Superfund Review Lists Site’S Needs

Having demolished the smelter, seeded the hillsides and scraped the valley floor, the Environmental Protection Agency is fine-tuning its cleanup of toxic metals at the Bunker Hill industrial site.

The truck portion of the RV park on the Smelterville Flats needs to be reseeded. A closer look is needed to see if trail bike access should be limited on hillsides and gulches. Thicker dirt barriers are needed in some places along the old railroad right-of-way.

Those are among the “deficiencies” listed in an EPA review of the last five years of work at the Superfund site. The most significant deficiency mentioned has to do with the Page Pond cleanup, which is the responsibility not of EPA but of the Hecla, Sunshine and ASARCO mining companies. In that case, the ground and surface water monitoring programs were found to be deficient.

Among the report’s recommendations:

Evaluate the need for additional efforts to encourage vegetative growth at the Page Mine Waste Rock Dump.

Evaluate the sitewide monitoring program to confirm that appropriate data are being gathered.

Inspect walls to catch runoff at the base of Smelterville and Wardner hillsides to determine if additional action is necessary to prevent recontamination.

Develop and implement a biological monitoring program.

Clean out the sediment from the bottom of the Lined Pond.

Evaluate the need to cover mine waste and tailings disposed in the Milo Creek Guy Caves area with clean material.

The report also calls for evaluating whether official documents need to be written to explain several changes from the original remediation plans. Those decisions included removing more mine tailings from the Smelterville Flats, not building a wetland treatment system for ground and surface water, and not building a system to collect water seeping from the Central Impoundment Area.

The Bunker Hill Superfund site covers 21 square miles intersected by the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River. A separate five-year review of cleanup in populated areas was released in April.

This sidebar appeared with the story:

IF YOU GO

Meeting tonight

The draft Five-Year Report for the Non-Populated Areas at Bunker Hill Superfund site will be discussed at a public meeting this evening. It will be held from 7 to 10 p.m. at the Kellogg Middle School library, 810 Bunker Ave.

The document and its executive summary is available on the Internet. It can be reached by visiting the site www.epa.gov/r10earth, then following the Superfund link to Bunker Hill information.

Copies are also available at the Kellogg Public Library and Pinehurst/Kingston Library.