Deadline Looms For Smokestacks Preservationists Must Have Proposal For Epa By Jan. 4

People trying to save at least one Bunker Hill smokestack for posterity are running out of time.

“We haven’t gotten too far along yet,” acknowledged Ron Eggart, one of many Silver Valley residents who want to preserve the largest stack as a museum and mining memorial. “We’re hoping that they can extend that deadline.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has given the save-the-stackers until Jan. 4 to submit a proposal for long-term care of one of the concrete stacks. The two largest stacks, built 18 years ago, tower over Smelterville and Kellogg. The largest stands 715 feet tall.

Proponents feel the stacks lend a distinctive skyline to the Silver Valley. Critics agree, but say that skyline is ugly.

The EPA has proposed blowing up the stacks, which are contaminated from years of lead and zinc smelting. A final decision on the stacks’ fate is expected by Feb. 2, said EPA spokeswoman Krista Rave.

To leave a stack standing, EPA project manager Howard Blood in Seattle said, the agency wants assurances that someone is backing the project financially. Someone, for example, must agree to maintain the airplane-warning strobe lights that ring the stacks and also pay the electric bills.

Blood said organizers would also likely have to post a bond, so that if the maintenance project folds, the stack could still come down.

“That’s the biggie,” said Blood. “Once EPA gets out of there, it’s going to be real tough to go back in there with Superfund money.”

The EPA estimates it will cost $400,000 to demolish the two biggest stacks.

Blood said there is a chance, however, that the agency would leave one stack - the zinc smelter stack farthest from Interstate 90 - standing. It may prove to be cheaper to decontaminate it, leave it standing and pay the light bill than to knock it down, break it up and haul it away, he said.

There are no such concerns about the lead stack, he said, because the demolition crew can drop it right into a landfill area, saving the hauling cost.

If a stack is left standing, it will be turned over to the state of Idaho, which has responsibility for the Superfund site once EPA is done with the cleanup. The stacks tower over a 21-square-mile area contaminated by smelter emissions and decades of water runoff leaching through mining wastes.

The state, Blood said, could transfer ownership of the stack to a non-profit group - or the group could simply manage the proposed stack museum and visitor’s center.

Brenda Auld, a leader of the effort to save the stacks, criticized EPA’s Jan. 4 deadline, calling it unrealistic.

“If we’re to get approval for non-profit status, it takes months, even if we overnight-mail it to the secretary of state’s office,” she said. Local lawyers, she said, are volunteering their time to prepare the necessary paperwork.

Until the save-the-stackers are approved as a non-profit group, she said, they cannot begin the necessary fund raising.

Blood said the EPA could delay the deadline until late February. But after that, he said, delaying the demolition further will begin costing EPA and taxpayers - money. The demolition contractor, Boise-based Morrison Knudsen Co., will need to commit workers by late February, he said.

“We’re spending enough out there without spending more,” said Blood.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo