The Silver Valley

 

A bagpiper played ‘Amazing Grace’ as 4,000 excited spectators watched tons of concrete crash to the ground in a fit of leaded dust. Five hundred pounds of strategically placed dynamite had demolished four smelter smokestacks, the tallest being 715 feet.

A controversial symbol of Silver Valley history disappeared in less than 30 seconds on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, in May of 1996.

“Good riddance to Bunker Hill stacks,” editorialized the daily Coeur d’Alene Press earlier that morning. The stacks had dominated the Silver Valley skyline for two decades.

The editorial was not gentle. “The stacks stood as monuments to Gulf Resources & Chemical Corporation’s defiance of common sense in its 20-year stewardship of a once great American company.”

Immediately after the stacks came down, a carnival atmosphere in Kellogg prevailed: food and drinks, T-shirts and hats, happy hours at the bars with live music. This was a community event in Kellogg like no other.

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Our 2005 “Silver Valley Rising” show had all the ingredients of a classic Outdoor Idaho program: an entertaining learning experience that featured a good bit of history with old film and photographs... interviews with down-to-earth folks... relatable scientists who could explain complicated matters well... and for good measure, a collaboration that actually seemed to work.

Ours was a complex story told compassionately that seemed to have what you might call a happy ending, if a story about the nation’s second largest Superfund site could ever really have a happy ending.

The Outdoor Idaho crew produced four other programs featuring the Silver Valley: “Mining Idaho,” “Under Idaho,” “Health of Our Lakes,” and “Idaho Tribes and the Environment.” Plus, one of the first full-length programs I ever produced in the 1980s was for IdahoPTV’s daily half hour “Idaho Reports” program.

 

We always came back from the Kellogg area with renewed respect for the toughness and friendliness of the area’s townspeople. And the immensity of their burden.

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Maybe it was because I’d spent three decades near Idaho City, among the scars of large-scale gold mining, that the story of the Silver Valley resonated with me.

When we think of gold mining, the image that comes to mind is of a lone miner with his gold pan and sluice box, and his pick and shovel, hellbent for bedrock five feet below in creeks like Grimes Creek and Elk Creek, where the gold tended to settle.

But that was 1863. What one sees today are tons of river rock piled unceremoniously along the major waterways of what’s known as the Boise Basin.

In the 1940’s, massive mechanical dredges churned through Grimes Creek, Mores Creek, Elk Creek and smaller streams. A dredge could weigh 900 tons, and be more than 100 feet long, with giant shovels capable of digging out rock and completely upending waterways. Someone got rich, but at what a cost.

The dredging halted before I arrived in the Boise Basin. I’m guessing those huge piles of river rock will likely still be there a hundred years from now.

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It’s always the water that suffers in mining operations. And no place is that truer than in Idaho’s Silver Valley. Such a pleasant-sounding name for such a massive sacrilege to water and land and air.

More than a century of mining, beginning in the 1890s, gave people plenty of time and reason to apply other names to the 40 mile long valley: “Black Basin,” because of the color of the air, water, and streets; “Valley of Death,” referring to the denuded forests, dead swans, horses, and fish that could only live a few minutes in “Lead Creek”; “Lead Heads,” a name callously thrown at school children because of the frightening level of lead in their young bodies.

But for those who owned and worked the mines, that was the price of doing business in the American West.

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Silver mining requires a willing workforce. As a child I used to build tree forts and once even an underground fort, but I gave up the idea after digging down four feet.  Imagine taking an elevator thousands of feet underground each morning to spend ten hours working in humid conditions that most of us would consider unacceptable.

And in the really ole days, around 1900, your pay would be $3 a day in unhealthy conditions The history of silver mining in Idaho includes bloody battles between miners and mine owners, the beginning of unionism in the state with leaders like “Big Bill” Haywood, and the presence of federal soldiers to quell riots as miners fought to get their daily wage to $3.50.

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Silver is not mined with a gold pan or a giant placer machine. The valuable ore is found in rich veins that snake through a geology that allows those veins to run deep, requiring expensive, complex machinery, brought into Idaho from foundries back east.

 

 

In the Coeur d’Alene mining district there are hundreds of miles of tunnels, stretched out like a vast spider web under the 21 square miles known as the “Box.” This network of extraction is the herculean effort of more than a century of digging and blasting.

 

For example, the largest mine, Bunker Hill, has 150 miles of tunnels.

The #4 tunnel in the Lucky Friday Mine reached a depth of 1.8 miles, the deepest mine in the valley.  That’s some serious digging. It speaks to the proud tenacity of Silver Valley miners.

The Sunshine Mine features 100 miles of tunnels. But that’s not what people will remember about this particularly rich and famous mine.

 

On the morning of May 2, 1972, 173 miners headed underground for the morning shift. Some arrived at the 3700-foot level; others went lower.

When the fire broke out, it was near where clean air was entering the mine, so carbon monoxide began to circulate through the main airways. Ninety-one men perished that day from carbon monoxide exposure.

