A career of occupational hazards

Jake Jakobosky wanted a job that reflected his love of nature, but he ended up spending most of his career in the ugliest and most abused landscapes of the Northwest.

There were meth labs, a series of poisonous mines, a toxic landfill and even a stretch of burning highway.

On Friday, after 29 years – the last 15 in Spokane – Jakobosky retired from his job coordinating hazardous waste cleanups for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Spokane office.

Colleagues describe him as a quiet force, a man who worked behind the scenes to ensure polluted sites were cleaned up.

“Sometimes you can just get bogged down in the sheer amount of approval processes you have to go through, but he had the patience to do it and the technical ability,” said Kelly Courtright, who oversees current mining projects for the BLM.

“He had extremely high standards and a real respect for natural resources. His career reflects that.”

Jakobosky said he feels a satisfaction in knowing he helped clean up some of the state’s most toxic sites, but the list of polluted areas remains long, and he worries that continuing federal budget cuts will only make it harder for the work to continue. The U.S. Forest Service is facing deep funding cuts – the agency is even being asked to sell off 300,000 acres to help fund federal programs. BLM offices are being told to prepare for several years of 5 percent annual funding decreases, Jakobosky said.

“That really snowballs,” he said Tuesday at his Spokane home. “They’re going to be spread real thin. There won’t be many people watching the land.”

Overall budgets are flat or decreasing, but President Bush has proposed a $25 million increase in next year’s budget for BLM programs aimed at finding new sources of oil, gas and minerals on federal lands, including Alaska’s North Slope.

Jakobosky said his passion for cleaning up polluted sites stems from a childhood in rural Oregon, where he hunted, fished and roamed the countryside with his dog.

College had him studying wildlife and range science. He worked for Weyerhauser before landing a job with the BLM. His first big project after transferring to Spokane in 1991 was the cleanup of an old landfill near the north-central Washington community of Oroville.

It wasn’t hard to locate the site’s buried toxic waste, Jakobosky recalled – the soil was so laden with chemicals, including the banned pesticide DDT, that wooden surveyor stakes pounded into the ground years earlier had been totally protected against hungry insects.

Much of his work focused on cleaning up long-abandoned hardrock mines, including the Kaaba-Texas mine near Oroville.

The project involved removing 25 feet of piled mine tailings, laden with lead and zinc. The toxic tailings spilled into the nearby Similkameen River.

Near Metaline Falls, Jakobosky helped with the cleanup of the Josephine Mill.

Every rainfall, poisonous tailings from the old mine would flow into a nearby creek and eventually the Pend Oreille River.

Many of the abandoned mines are small and hard to find, Jakobosky said. In the late 1990s, he was tipped off about a small, out-of-the-way creek in Ferry County that sometimes flowed with red water.

He investigated and found water with high levels of arsenic and lead coming out of an old mine shaft. Nothing grew in the area. The site, known as the Cleveland Mine, has since been restored and is now covered with grasses and trees. Frogs and brook trout have even been found in the creek.

“I’ve gotten the biggest mines – the ones we knew about – but new ones keep showing up,” Jakobosky said.

The nonprofit group Westerners for Responsible Mining estimates there could be as many as 500,000 abandoned hard rock mines in the United States.

Government agencies are just starting to scratch the surface of identifying and cleaning up these sites, said Don Abbott, manager of the toxics cleanup program for the Washington Department of Ecology’s central region.

Abbott, who worked with Jakobosky on several projects, said finding a way to pay for the cleanup can be almost as difficult as fixing the mess. But Jakobosky somehow managed to find the money, Abbott said.

Although Jakobosky left the West cleaner than he found it, Abbott said more than enough work remains for the next generation. “It’s going to take hundreds of years.”

Jakobosky said he did what he could. Now, he plans to turn his focus to fly-fishing and overseeing improvement projects in his backyard garden.