Epa Picks Bellwether Beaches Studies Will Help Guide Cleanup Downstream From Mines

Scientists studying the legacy of Idaho’s mining pollution will zero in on four Spokane River beaches where elevated lead and arsenic levels pose hazards to recreationists.

The beaches are immediately downstream of the Idaho state line in the Spokane Valley.

They are contaminated with lead and arsenic flushed into the river from Lake Coeur d’Alene, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s draft human health risk assessment of the river.

At a public meeting tonight in Spokane, EPA officials will present their risk findings and outline plans for further sampling along the shoreline.

Sediments at River Road 95, the closest beach to the Idaho state line, contain lead at twice the levels considered safe for recreation and are also laced with cancer-causing arsenic at nearly three times the safe limit, the EPA report says.

The other beaches - at Harvard Road North, Barker Road North and Flora Road - have elevated arsenic levels, the EPA notes.

Lead is a developmental toxin that can cause behavior changes and mental retardation in children.

Swallowing water or soil that contains arsenic can increase the risk of skin cancer in children and adults.

If the Spokane River beaches were private yards, Washington state’s toxic waste cleanup rules would require a far stricter lead cleanup - to no more than 250 parts per million instead of the 700-ppm threshold the EPA has proposed for the beaches in the draft risk assessment.

“Our toxic cleanup standards don’t apply to the Spokane River,” said John Roland of the Washington Department of Ecology.

The EPA risk assessment assumes that children will visit the river beaches two days a week for 10 or more hours per visit from June through September.

Michelle Nanni, coordinator of the “Get The Lead Out” campaign for the Lands Council, a Spokane environmental group, encouraged people to attend tonight’s meeting.

Public input “will help determine whether the heavy metals in the river and along the banks are cleaned up or whether we will be forced to just settle for health warning signs as protection for our children in the future,” Nanni said.

The Lands Council wants the EPA to study more beaches because their contractor for the Spokane River study, the U.S. Geological Survey, detected elevated levels of heavy metals in other places along the river.

The discovery of the metals pollution prompted the Spokane Regional Health District to post warning signs along popular public beaches last year. The temporary signs became permanent this year.

Last month, regulators issued a new health advisory warning pregnant women and small children not to eat whole fish caught from the Idaho state line to the Seven Mile Bridge because the fish contain elevated lead levels.

The advisory also set limits on consumption of fish fillets for children and pregnant women.

The EPA risk assessment is part of a sweeping plan for mining pollution cleanup that may eventually extend from the Silver Valley in Idaho to Lake Roosevelt in Washington.

It includes an analysis of human health and ecological risks of the metals contamination, along with cleanup options for problem areas, such as the Spokane River beaches.

Basin-wide cleanup was given further impetus by a draft study released by the state of Idaho last week.

The study revealed that a quarter of all 2-year-olds in the Coeur d’Alene River basin have elevated amounts of lead in their blood.

The worst pollution was found in side canyons between Bunker Hill and Mullan and in the lower Coeur d’Alene River around Cataldo and Wallace, the study said.

The Idaho study recommended that hundreds of residents’ yards be cleaned up to between 400 and 800 ppm.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled that the EPA can chase Superfund cleanups where pollutants “come to be located” - in this case, far downstream from the mines.

That opinion vacated a ruling by an Idaho federal judge, who had said the Superfund cleanup was restricted to the original 21-square-mile area near Kellogg where cleanup has been under way since 1992 and is due to be finished in about a year. That effort has cleaned up lead to 1,000 ppm in soils.

Idaho mining companies had argued the Superfund effort shouldn’t be expanded because they are addressing the source of the pollution.

The EPA’s draft human health risk assessment for the Spokane River can be seen on the Internet at http:// yosemite.epa.gov/r10/cleanup.nsf/ sites/cda. Public comment on the document closes Aug. 18.

The Washington advisory committee will meet again at Ecology’s Spokane office on Aug. 10 for decisions on the committee’s formal comments to EPA.

The EPA study of the entire Coeur d’Alene Basin will wind up next spring.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

MEETING

Tonight’s meeting of the Washington Citizens Advisory Committee on the mining cleanup starts at 7 p.m. at the Washington Department of Ecology office, N. 4601 Monroe in Spokane.

Karen Dorn Steele can be reached at (509) 459-5462 or by e-mail at karend@spokesman.com.