Lead Levels Lower Near Bunker Hill Children At Superfund Site Improve; Blood-Lead Levels Rise Slightly Elsewhere

Kids living inside the Bunker Hill Superfund site are showing the lowest levels of lead in their blood since government studies started 12 years ago.

But blood-lead levels rose slightly this year in children who live in Coeur d’Alene River towns outside Bunker Hill, according to 1999 blood screening results.

Compared with kids living in the Superfund site, nearly twice the number of kids outside Bunker Hill have blood-lead levels exceeding national health standards.

Statistics released Thursday by the Panhandle Health District showed that of 370 kids tested inside the Superfund site, 23 had blood-lead levels higher than 10 micrograms per liter - the national health standard.

That’s about 6 percent, almost down to the 5 percent goal set by Superfund officials nine years ago.

At Bunker Hill, mining and smelting pollution cleanup is apparently working, health officials said.

“Overall on the site, it’s basically good news,” said Ian von Lindern, president of Moscow-based Terra-Graphics Environmental Engineering, a contractor evaluating the data. But outside the 21-square-mile Superfund “box,” it’s still a different story.

Of 272 children sampled from near Cataldo to Mullan, 10 percent had blood-lead levels above the health standard. Last year, 9 percent of 128 kids were at that level.

“The basin appears to be a little bit higher than the box,” von Lindern said.

While federally-funded cleanup removed mining and smelting pollution from Bunker Hill, the bulk of contaminated sediment outside that area remains in place. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Idaho officials are wrangling over future plans to remove lead and other heavy metals.

The statistics, released at a monthly meeting of the Bunker Hill Task Force, elicited some doubts from audience members.

Kellogg Mayor Roger Magnum questioned the validity of the blood work. The sampling “drops” children once they reach the age of nine - even with marginally high blood-lead - and includes recent transplants to the basin who may not have sustained lead exposure there, Magnum said.

“It’s kind of skewing your test,” he said.

The health district screens kids from nine months to nine years. After age nine, play habits change enough that children aren’t exposed to dirt and their blood-lead levels drop, district staffer Jerry Cobb said. But von Lindern acknowledged that the tests are complicated by the area’s mobile population. About half the kids tested have lived for less than a year in their current home; 30 percent came in within six months.

Cobb said health officials interview kids with high levels to find out how they were exposed to lead.

Cut in Spokane Edition