Mining enriched region, left big mess
Silver Valley's bittersweet saga began when pollution was legal

Karen Dorn Steele
Staff writer

EPA The peak of production at Bunker Hill in the 1970s shows an extensive array of buildings and roads. The photo hangs in the EPA offices at Kellogg.

Idaho's Superfund saga is the latest chapter in a century-long political and legal fight over the Silver Valley's mineral riches.

Mining companies have dug, blasted and smelted an estimated $5.8 billion in metals from the narrow valley since the 1880s.

Some of labor's most violent battles were fought here -- including the dynamiting of the Bunker Hill ore concentrator in 1899, a labor revolt put down by armed U.S. soldiers.

Mining enriched shareholders, drove America's industrial expansion and built Spokane's turn-of-the-century mansions and office buildings.

It also left a huge mess -- an estimated 30,000 tons of lead from the valley's biggest smelter stacks and up to 100 million tons of mine sediments that polluted lakes and rivers from Mullan to Spokane.

The pollution was legal at the time, but it began to cause problems early in the 20th century.

Shortly after the turn of the century, farmers along the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River sued over "leaded waters" they claimed were killing their animals and crops.

They lost the early court battles. The mining companies blamed the livestock deaths on a fungus.

Around 1912, Bunker Hill introduced a new process to extract more metals that added to the pollution. Finely ground rock was mixed with water and a "flotation" material and agitated to a froth. The minerals bonded to the flotation chemicals.

The process increased the quantity of tailings and produced finer waste that washed far downstream, says a paper by Earl Bennett, Idaho's chief geologist.

The legal tide began to turn in 1917.

Cataldo farmer Jacob Polack's lawsuit against three mining companies was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said mining companies couldn't inflict "unlimited injury" on others. The mines bought up pollution easements along the Coeur d'Alene River, which are still in effect today.

When the fine sediments called "mine slimes" spread to Lake Coeur d'Alene and the Spokane River in the 1920s, it provoked a public outcry.

In 1932, a Department of Interior report said mine slimes had washed downstream as far as Greenacres in the Spokane Valley.

The Interior Department recommended the mines adopt the Canadian practice of placing wastes in settling ponds. The Idaho Legislature accepted the federal report, but did nothing.

In 1934, the Mine Owners Association built a dredge at Cataldo to remove 500 tons of mine sediments a day from the Coeur d'Alene River. The tailings were deposited on Cataldo Flats.

Idaho formed a commission to review the mining practices, but World War II intervened, overshadowing the pollution concerns.

By the mid-1960s, new federal and state regulations required mining companies to stop dumping tailings into the Coeur d'Alene River. The mining companies haven't put tailings into the river since 1968.

But fine sediments already in the river continued to wash downstream.

In the 1970s, a growing national environmental ethic led to new laws, including the Clean Air and Clean Water acts.

The takeover of Bunker Hill by Gulf Resources of Texas in 1968 upped the ante. In 1973, Gulf's Texas owners decided to run the Bunker Hill lead smelter with a fire-damaged baghouse.

For six months, 1,500 tons of lead oxide fell on Kellogg and Smelterville -- poisoning kids closest to the smelter.

In 1977, Idaho Sen. James McClure amended the federal Clean Air Act to allow Gulf to erect tall emissions stacks to dilute smelter pollution by spreading it far beyond Kellogg.

Gulf closed its Kellogg plants in 1981, and Bunker Hill was named a Superfund site in 1983.

Idaho Attorney General Jim Jones filed a $50 million lawsuit against Gulf in 1981 to snag some of its assets for cleanup, but the Idaho Legislature refused him $300,000 to develop a natural resources damage study for the case.

Idaho settled with the mining companies in 1986 for $4.5 million -- a sliver of the $253 million that's been spent to clean up the Bunker Hill site.

In 1989 and 1990, Gulf moved $160 million overseas, mostly into commercial real estate in New Zealand. Gulf's maneuver eventually forced the national Superfund trust fund to pay for much of the Kellogg-area cleanup.

Meanwhile, Gulf pressured EPA to hold other mining companies responsible for the pollution, too.

In 1991, the Coeur d'Alene Tribe sued the remaining mining companies, claiming the mine wastes had fouled their ancestral lands.

Two years later, Gulf sought bankruptcy protection.

The Justice Department joined the tribe's lawsuit in 1996, filing a claim for up to $1.3 billion in natural resources damages against the surviving mining companies. A ruling on the case is expected this year.

Back to Top