The Political Thread

--11-17-18 HOW STUPID & UNBELIEVABLE: www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-epa-cant-wait-to-reopen-the-mine-that-poisoned-north-idaho/ar-BBPFJ6g?li=BBnb7Kz  

The EPA can't wait to reopen the mine that poisoned North Idaho.

The Bunker Hill Mine deposited 75 million tons of toxic sludge in Lake Coeur d’Alene, and the lead and zinc are still flowing.

For a century, the mines of the Coeur d’Alene Mountains in North Idaho produced much of the heavy metals that made the U.S. a global superpower.

Starting in the 1880s, through the rise of industrialization, the introduction of the automobile, and two world wars, a few narrow canyons in the Coeur d’Alenes yielded more than 11 million tons of zinc, lead, and silver, as much as a fifth of U.S. production.

Mining has left a mark on the culture of the Silver Valley and an indelible stain on the landscape, which remains heavily contaminated.

To extract a pound of metal, mining companies had to process nearly 14 pounds of ore, and they dumped the crushed waste rock into mountain streams and along river banks.

Over the course of a century, the tailings and mine drainage flowed down the 40-mile-long watershed, depositing some 75 million tons of highly toxic sludge into Lake Coeur d’Alene.

House cats convulsed from drinking the water. Migratory tundra swans suffered slow deaths as their digestive tracts seized up from lead poisoning, causing both suffocation and starvation as undigested food backed up into their long necks.

Children in the Silver Valley in the 1970s registered some of the highest levels of lead in their bloodstreams recorded anywhere.

By the time the area’s biggest mine, run by the Bunker Hill Mining Co., in Kellogg, closed in the early 1980s, the mines had spread a ribbon of poison from the Idaho-Montana border to Lake Coeur d’Alene and down the Spokane River all the way into Eastern Washington.

In 1983, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the Bunker Hill Mine and smelter complex the nation’s second-largest Superfund site. The agency has been a presence in the valley ever since.

Today, after 35 years and almost $900 million in cleanup costs, Bunker Hill’s tailings heap still oozes 400 pounds of toxic metals a day into the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River.

Tundra swans still flap and stagger in the marshes. After picking up more mine waste downstream, the river dumps almost 400 tons of lead and 700 tons of zinc into Lake Coeur d’Alene every year.

You’d never know it on the shores of the azure lake, a vacation jewel of the inland Northwest. The region has moved on. Timber and minerals have given way to tourism, outdoor recreation, and second homes.

The new economic base is additive, not extractive. It relies on healthy forests, fish, wildlife, and an abundance of clean rivers and lakes—clean, at least, to the naked eye.

People come from all over the West to be on or near the spider-shaped lake, which extends its arms across 50 square miles.

They fish for native cutthroat trout and invasive northern pike; swim, kayak and jet-ski in tranquil bays; and tee off over the lake onto the famous floating 14th green of the Coeur d’Alene Resort golf course.

Many never leave. Last year the population of Kootenai County, where Coeur d’Alene is located, increased 2.9 percent, to 157,637, making it the fifth-fastest-growing metropolitan area in the U.S., according to the Census Bureau.

The median home price in the area rose 12 percent, to $249,000—still more than affordable for the thousands of people, many of them retirees, who’ve moved there after selling homes in such places as Los Angeles and Seattle.

The county is 94.5 percent white, 1.4 percent American Indian, and 4.6 percent Hispanic, and, in the 2016 presidential election, 67 percent Trump voters.

The politics here are deeply conservative; as recently as 2004, the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations marched through downtown Coeur d’Alene.

So far, much of the metals pouring down from Silver Valley has settled innocuously on the bottom of the lake, undiffused in the overlying water.

But the pollution is a ticking time bomb. Coeur d’Alene’s rapid development is loading the lake with nutrients from septic systems, lawn runoff, and logging activity, among other sources.

Nutrients promote plant growth, which depletes the water’s oxygen supply.

When the water becomes sufficiently anoxic—depleted of saturated oxygen—the metals will dissolve and flux upward into the water column, turning the lake into a toxic sink of liquefied arsenic, cadmium, lead, and zinc.

“This watershed needs time to heal, and billions of dollars of remedial cleanup, to become a functioning ecosystem again,” says Phil Cernera, an environmental scientist for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, whose lands include most of the southern half of the lake.