The Bureau of Mines ultimately decided it was spontaneous combustion of refuse near scrap timber. Most people who understand mining believe it was a failure of old and inadequate safety equipment and a lack of training that doomed the men that day.

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When I look back at our “Silver Valley Rising,” we could have started our show with images of the south fork of the Coeur d’Alene River filled with poisonous tailings hauled out of the mines and headed to nearby Coeur d’Alene Lake.

Instead, we began our program with smelter smokestacks crashing to the ground in slow motion. Those tall smokestacks were the response to the poisons enveloping the towns of Kellogg, Smelterville, Pinehurst, and Wardner, and to some extent, Wallace.

The thinking was that the higher the stacks, the more smelter pollutants would escape the frequent inversions and spread out away from the towns. And sure enough, the poisons did spread far and wide.

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The purpose of a smelter is to separate out valuable metals like silver, lead, zinc, and cadmium. The smelting process requires intense heat and chemicals and releases poisonous gases, including lead.                                    

In September of 1973, a fire swept through the Bunker Hill baghouse. That’s the filtration system designed to remove emissions from the smelter, before they are released into the air.

 

What happened next was a pivotal turning point in the environmental history of Idaho.

The Houston-based Gulf Resources & Chemical Corporation had purchased the Bunker Hill Company in 1968. As historian Katherine Aiken explained to us in an interview for the show, when many of the owners lived in nearby Spokane, miners felt connected, even referring to the mine as “Uncle Bunker.” But now, she pointed out, “a corporation from Texas was making the decisions, and that made a huge difference.”

 

After the fire, Gulf Resources officials met and came up with a calculation. According to written notes, they determined that each poisoned child would likely cost them $4,000 in case of a lawsuit. But this was at a time when the price of silver and lead was approaching all-time highs.

If you cared to use the term “evil” to describe what happened next, you wouldn’t get much pushback from the former Dean of the College of Mines and Earth Resources at the University of Idaho.

 

“Gulf Resources management made the decision to go ahead and continue running the smelter,” geologist Earl Bennett told us in an interview for our show, “even though, with a part of the bag house gone, they knew there was going to be a tremendous increase in emissions of litharge, or lead oxide, out of the stacks.

“We talk a lot about the sins of our fathers. Our fathers did a real sin,” said the former State Geologist. “It was illegal what they did in 1973. It’s illegal now, and I don’t think there’s anybody that would try to justify what they did.”

Gulf Resources not only kept the mine running, but they ramped up production.  This went on for eleven months.

That sin, according to the Academy of Sciences, released approximately 35 tons of lead each month into the atmosphere.

The Panhandle Health District began testing children’s blood lead levels, and what they found was truly alarming. The lead levels were off the charts, some of the highest levels ever recorded in the United States. 

Even the best lawyers and lobbyists that the mining company’s money could buy weren’t able to spin that travesty.

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By 1981, sinking silver prices had slipped below the break-even point for most of the region’s mines. Even “Uncle Bunker” closed its doors, along with other mines in the region. Thousands of jobs dried up.

Two years later, the Environmental Protection Agency declared Bunker Hill and the 21 square mile Box around Bunker Hill a Superfund site.

Silver Valley, once the most prosperous region of Idaho, couldn’t get a break. The valley slipped into a deep depression. Thousands left, never to return. But some stayed to fight, to find a solution to this intractable mess.

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The collaboration between the federal government and the state of Idaho was always going to be a prickly one. Idahoans have never been keen on having the federal government intervene in their lives. After hundreds of meetings that stretched on for six years, a community taskforce designed a novel approach to the task ahead.

The state of Idaho would be responsible for cleaning up the populated areas, like Kellogg, Wardner, Smelterville, Pinehurst, and Wallace. Part of that involved contractors scooping up the first foot of contaminated soil where children played. They then laid down a barrier and brought in clean dirt, at no expense to homeowners.

Unfortunately, just when Gulf Resources was to pony up millions of dollars for this part of the cleanup, the corporation declared bankruptcy.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency would tackle the industrial complexes, including the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River.

The EPA paid for removal of the tailings from the valley floor and began the revegetation of the nearby denuded hillsides. Contractors dismantled the smelter and the zinc plant and spent millions of dollars on the restoration of Milo Creek. Without improvements to that creek, annual spring floods would continue to re-contaminate yards and playgrounds that had already been cleaned up.

The job of the Panhandle Health District was to jumpstart economic development and to monitor lead levels of children.

Lead levels did indeed start to drop. The collaboration was working.

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Sometimes one side of a collaboration may want to end the partnership, believing it’s time to move on.

But the EPA had no intention of walking away so soon. Instead, the federal agency dramatically expanded its jurisdiction to include Coeur d’Alene Lake and even the Spokane River flowing into the state of Washington.

Federal officials also suggested cleanup work could continue for another 30 years, possibly longer.

