SPOKESMAN-REVIEW
Sunday, April 23, 2000
Mine landfill safety debated
Residents worry plastic liner won't forever
contain worst pollutants buried at Bunker Hill
By Julie Titone Staff writer
KELLOGG, Idaho -- The nastiest pollutants from the Bunker Hill lead and zinc smelters are
buried in a 1.5-acre plastic baggie on a hillside above the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River.
The Environmental Protection Agency saved $6million in taxpayers' money by burying the
toxic metals without first stabilizing them in concrete. But some residents worry that the decision
put public health and the environment at risk.
Environmental consultant Joel Hirschorn dismissed the EPA contention that burying the
pollutants in a landfill was a safe way to dispose of what are called PTMs, or ``principal threat
materials.'' He called the claim ``ludicrous.''
``Why? Because any future failure of the containment system, which can and will happen
eventually - because even EPA has acknowledged that all landfills eventually fail - has the
potential to release the highly toxic PTMs into the environment,'' he said.
Hirschorn's strong words were contained in a 1998 review of the Bunker Hill project. He was
hired by the Silver Valley People's Action Coalition, which often criticizes the EPA for not
doing enough to protect public health.
But even some members of the local mining establishment, who are prone to accuse the EPA
of overkill, have raised questions about the landfill.
``It's sitting above the aquifer. It's sitting in a canyon that's plugged with rock,'' mining
consultant Bill Calhoun said.
The EPA never officially considered the expensive option of shipping the worst pollutants to a
toxic waste depository in Oregon. Only PCBs, acids and liquid mercury were removed from the
hilly smelter site, which is drained by several streams.
``People call it a cleanup, but it's not,'' said Duane Little, Shoshone County assessor and
chairman of the Bunker Hill Superfund Task Force.
``It was a management.''
The question of how wisely the EPA spent money will be addressed by a General Accounting
Office audit. It was requested last week by three of Idaho's congressional representatives. Rep.
Helen Chenoweth-Hage in particular accuses the agency of mismanagement and overspending.
How well the EPA dealt with 100,000 tons of PTMs will be among the questions addressed by
an EPA ombudsman, who will investigate the Superfund project at the request of the People's
Action Coalition.
A starting point for each investigation will be the EPA's own five-year review of the Superfund
project.
The first part of the review deals with populated areas, covering such issues as lead-dust
contamination. It will be released at a public meeting at 7 p.m Thursday at the Kellogg Middle
School. The rest of the report, expected out in a month, will focus on work at the 1,900-acre
industrial site. That includes burial of the principal threat materials.
By definition, PTMs are highly toxic or highly mobile. They generally can't be contained in a
reliable manner and/or they present a significant risk.
Bunker Hill PTMs included materials spilled or stockpiled during the process of turning ore
into iron and zinc concentrates. They contain extremely high levels of metals. For example, lead
- which damages human nervous systems - had to be present at 84,600 parts per million to
qualify material as a PTM. In comparison, 1,000 ppm would qualify the yard of a Kellogg house
for cleanup.
When the smelter site was still owned by Pintlar, Bunker Hill's corporate successor, EPA
officials concluded that the toxic materials should be mixed with cement and buried.
That was in 1992. Two years later, Pintlar was bankrupt and most cleanup costs fell to
taxpayers.
In 1996, the EPA decided to bury the material without it first being stabilized in concrete. The
price tag was much lower: an estimated $7 million for stabilization vs. $600,000 for putting the
untreated toxic materials in a landfill.
Cost wasn't the only factor, project manager Sean Sheldrake said. The lime in the cement,
which stabilizes lead, sometimes has the opposite effect on arsenic. So, the cement can actually
drive one poison away.
Hirschorn said that not enough testing was done to show that cement would have destabilized
the arsenic.
Sheldrake responded: ``No matter how far we went, there would be someone who said we
didn't go far enough.''
When the EPA faced the same situation at the Anaconda Superfund site in Montana, the
agency found that arsenic could be effectively stabilized in cement along with other wastes from
the defunct copper smelter.
At Anaconda, there was still a corporation around to hold accountable for cleanup. ARCO
spent $50 million to stabilize and bury 500,000 cubic yards of PTMs.
But at Bunker Hill, Sheldrake said, cement treatment ``just seemed like being overprotective.''
Asked if people can be confident the toxic metals won't escape, he said that the landfill ``is as
stable as can be engineered.''
The PTM landfill has a thick plastic liner on the bottom, and two on top. The edges of this
baggie, as the EPA calls it, are not welded, but are folded together accordion-style. A drainage
system is collecting water that is expected to seep out of the landfill for three more years. The
effluent is piped to a treatment plant that filters water from the Bunker Hill Mine.
The 1.5-acre site lies within the 30-acre landfill where the rubble of the demolished smelter
was buried. The larger landfill doesn't have a liner, and has one top layer of plastic. The hillside
has been planted and is fuzzy with native grasses and lupine.
Ground water never gets closer than 50 feet from the bottom of the landfill, said Rich Fink of
the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. There are four monitoring wells below the site, meant to
catch any spikes in the amount of metals running off.
Fink, who oversaw construction of the landfill, is convinced the huge perimeter ditch would
carry rains and snowmelt safely around the 30 acres.
If there were a break in the plastic, officials said, there would be plenty of time to fix the leak
before metals gushed toward the river.
One washout has already occurred. Fink said it was caused by water that had frozen behind
some rocks. Only topsoil was lost, Fink said. The protective plastic layer was not broken.
Jerry Cobb, a Panhandle Health District official, said the only people who raised concerns
about burying the toxic materials were people who, like Calhoun, felt some of the material
should have been reprocessed.
It's not surprising that the 1996 decision went largely unquestioned. Few people have been
aware of decisions the EPA made to deal with pollution within the 21-square-mile Superfund
``box.''
Exceptions were members of the People's Action Coalition, which many Silver Valley
residents see as a tiny band of wild-eyed activists, and the Bunker Hill Task Force, made up
mostly of public officials such as Cobb.
``There hasn't been much interest in the box,'' Sheldrake said.
There also hasn't been much publicity. Since cleanup got under way in the early '90s,
Sheldrake said, the EPA has issued only a few statements and conducted some low-key public
meetings.
The People's Action Coalition has focused largely on health issues related to lead dust. Back
when the PTM decision was being made, its members sought the advice of Steven Lester of the
Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste. He recommended encapsulation of the toxic
materials.
``We hardly knew what encapsulation meant,'' coalition director Barbara Miller said.
``It was a dead-end point,'' she said. ``We had to move on to something else.''
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MEMO: Staff writer Julie Titone can be reached at (208) 765-7126, or by e-mail at
juliet@spokesman.com