Sickened and radicalized
More than 30 years after the fact, mining pollution in the Silver Valley of North Idaho still is taking a toll, recent articles in this newspaper have shown. Silver Valley children, when the Centers for Disease Control tested them in the 1970s, had the highest blood-lead levels ever recorded in the United States. Many of those children have gone on to raise their own children in houses whose heating ducts, crawl spaces and carpeting test high in lead.
Those offspring lack the health care needed to detect and combat lead in their blood. It’s not that the parents can’t afford health care, and it’s not that the state of Idaho is denying the potential hazards. The problem is that “blame, shame and guilt” keep parents from taking their kids in for tests.
One man has chosen to go public with his gamut of health challenges. Cass Davis, 45, was “leaded” as a child by smelter fallout from the Bunker Hill silver mine. His claimed afflictions include infertility, ADHD, prostate problems and more. Davis now lives in Moscow, Idaho.
“The worst are the racing thoughts,” he reported in sad candor. “Racing thoughts is the way I talk about the ADHD.” Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, among a range of other troubles, makes it hard for him to focus on words, on work, on books or films. His unruly thoughts race away.
Davis was one of some 600 children whom owners of the Bunker Hill smelter knowingly sacrificed to boost profits. A fire ruined the anti-pollution filters in Gulf Resources’ “bag house” in 1973. To fix them would mean a costly delay. Handwritten notes from that era calculate the number of children – laborers’ kids, kids like Davis – who would sicken if production stayed on pace. Gulf multiplied them by a per-child settlement price.
Tons of lead rained down between September 1973 and April 1974. The projected cost of the poisoned kids – calculated at some $7 million, their lives discounted via the emerging science of risk analysis – proved worth it all, once a record $26 million in profits came home to roost that year.
Davis holds left-of-center political beliefs. He has seen social and environmental wreckage that jades his outlook. “Shrewd business people worldwide leave a trail of polluted rivers, destroyed economies and unclean air.” His experiences in the toxic Silver Valley, combined with his parents’ unionism when he was growing up, radicalized him.
In 1981, Gulf shut down its legendary smelter – “Uncle Bunker,” as most locals referred to it, Idaho’s largest employer. The shutdown threw some 2,200 employees out of work and plunged the valley into a depression Davis remembers well. He got free “hot-lunch tickets,” but sometimes he went hungry at noon to trade his tickets for much-needed cash.
In 1999 he joined the WTO protests in Seattle, along with a number of other residents from Spokane, giving action to his belief that “greed knows no borders.” Davis is not a cynic or a defeatist, he says. Rather he is “an undisciplined idealist,” one who believes in social change but is too lazy to work very hard for it.
Meantime, residents of Spokane – especially those who don’t enjoy “a place at the lake” – are learning that the beaches of the upper Spokane River contain the highest concentrations of poisonous metals on any waterway in the state. Gov. Chris Gregoire’s office demanded from the federal government and the state of Idaho that the Spokane River be considered in any remediation plans.
In the Coeur d’Alene River, Davis waded into thigh-high water. He reached down and came up with a double scoop of mud mixed with lead and other heavy metals. “I have no health insurance,” he said. “I can’t afford to see a doctor, and so I can never know whether my physical or mental problems are serious, normal or related to my exposures.” The good news is that he is on the mend.
The poor take every cataclysm on the chin. The children of the Gulf of Mexico oil gusher – kids of fishermen and others in maritime trades – time will tell if they become jaded, sickened, ostracized and radicalized like Davis.