Legacy Of Lead Floods Spread Mine Waste Toxic Metals From Old Mine Tailing Piles Migrate Through Cda River Basin
Two-year-old Lee Anna Sexton likes to play in the dirt.
Any dirt will do.
Even toxic dirt.
“Get out of the dirt,” her mother scolds as Lee Anna scrapes the earth floor of her grandpa’s garage with a rock.
Last summer, Lee Anna’s blood was tested for lead.
The results stunned her parents.
Lee Anna had nearly twice the amount of lead in her blood than what is considered safe, enough to cause hearing problems, stunted growth and reduced intelligence in some people.
Her mother, Lila Sexton, says it’s pretty clear where the lead came from - upstream. It landed in their house and yard during the February 1996 flood.
The family lives five miles west of the Bunker Hill Superfund site, a 21-square-mile area polluted by the now-defunct Bunker Hill smelter. Lee Anna’s blood lead levels are higher than those of most kids who live inside the Superfund area.
The threat of lead poisoning isn’t confined to the area coated by smelter fallout in the 1970s.
Heavy metals from old mine and mill tailings are washing downstream, sowing hot spots of lead in the basin like patches of poison ivy.
The lead lurks in narrow gulches near the Montana line, in the banks of the Coeur d’Alene River, along the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and all the way downstream to where the Spokane River empties into the Columbia.
When the lead washes up high and dry on the flood plain, it becomes more of a danger to children like Lee Anna.
It’s not clear how many children have elevated blood lead levels in the Coeur d’Alene River Basin, which stretches from the Idaho/Montana border to Lake Coeur d’Alene. A state-sponsored health study launched last summer may find out.
Preliminary results are expected to be released this month.
Eventually, with samples of blood, soil, dust and house paint, state researchers hope to determine the health threat from lead washing downstream.
No one anticipates lead levels as high as those found during the ‘70s lead-poisoning epidemic from smelter emissions. Then, people were breathing smoke laced with lead. The fine particles settled everywhere, not just along the river.
Today, inside the Superfund site, communities tell newcomers how to reduce exposure to lead.
While the ongoing Superfund project is cleaning up mounds of lead from inside the site, cleanup in the rest of the basin is not guaranteed.
Some experts say the lead washing downstream from tailings piles is less toxic than the smelter dust.
“The emissions from a smelter are a very fine dust,” explains Steve Werner, an environmental consultant for the area’s mining companies. “Physically, the tailings are larger in size. They aren’t as susceptible to being ingested.”
Still, physician and environmental activist John Osborn says the downstream risk is obvious.
“As long as people live in these toxic watersheds, there will have to be a high level of vigilance to protect people at risk,” says Osborn, a board member of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council.
A year ago in February, the Coeur d’Alene River swelled over its banks and swamped the Sextons’ house with five feet of water.
Now Lee Anna is a 2-year-old insomniac with a tiny appetite. Her parents believe her lack of interest in sleep and food could be a result of lead poisoning.
Lead has been linked to hyperactivity in children and stomach problems.
“I believe she does have this because of the flood,” says Lila Sexton, 19. “At her age, she puts everything in her mouth.”
The Panhandle Health District counseled the family about reducing Lee Anna’s exposure to lead.
Neighbors had the flood-deposited sediment tested last spring, and found lead concentrations from 370 to 579 parts per million. Anything in the range of 500 to 1,000 ppm is believed to raise blood lead levels.
One family, the Irwins, moved their son to Kellogg until everything in their Cataldo home was cleaned after the flood.
But that didn’t take care of the yard.
Justin Irwin, 5, likes to play on his swing set, dig for buried treasure and brush his Appaloosa, Cocoa. He gets pretty dirty.
When Justin’s blood was tested for lead last summer, it measured on the high end of what’s considered safe.
“Here we have the fine silt,” explains his mother, Tina. “When it gets dry, it just poofs up under your feet … What bothers me is having a toddler who likes to go outside and play.”
A few miles upstream from the Irwins lies Smelterville Flats. A wooden plank dam used to cross the flats in the early part of the century, when mines and mills dumped waste directly into the valley’s streams and river.
This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency plans to start cleaning up a million cubic yards of contaminated flats, where concentrations of lead have ranged from 10,000 to 28,000 ppm.
That’s just one of several hot spots upstream from Cataldo. Most are along the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River or its tributaries.
For instance, Pine Creek above Pinehurst brought tons of mine tailings into the Coeur d’Alene River during last winter’s big flood.
The creek ate 50 feet out of one large tailings pile and chomped away at another half-dozen piles. The Bureau of Land Management was busy all last summer cleaning up the old tailings piles, but it can’t get everything out of nature’s way.
