Superfund


When we posted an online query to a network of labor scholars about the national-level significance of the Coeur d'Alene Mining Wars (see our Mining Wars page), one reply we received suggested as follows:
In addition to the case based on labor history (which I think is a compelling one), I would urge inclusion of reference to the recent environmental history of the community. While much of this has focused on near-by Kellogg, Idaho, the whole Silver Valley and Shoshone County have repeatedly been part of a classic environmental policy debate about the impact of the Bunker Hill Smelter's impact on the environment and public health.  I would think Wallace could use that controversy to support the claim to historical significance.
We agree.  The story of environmental damage, social conflict, mitigation, and Superfund's controversial role within that story merits an important place in our National Heritage Area's program.

In the late 19th Century and over much of the 20th Century mining in the Coeur d'Alenes was too often unmindful of environmental consequences.  Conflict over mining-related pollution in the Coeur d'Alenes has a long history.  By 1900, farmers in the lower reaches of the river complained that flooding poisoned their lands and crops with mine waste.  Mine owners built damns, settling ponds, and also engaged in a program of buying downstream properties in order to minimize damage as well as limit their exposure to law suits.

The story of Superfund involvement in the Coeur d'Alene Mining District began in the 1970s, the decade preceding the passage of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (Superfund) by the United States Congress on December 11, 1980. 

In the summer of 1973 the Bunker Hill smelter stack had a fire in the bag house, which knocked out key filtration functions.  Despite known risks to public health, Gulf resources management decided continue their smelting operations.  The result of this decision greatly increased the emission and diffusion of letharge or lead oxide from the smelter stack.  The result was a period of greatly elevated juvenile blood lead levels, particularly within a one mile radius of the stack.  An epidemiological survey conducted soon after the fire revealed a mean blood level of 60 micrograms lead per deciliter of blood.

In 1983, the Bunker Hill "Box," a 3-mile by 7-mile rectangle of residential and commercial properties became the second largest Superfund site in the nation.  By and large, the local community welcomed the EPA's efforts and shared that institution's concerns about elevated blood lead levels among children.  Concurrent with the EPA's program of replacing the top soil of residences, blood lead levels dropped significantly over the remainder of 1980s and 1990s.  As it happened, nationwide epidemiological surveys also reported that the nation's juvenile blood lead levels dropped precipitously over the same period, after the removal of lead from gasoline, paint, and "tin" cans.  One consequence of these parallel declines in blood lead levels was uncertainty regarding how much the Bunker Hill decline was due either to local EPA efforts or to the prevailing and larger national trend.

In the late 1990s, word trickled out that EPA was planning to expand the Box Superfund site to a much larger area of the Coeur d'Alene River Basin -- thus creating the so-called Basin Superfund site.  The local communities that would become parts of this new and much larger Superfund site viewed the prospect with suspicion.  Blood lead levels in the wider area never reached the levels that were reached in the Box.  Moreover, the EPA's  methodology for estimating the blood lead levels of children in the wider area of the Basin relied on a computer simulation model that, in turn, had been validated against low quality survey data.  Finally, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s EPA's actions were directed toward children with blood lead levels that stretched up to 150 micrograms per deciliter, now the program was focused on the question of whether a mere five percent of children exceeded ten micrograms.

A citizens group -- the Shoshone Natural Resources Coalition -- formed and it determined to study the EPA science that had been employed to justify the expansion of the Box Superfund.  Before very long, this group discovered the existence of a similarly dubious citizen group's struggle in a Superfund site in Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  The Smuggler Mountaina report

The two decades of past Superfund experience and the decades to come represent an important story in the history of the American West and therefor also, we believe, an important part of our National Heritage Area's program. community had succeeded in persuading the EPA to impanel a committee of neutral scientists to review citizen criticisms of the same computer simulation model.  In the end, this panel sided with the citizens and EPA discreetly withdrew from the scene.  This history caused the Basin citizen's group to search for a similarly authoritative panel of neutral scientists to review EPA's human health study.  With the help of Idaho's representatives to the U.S. Congress, a National Academy of Sciences panel was formed.  In due course, the NAS panel published that both substantially agreed with local objections to EPA science and simultaneously blessed the EPA's human health efforts as well.