Osburn Kids Get Safer Place To Play Epa Replaces Contaminated Soil At School To Limit Lead Exposure

A new carpet of grass covers the ball field at Osburn Elementary School. Fresh bark mulch will cushion the falls of children launched off swings next to Wallace High School.

More than an outdoor makeover, the improvements will limit Silver Valley students’ exposure to lead from mining pollution.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is paying contractors to dig up contaminated soil and put clean dirt in its place.

Osburn Elementary is the first completed schoolyard outside the 21-square-mile Bunker Hill Superfund site. Soil in the ball field and in front of the school was polluted by lead at more than 2-1/2 times the federal cleanup threshold.

As federal officials celebrated the milestone Tuesday, elementary pupils poured onto the playground near the ball field for recess.

Students and teachers like the look, regardless of the reason.

“I want you to know that all of our children went out and pulled all the weeds!” first-grade teacher Cindy Doney yelled from an open door.

Looking on, a representative from Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s office watched with a little more skepticism.

Kempthorne’s office agrees that human health concerns need to be addressed, “but our approach is different,” said Damon Darakjy, Kempthorne’s North Idaho mining cleanup coordinator.

The state wants cleanup projects to be based on individual cases of high lead levels.

“Random soil removals do not necessarily mean you’re going to achieve lower blood lead levels in children,” Darakjy said. Lead-based paint or metals in household dust are also factors, he said.

The schoolyard was cleaned up to make sure children aren’t exposed to abnormally high amounts of lead, said Dick Martindale, EPA’s Coeur d’Alene community liaison. Lead, especially in children, can cause mental and physical retardation if inhaled or swallowed. “We don’t wait till kids exhibit signs of lead poisoning,” Martindale said.

Though the towns outside Bunker Hill are not part of Superfund, the EPA has money to pay for cleanups where lead poses a potential health risk. An ongoing study into cleaning up metals in the Coeur d’Alene River basin won’t be done until next year.

So far, the agency has spent $895,000 on school cleanups - $140,000 each at Osburn and Wallace. At Wallace, lead measured up to 6,000 parts per million, three times the 2,000 ppm cleanup standard. At Silver Hills Middle School in Osburn, $615,000 has been spent cleaning up lead levels that ranged from nearly 10,000 ppm on the soil’s surface to 63,400 ppm between 12 and 18 inches below ground.

The agency recently sampled soil at other schools, including Canyon School in Cataldo; three Mullan schools; and Silver Meadows Adventist between Cataldo and Rose Lake.

All the schools fall within the reach of historic mining activities in the Silver Valley. Contaminated soils washed down the Coeur d’Alene River over decades, blew out of Bunker Hill’s smokestacks in Smelterville, and even went into fill used to bolster roadways and buildings throughout the drainage.

The EPA called schools in the Coeur d’Alene River basin to suggest soil samples be done, Martindale said, but the agency doesn’t test or clean up without voluntary school participation.

Laws requiring disclosure of the amount of lead in soils fall into a gray area, EPA officials have said. And unlike Coeur d’Alene River beaches where EPA merely wants to post signs, many schoolyards are getting quick cleanups.

A few parents say Silver Valley schools should do more to inform them and their kids about metals in schoolyards.

Tina Paddock, a former Wallace resident who now lives in Oregon, wrote to Idaho’s schools Superintendent Marilyn Howard to get metals warnings in student manuals.

“This is my effort to get people informed,” Paddock said recently.

Wallace School District Superintendent Nancy Vandeventer in July drafted a three-sentence paragraph for the manual telling parents, “we always advise our students to wash after playing outdoors and keep soil, etc., out of their mouths.”

But the Wallace school board decided against the wording in August, Vandeventer said, because board members had no reason to think that the soil poses a risk to children.

Vandeventer said she and board members were reassured by information from the Panhandle Health District.

“It didn’t surface as something we needed to attend to,” Vandeventer said. “Experts were not telling us, `You need to do something about this.”’

Zaz Hollander can be reached at (208) 765-7129 or by e-mail at zazh@spokesman.com. This sidebar appeared with the story: REPORT Cleanup A progress report on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s mining pollution cleanup outside the Bunker Hill Superfund site includes: 17 residential yards cleaned up this summer; about 150 to be sampled by winter. Paved parking lots capping contamination at boat launches at Anderson and Thompson lakes.