“If you look at the amounts we’re moving now compared to the amounts dumped in over 100 years, what we’re moving is a small amount … maybe only a tenth of what was originally dumped,” says Dave Fortier, BLM scientist. “Whether it will make a significant difference in the overall river system, I can’t really tell you at this time.”
When it washes downstream, most of the lead settles out below the confluence of the north and south forks of the Coeur d’Alene River.
From there, high water from the North Fork helps move it downstream. Flooding also erodes the riverbanks.
“Most of the banks have some level of contamination,” says Dave Brown of the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service. “You can pretty much say that anything that’s flooded is basically being recontaminated.”
The heavy metals that make it all the way to Lake Coeur d’Alene normally settle to the lake bottom. But during high water, the sediment - and lead attached to it - is mobile.
Last year, the state issued a health warning when lead in the lake exceeded drinking water standards for the first time. But because most residents either filter their water or draw it from the aquifer, the lead didn’t cause a public health crisis.
And while the lake’s fish contain a higher-than-average amount of lead, people who eat them do not, according to a 1989 federal study by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Some lead has traveled downstream, settling behind Spokane’s Upriver Dam.
The amount of lead in the Spokane River exceeds water quality standards for aquatic life, but is well within drinking water standards, according to a Washington Department of Ecology study.
The agency also found that rainbow trout in the Spokane River had elevated lead levels in their flesh, but health officials determined that people aren’t eating enough of the fish to warrant a warning.
If anglers comply with the one fish per day limit, “then it shouldn’t be a problem,” says Glen Patrick, a public health specialist.
The agency also sampled sediments and found levels behind Upriver Dam that could be a problem.
“We found places there where families go and kids go in the river,” Patrick says. “If kids are eating this stuff, it is bad for them. Is it causing adverse health effects? We don’t know.”
The amount of lead in the Spokane River banks is minuscule compared to what lines the Coeur d’Alene River upstream from Harrison.
“We’re talking thousands of acres … which is not safe for kids to be playing in,” says Phil Cernera, project manager for the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s Natural Resource Damage Assessment.
The assessment - a series of scientific studies on the environment - will be used as evidence in the tribe and federal government’s multimillion-dollar lawsuit against five mining companies accused of polluting the Coeur d’Alene Basin.
“People are hanging out on those beaches in the summer all the time,” Cernera says. “There are hot spots all the way down there.”
Nearly every picnic area and boat launch in the lower basin has a health warning sign.
The BLM plans to pave the boat ramp parking area at Killarney Lake so it can be hosed down after a flood. The state will plant hawthorn bushes around the Cataldo boat ramp to discourage people from tramping through contaminated soil.
But those measures won’t protect children playing elsewhere along the river.
Medimont resident Robert Hanson sometimes worries about those kids.
“I can imagine the silt they’re playing in is loaded with lead,” Hanson says. “I always kind of wonder about that when I see families down in those places.”
Still, people who spread doom and gloom about the condition of the lower basin are reminded by Rose Lake resident Michael White of how much worse things used to be.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s contaminated,” says White, 44. “But it’s a matter of degrees.”
As a kid, White tried in vain to save the lead-poisoned swans and geese by feeding them a mixture of vodka and grain mash - the elixir suggested by an “old guy” in Harrison, he recalls.
Once, White and his high school buddies were hanging out in Rose Lake after school one day when a car drove up with Washington plates.
The driver stepped out with a fishing pole to the amusement of White and his friends, who knew there weren’t any fish in the contaminated river.
“We laughed and we laughed until he pulled out a fish,” White says. “That was the first time we knew the fish were coming back.
“Now we have a sizable run of cutthroats that come through every year.” Other wildlife, such as moose, also have made a comeback.
Trees have grown tall, and barren flood plains now are covered with vegetation.
Some residents point to the changes as evidence that nature will clean up the basin. Eventually, the theory goes, the lead will wind up permanently at the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene.
It could take nature hundreds or thousands of years to flush out the basin, but no one has ever attempted to estimate the actual time, experts say.
The Sexton family isn’t waiting.
This spring, Lee Anna’s parents plan on making an outdoor play area with clean dirt. But whether they can contain their active tyke to that spot is questionable.
Moving isn’t in their plans.
Lila Sexton grew up in Cataldo and doesn’t feel she should have to leave to escape lead. Instead, she’d like to see the government or mining companies replace her lawn, like they have for residents in the Superfund site, and cleanup the mess.
“It’s there. It’s always going to be there,” she says of the pollution. “They need to fix it.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Color Photos Graphic: Hot spots for lead contamination in the Coeur d’Alene Basin
The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Susan Drumheller Staff writer Staff writer Ken Olsen contributed to this report.