Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, December 17, 2003 at 11:54AM :
In Reply to: Re: If thats on the Columbian posted by George (AB) on Wednesday, December 17, 2003 at 1:55AM :
No, different river. What we have in the Coeur D'Alenes is the residue of 120 years of hard-rock silver/lead/zinc mining. It doesn't look bad since most of the tailings go back in the mines as sand-fill, but back in the bad old days the Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg made quite a mess. The fumes poisoned the hillsides for miles around, killing all the trees, and the slag was piled in a huge black heap. The water that runs out of the old mines has some zinc in it, which they claim is bad for fish. The main cause of the lead dust in town was when Gulf Industries did a junk-bond takeover of Bunker and decided to suck it dry. The baghouse, which is supposed to catch the dust from the smelter (but not the gasses) caught fire and the bags burned up but the company decided to keep running the smelter anyway, which blew a lot of lead oxides out the stack. That's most of what the EPA's been measuring in people's yards. But that was all 20-30 years ago, and the trees are growing back and the smelter's been torn down. Gulf Industries went bankrupt not too long after the baghouse fire, but the execs got their money out of the country before then. A couple years ago, the EPA proposed new limits for lead in the Coeur D'Alene river. The trouble is, if you take the average concentration of lead in the rocks of the mountains that the river drains, and divide it by the average rate of erosion, you exceed that limit without even without doing any mining. After all, that's why the mines are there. Thus, if any mines are still determined to keep operating, they must discharge water that has less lead and zinc in it than the natural river does. I'm all for clean rivers, but something's wrong with that picture. At this point it's a big political money squabble between the few remaining mining companies who are nearly broke, the superfund contractors who want more work, the Coeur D'Alene city chamber of commerce types who don't want the word "superfund" or "toxic" associated with anything near their resort town, and the Coeur D'Alene indians who want a big pile of money for the pollution of the ancestral lands. There's $300 million in the superfund pot so far and the chance to get a piece of it is suddenly converting lots of people into environmentalists.
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