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Another busy year for EPA cleanup projects

DAVID COLE/dcole@cdapress.com | Hagadone News Network | UPDATED 10 years, 3 months AGO
by DAVID COLE/dcole@cdapress.com
| May 14, 2015 9:00 PM

COEUR d'ALENE - Federal officials plan to spend $35 million this spring and summer in the Silver Valley doing cleanup of historic mining waste and pollution.

"The cleanup is still in a very aggressive phase in terms of the amount of work we're doing," Bill Adams said Tuesday. Adams is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Coeur d'Alene River Basin team leader.

A majority of the work is being done by the Coeur d'Alene Work Trust, using mostly local contractors that will directly employ more than 400 people. Money was placed into the trust from the settlement with the Asarco mining company.

Money in the trust is being spent in a way that allows the trust to grow through investment, Adams said. The current balance in the trust is $530 million, which is more than $100 million more than where officials started five years ago.

"We've done a significant amount of work and yet it's still continuing to grow," Adams said.

The Upper Coeur d'Alene River Basin cleanup is estimated to cost $635 million, and lower basin cleanup costs haven't been quantified.

"There's more work than dollars available, so the idea is that the trust would continue to grow," Adams said.

Along with getting the cleanup work done, those in charge of the project must be good stewards of the trust funds, said Terry Harwood, executive director of the Basin Environmental Improvement Project Commission.

"These guys are all responsible for those funds, and they need to be spent in a proper way," Harwood said Tuesday.

This summer, workers will finish removing Interstate-Callahan Mine rock-dump material and placing it into the waste consolidation area built high in Nine Mile Canyon northeast of Wallace.

Construction of that waste consolidation area was finished last year, and approximately 120,000 cubic yards of material from the Interstate-Callahan was deposited there.

The waste material releases high concentrations of dissolved zinc and other metals like lead into streams and groundwater, so it needs to be placed high and dry in the waste consolidation area.

Dan Meyer, senior program manager for the Coeur d'Alene Work Trust, said 60,000 cubic yards will be removed from the Interstate-Callahan dump sites this summer. A stream channel through the mine dump site also will be rebuilt.

Work is continuing this summer on the expansion of the Big Creek Repository, giving it approximately 400,000 cubic yards of additional space.

Work is also being done on the Lower Burke Canyon Repository, which will be ready to begin receiving material in a couple weeks, Meyer said. That repository is in Wallace near Woodland Park.

There will be five "remedy protection projects" under construction this summer, Meyer said. These infrastructure projects protect previously cleaned areas from being re-contaminated during flooding events.

One of the big ones will be at Revenue Gulch in Silverton, which has had a lot of past water issues.

"We'll be there most of the summer working on that one," Meyer said. "It includes quite a number of the side streets and then the main channel of Revenue Creek that runs down through Silverton."

Another remedy protection project this summer will be at Mill Road in Mullan, Meyer said.

Bruce Schuld, Kellogg remediation manager for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said 75 residential or commercial properties will be cleaned up this summer, compared with 128 last year.

The residential cleanups will be in Mullan, Wallace, Osburn and some outlying areas.

"We're also doing a review of all of the sites (that have been cleaned up over the years)," Schuld said. "We're reviewing those to make sure we don't have any holes in the remediation as we move forward."

More than 17 miles of roads will be demolished and re-paved this summer, Schuld said.

"The East Side Highway District in Kootenai County is paving a significant portion of its highway down through the Chain Lakes," Schuld said. "The cities of Pinehurst, Smelterville, Kellogg - all the communities have very substantial projects."

About $9 million in paved road work will be done this summer, Schuld said.

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