most vitriolic attacks against the EPA have come from local newspaper columnist David Bond. In a recent column, Bond compared EPA employees to the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.

“The people . . . who continue to take deadly aim at the Coeur d’Alene mining district aren’t traveling on forged passports. But they are terrorists just the same,” he wrote.

In a July column, Bond jokingly suggested that EPA employees should be shot on sight if they trespass on private land, which prompted the agency to ask for police protection at its next public meeting.

Outgoing regional EPA director Charles Findley in Seattle said debate on the need and scope of the cleanup is healthy.

“However, there is no place in our society for threats against fellow citizens who are merely doing their jobs,” Findley wrote to a Silver Valley newspaper.

Idaho’s congressional delegation sent a letter last week to new EPA Administrator John Iani, saying he should visit the valley immediately and adding they hoped that “under your leadership, the animosity between the communities and the EPA will lessen if not disappear.”

Feelings against the EPA run so deep in the Silver Valley that it has become nearly impossible to have a reasonable conversation with opponents, agency officials said.

“I keep hoping we’re going to be able to work with people in the community in a constructive way,” Deppman said. “We haven’t found the answer on how to do that.”

But the EPA is required to perform the cleanup, whether local residents want it or not, she said.

Agency spokesman Bill Dunbar said it is local residents, not the EPA, who constantly bring the Superfund issue to the news media, thus hurting their own efforts to lure business.

“We don’t put up signs saying, ‘EPA is here, steer clear,’ ” Dunbar said.

In the Silver Valley, there is much longing for the good old days, when dozens of mines employed thousands of workers, and the stacks of the Bunker Hill smelter belched out smoke day and night. Sons followed their fathers underground.

Small towns like Wallace and Kellogg had bustling commercial districts. Brothels and illegal gambling establishments thrived.

A fire at the smelter in 1973 spewed toxic smoke across the valley. Despite damage to its pollution-control systems, the smelter continued to operate, sending lead into the environment.

The smelter closed in 1981, throwing 2,100 people out of work. Mines have been closing here for years, because of competition from cheap foreign producers. Only a few hundred people are employed in the mining industry these days.

The Silver Valley is trying to reinvent itself as a tourist destination, promoting a ski hill and a huge system of snowmobile and mountain biking trails. Forty miles downstream, Lake Coeur d’Alene is the centerpiece of a thriving convention and recreation industry, with million-dollar homes lining the shore.

“We love this community,” Fudge said. “It’s a wonderful place to be.”