U.S. Water News Online
BOISE, Idaho -- All children aged 1 to 4 in the Coeur d'Alene Basin corridor that stretches from Montana across Idaho to Spokane, Wash., should have their blood sampled for lead each year, a national science panel recommended.
The National Academies of Science committee also concluded in a new study that the only way to extinguish a "legacy of contamination" from decades of silver, lead and zinc mining is a massive, lengthy, expensive cleanup of the spidery Northern Rockies drainage.
The congressionally ordered study endorsed the Environmental Protection Agency's ambitious plan to greatly expand federal Superfund cleanup authority beyond the 21-square-mile "box" surrounding the Bunker Hill smelter and mining complex in Kellogg.
EPA began cleaning the smelter site in 1983 after it was placed on the national Superfund priorities list and has spent more than $250 million thus far. In 1998, the agency announced a $359 million expansion of the cleanup to encompass the basin, a decision that was met with widespread criticism by residents who feared the Superfund designation would create a social and economic stigma for the region.
EPA officials were still reviewing the study but said they were gratified by the panel's overall conclusions.
"Their report suggests that contrary to a position that you should narrow your activities, they say we really do need to take a big picture view of the system and look at how each piece of the problem is connected with the other pieces," said Dan Opalski, Pacific Northwest regional EPA Superfund director in Seattle.
Environmentalists also hailed the findings as validation of long-standing fears that mine tailings dumped into the Coeur d'Alene River and along stream banks beginning in the 19th century are slowly poisoning people, fish and animals. The conclusion by the Academies' National Research Council was a blow, however, to Silver Valley residents and organizations that oppose the sprawling Superfund designation and to members of Idaho's congressional delegation, which had requested the $850,000 study in 2002 to challenge EPA's cleanup expansion plans.
"We remain committed to working with the (Coeur d'Alene) Basin Commission in monitoring this process and to ensuring that the well-being of the people of the Coeur d'Alene Basin is its highest priority," Sens. Larry Craig and Mike Crapo and Reps. Mike Simpson and C.L. "Butch" Otter said in a terse statement.
"They are the ones that asked for this and our feeling was they wanted to use the National Academies to undermine the science of EPA," said John Osborn, a Spokane physician and Sierra Club conservation chairman for Idaho and Eastern Washington. "We've inflicted a chronic disease on this watershed and it's going to require a long-term effort with state and federal leadership to fix it."
The study, presented recently at a public meeting at North Idaho College in Coeur d'Alene, said the current random rate of childhood blood testing is insufficient to measure potentially harmful effects of lead poisoning. It also commended EPA's program to replace contaminated soil with new dirt in the yards of homes in the basin. It called for greater monitoring of chronic psychological stress related to living in or around Superfund zones and more research into measuring human arsenic exposure.
Researchers said EPA needed to do more to identify threats to the basin environment by pinpointing places where zinc is leaching into groundwater and removing or stabilizing the biggest accumulations of lead-contaminated riverbed sediment.
But researchers stopped short of calling for dredging the accumulations of heavy metal contamination that have settled in Lake Coeur d'Alene, hub of the basin's booming recreational industry.
"Right now there's insufficient information on the toxicology of the lake, the geochemistry of the lake, the kind of organisms that are present, and what the potential effect of lake changes are, including impacts from including human development, to come up with a credible plan to remediate the lake," said David Tollerud, a University of Kentucky public health and pharmacology professor who chaired the study committee.
One of the biggest challenges EPA has, the study found, is to find a safe place to put the millions of tons of contaminated dirt that must be removed from shorelines, streambeds, neighborhoods and flood zones in the mountainous watershed.
"Just like siting any repository at any Superfund site, you have community interest and topographic interest, but we need to remove or contain these materials to ensure people and wildlife are no longer exposed to them," said Anne Dailey, EPA environmental scientist and Coeur d'Alene Basin project manager.
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