EPA Announces $359 Million Basin Clean Up

Date: November 8, 2001

Source: News Room

The federal EPA has begun preparing to take bids for a $359 million clean up of the Silver Valley Mining Basin in the northwest United States. The contaminated Silver Valley Region is home of one of the EPA¹s most notorious "Superfund" sites, the Bunker Hill mine site in Kellogg, Idaho. While the agency has made much progress on the Bunker Hill smelter site, attention is now turning to the area along the 150 miles of the Coeur d'Alene river basin, from Montana to Washington State, creating the nation¹s largest Superfund site. For more than 100 years, mines in a 40-mile strip of the Idaho panhandle produced much of the nation¹s silver. The mining and smelting released lead and other dangerous metals into the Coeur d¹Alene River Basin. The river carried those metals into Lake Coeur d¹Alene, and then into Washington through the Spokane River.

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