Cleanup to create 400 Silver Valley jobs

If you don’t like dump trucks, stay out of Idaho’s Silver Valley this summer.

More than $20 million work of environmental cleanup work in the historic mining district this year will create about 400 jobs and untold numbers of truckloads full of dirt.

A cleanup of old mining sites in Nine Mile Canyon outside of Wallace will result in the movement of 150,000 cubic yards of contaminated dirt. Additional projects will resurface roads and put clean dirt over contaminated areas, all with the goal of preventing the spread of heavy metals in the nation’s second largest Superfund site.

“We’re getting a lot of work done,” said Bill Adams, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manager at a Tuesday briefing in Coeur d’Alene.

The work is being paid for out of a trust funded by Asarco LLC through the company’s 2009 bankruptcy settlement. EPA has been spending about $20 million annually on cleanup projects in the Coeur d’Alene basin for the past six years/ Becky Kramer , SR. More here.