The Trump EPA doesn’t do healing. In March, the agency disclosed a shocker: After months of secret talks, it had signed an agreement with a Canadian company to reopen the Bunker Hill Mine.

Scott Pruitt, the agency’s administrator until his ouster in July, said in a statement that the pact would restore mining jobs, contribute $20 million toward cleanup costs for the Bunker Hill Mine, and provide almost $1 million a year for water treatment.

In exchange, the new Bunker Hill Mining Corp. and the property’s previous operator were absolved of any responsibility for past toxic releases. The slate, if not the Coeur d’Alene watershed, would be wiped clean.

The deal foundered in September, after metals prices dropped and investors balked at pouring more money into a mining project led by a majority shareholder who is facing, of all things, Securities and Exchange Commission charges for mining fraud.

But the consent decree to let bygones be bygones still stands, available for use by Bunker Hill Mining or whatever operator succeeds it.

One way or another, the Bunker Hill Mine, one of the most prodigious polluters in American history, appears destined for a “fresh start,” as the EPA put it in its March announcement celebrating the deal.

Bunker Hill closed in 1981 because it couldn’t comply with U.S. clean air and water laws.

Its owner at the time, Gulf Resources & Chemical Corp., declared bankruptcy, walking away from its pension obligations to its workers and stiffing the EPA for the cleanup bill.

Gulf’s chief executive officer, David John Rowland, moved home to Britain, where he is a lavish contributor to the U.K.’s Conservative Party.

Other mining companies came and went; none could figure out how to make money while saddled with Bunker Hill’s pollution liabilities.

That changed under a U.S. president who has promised to revive traditional industries in rural and blue-collar America, come what may.

Bunker Hill makes a juicy target. In 1991, geologists estimated it still had 9.1 million tons of minable ore. Under the new operators’ plan to mine 1,500 tons a day, that’s 16 years’ worth.

Those estimates date back 27 years and cover only reserves compliant with SEC disclosure standards for “proven and probable” mineral bodies.

In September, Bunker Hill Mining filed a technical report with Canadian securities regulators upgrading its “exploration target” for two zones within the mine to 10 million to 12 million ore-tons, with metals concentrations four to seven times higher than in the 1991 estimates.

Laced with fat veins of zinc and lead and to a lesser extent silver, Uncle Bunker, as locals once called the mine, boasts a labyrinth of tunnels almost the length of New York City’s subway system, on 31 levels spanning 6,000 vertical feet. Some of the passages have shifted and crumbled and need shoring up, but most are ready to roll rock.

“This thing’s got 200 miles of tunnels already built and an ore body that’s only one-third mined,” says Robert “Bobby” Genovese, the Canadian investor who put together the original deal. “It’s like buying the New York Yankees!”

Genovese was a peculiar choice on the part of the EPA, even considering the rogues and swashbucklers who helped build the American West.

He’s a penny-stock pitchman whose companies operate polo clubs, boutique hotels, cowboy-themed restaurants, and a fleet of Florida yachts—one of which, a 75-footer, was seized by U.S. marshals in February for $1.6 million in unpaid debt.

He’s also fighting SEC charges of fraud and securities violations stemming from a dubious mining investment in Nevada. Genovese is as brash and checkered as a mega-Superfund mining promoter could be.

The reprieve for Bunker Hill was vintage Scott Pruitt. During his tumultuous 16 months in office, he pushed cleanup and reuse of Superfund sites with the same ardor he brought to gutting regulations protecting the nation’s air and water.

The rehabilitation of toxic facilities was part of “refocusing” the EPA on its “core mission,” Pruitt said—ignoring that President Richard Nixon created the EPA a decade before the Superfund law explicitly to prevent pollution from harming the environment.

Mining has never entirely stopped in the Silver Valley, but output fell sharply when Bunker Hill closed and laid off 2,200 workers. The EPA and its hundreds of contractors were greeted like an occupying army.

Families who’d lived on mining incomes for decades rejected the whole idea that pollution was a serious problem.

From their point of view, the worst contaminant in North Idaho was the federal government, in thrall to effete environmentalists on the coasts.

“Somebody somewhere else is always sticking his nose into your town, like everybody in Hollywood complaining about hunting grizzlies,” says Gary Sheppard, a fourth-generation Silver Valley miner who now drives 11 hours, four times a month, to a mining job in Nevada. “You don’t see grizzly bears being reintroduced to California.”
READ MORE…