Hecla Mining Co. settles one of the largest suits in EPA history - now the work begins
Earlier this week, the largest and oldest owner of Idaho's silver mine, Hecla Mining Co., reached a $263.4 million settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the state to clean up historic mine waste in the Coeur d’Alene Basin. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, this settlement ranks among the top ten settlements in Superfund history.
Is it enough? Well, the money will be used to cleanup lead, arsenic and other heavy metals from their mining operations that have polluted 160 miles of the Coeur d’Alene River, its shoreline and downstream water bodies including Lake Coeur d’Alene and the Spokane River.
The Spokesman reported about 150 tundra swans died this spring after ingesting toxic doses of lead in marshes along the Coeur d’Alene River and many of the river’s tributaries are too polluted to support fish.
Terry Harris has been following this issue for a long time at the Kootenai Environmental Alliance.
He weighed in at his excellent blog for KEA:
Indeed, with the litigation largely resolved, the financing largely settled, and with the cleanup plans for the upper basin to be approved soon, the Coeur d’Alene basin cleanup may be entering a new era. Collaboration and cooperation should be much more prevalent as the cleanup continues from the upper reaches of the Coeur d’Alene basin down to the Coeur d’Alene Lake.
In fact, planning for the lower basin cleanup is just now getting underway. Along those lines, a more formal collaborative effort is in the early stages of being formed to engage stakeholders in designing the lower basin cleanup work. The cleanup of the waterways and shorelines between Cataldo and Harrison will be complex and expensive. Indeed, some approaches could still be quite controversial. However, without the specter of ongoing litigation, the cleanup should proceed less acrimoniously. We certainly look forward to getting on with it.
I've been following the cleanup for years with the Eastern Mission Flats repository and I agree with Terry, this seems like a new era for the Coeur d' Alene Basin. The EPA has been performing cleanup work in the area since 1981 - despite all that time, the federal government is estimating $2 billion worth of cleanup remains. As The Spokane Riverkeeper said after news of the settlement, "now the real work begins."