 

Merchants and others around Coeur d’Alene and the Silver Valley were incensed. They were sick of the cleanup and tired of the stigma of Superfund tarnishing their fine towns.

 

The area’s newspapers were especially vocal. Industrialist Duane Hagadone, who owned most of the media in the region, as well as the Coeur d’Alene Resort, was particularly adamant that the problem had been blown out of proportion.

One newspaper editorial argued that "no one in the past 20 years has been provably sickened by heavy metals in the Silver Valley."  Other stories compared EPA workers to terrorists and thugs. One even wrote, “tongue in cheek,” of assassinations.

Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne also weighed in. "The bureaucracy of the EPA is absolutely non-responsive, and we've had it. Absolutely had it," Kempthorne said in a speech in Coeur d’Alene. "I've become so frustrated with EPA that I'm on the verge of asking EPA to leave the state of Idaho." The governor received a standing ovation.

The state director of the Idaho Bunker Hill project team explained how things worked when you collaborated with the federal government. “You need to remember,” Chuck Moss told us in an interview, “the EPA had a couple of things going for them. One, they had the money. They also had the authority. That makes sometimes who really is the top dog, the top dog.”

Idaho was learning that collaborating with the federal government is a lot like dancing the country two-step with a stubborn lamppost.

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One thing that really impressed director/videographer Pat Metzler and the others who worked on the Outdoor Idaho show was the sheer magnitude of the mining operation in the relatively small area near the Idaho-Montana border. Mining had recovered more than a billion ounces of silver, 3 million tons of zinc, and 8 million tons of lead, all totaling more than $6 billion in value, ranking the Silver Valley among the top ten mining districts in world history.

That’s one side of the ledger. The other side is harder to document, but the Academy of Sciences put the number of pollutants in the air, water and on the land at 300 million tons.

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Early one Sunday morning, Pat Metzler and I headed to the Central Treatment Plant near the Bunker Hill Mine. We had been conducting interviews and shooting video for several days and were ready to drive back to Boise.

But first we needed video of the highly acidic water flowing out of Bunker Hill mine and into the Treatment Plant.

We had been told that the mine water would continue to flow, that it could not be stopped, that it would flow forever. The state of Idaho was on the hook for a million dollars annually. 

A fence surrounded the treatment plant and made it difficult to get the shots we wanted. Pat had heard that sometimes a magnetic card could spring certain locks. He happened to have a grocery store “rewards card.” And sure enough, it triggered the lock. The door opened for us.

It was early Sunday morning. No one was around. We walked in and got the close-up shots of the brown-colored water that we needed. Then we quickly left the facility, locking the door. “Rewards cards are usually worthless,” Pat commented, “but not today.”
Indeed, that card got us into Bunker Hill’s central treatment plant.

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Anyone traveling to the Silver Valley these days will quickly discover that the excitement is above ground. Condominiums sold quickly. One of the world’s longest gondolas whisks people to the top of an impressive ski hill that often has snow when others don’t. Bike paths snake gently through the valley, compliments of a train that once carried ore, uncovered, from the Silver Valley into Montana. (check)

I’m guessing few today know the full story of why the bike path is capped with asphalt or why signs warn bikers and pedestrians not to leave the pavement. I’m betting those signs will still be there 100 years from now.

The world’s most beautiful Superfund site has benefitted immensely from the prickly collaboration between state and federal agencies. Both continue to throw money into cleanup efforts.

Courts have transferred ownership of the southern third of the lake to the Coeur d’Alene nation. The Tribe is actively involved in the lake’s restoration. They are also convinced that neither state nor federal efforts are currently enough to clean up the lake.

Seventy-five million tons of contaminated sediment – arsenic, lead, zinc, and cadmium – lay/lies at the bottom of the lake. That represents a lot of money under the waves, and that’s likely where it will need to stay. The consequences of trying to manually bring those heavy metals to the surface has scientists on edge.

And it’s possible that those metals could come to the surface on their own. An oxygen “cap” currently traps those sediments. But as algae and nutrients continue to enter the lake, the oxygen levels drop. Scientists worry that those metals could become soluble and reenter the water column.

 

I’ve heard that things are safe on the lake, especially on the north side, furthest from the Silver Valley. I think that’s wonderful. It is one of the world’s most attractive lakes.

But I’m pretty sure I won’t be casting a fly into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River any time soon.

                                                               -30-

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Obsessions, and we had a few)

(draft 0.0)

 

Some possibilities:  Wilderness (is enough enough? what about Mt. Borah? We sure did a lot of shows on Wilderness)... Lewis&Clark (during the Bi-centennial we were all over this one) ... Rafting (we did do a lot of rafting!) Profiles of older folks (we managed to catch a few before the inevitable)...Salmon (we followed this issue a lot, starting with small stories and ending with a full show)... Possibly Silver Valley and Trial of Century (Is this part of the state the most interesting? Could be.)... Llamas (we sure used a lot of em in various shows, but maybe not more than horses, but it's close!..Others?)