Time To Zinc Or Swim On Tailings Cleanup Momentum Is Building For Solution To North Idaho Mine-Waste Pollution

Fall floods have chomped away at the Pine Creek shoreline, which in some spots is nothing but piles of mining waste.

Federal scientist Dave Fortier stood on one such tailings pile recently. On the hill above him were the wooden ruins of the Liberal King ore processing mill. Beside him was a chest-high embankment carved by raging water.

During high runoff, Pine Creek is a major source of the zinc, lead and other metals that flow downstream into the Coeur d’Alene River, Lake Coeur d’Alene, the Spokane River and beyond.

“People can’t fathom that nature has the energy to do this,” Fortier said.

The Bureau of Land Management land is riddled with historic mines, mill sites and tailings dumps - those often reddish piles of grit where even bugs don’t like to live.

For 16 years, Fortier has fretted over the need to keep the metals out of the water.

“We just never come up with the resolve and the wherewithal to do something about it,” he said.

That may change.

Momentum is building toward a once-and-for-all solution to the metals contamination. Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, has promised to introduce legislation that would combine money from federal taxpayers and mining companies to do the work.

In a drainage long ago stripped of trees and made unstable by tumbling rock, Pine Creek moves back and forth with each flood. In late November, it took a bite out of Pine Creek Road.

Fish avoid parts of the creek, because there’s nowhere for them to find food or cover.

Fortier has been preparing a report in which he recommends seven top-priority cleanup sites.

“All involve mill sites, all adjoin a stream, and all have obvious releases of material into the stream,” said Fortier.

The report is required by the federal law that also governs Superfund sites - one of which, Bunker Hill, is next to the Pine Creek lands.

The report will be out early next year for public comment. It will include the Liberal King site, a 1930s-era ore processing mill operated during Pine Creek’s mining heyday. That was during World War II and after, when zinc became especially valuable.

Most of the Pine Creek mills shut down in the 1950s. The silver discoveries were never as rich as they were in drainages to the east, said Bob Rice, a director for the Nabob Silver Lead Co.

The Nabob mill operated until the early 1980s. While it’s on Fortier’s priority list, it’s clean compared to the others.

“We think we’ve done a good job of correcting any problems that were on the Nabob property,” said Rice.

The company put soil on top of the tailings pile, seeded it with grass, and used rock to reinforce the channel of adjacent Nabob Creek.

As far as Rice is concerned, the BLM tends to overstate the dangers from metals.

Mark Kleinbeck has a different view.

He lives next door to the Nabob where, last year, the BLM put chain-link fence around it to discourage children from playing on the tailings pile.

Kleinbeck said his four sons have learned to keep out. But he said he would never have bought the bright green house three years ago if he’d known about the metals.

“I had no idea that mining wastes were dangerous,” said Kleinbeck, a mechanic who came west from New York state. “I wanted my kids to be able to run around and play and not worry about the danger of growing up with gangs and drugs - and come to find out there’s hazardous material right next door.”

No one lives near the other six sites Fortier has identified for priority cleanup. Those are the Amy, Denver, Sidney, Highland-Surprise, Douglas and Upper Constitution mills.

Parts of those mills, their waste-rock piles and tailings, are on private lands. The Pine Creek drainage is a hodgepodge of intermingled ownership, with the BLM managing 42 percent, or 21,800 acres.

The cooperation of landowners is critical to cleanup efforts, Fortier said.

“Without their help and support, there’s not much we can really do,” he said.

The government will likely find cooperation, but no one with money to contribute, Rice said. “Some have sold their timber just to keep paying their taxes.”

, DataTimes