Idaho wrangles with the feds over a Superfund site COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho – For years, a handful of locals in Northern Idaho have grumbled that federal cleanup efforts were botched and that Bunker Hill, the largest Superfund site in the country, was still unsafe after 20 years. Now, the cleanup is supposed to wind down […]
Pollution
Posted inAugust 14, 2000: Meth invasion
A leaky mine must get in line
IDAHO When the Grouse Creek Mine opened in 1995, it was hailed as an example of mining done in harmony with the environment. But the central Idaho gold mine closed in 1997 because it wasn’t making enough money, and its 500 million-gallon tailings pond leaks and has been contaminating streams with cyanide. Now federal and […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
Libby’s dark secret
For decades, mine dust has been killing people in Libby, Montana. Why didn’t anyone do anything about it?
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
Who knew what, and when?
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. W.R. Grace maintains it has always been frank about the dangers of asbestos. Former workers and union leaders disagree. They say Grace didn’t come clean with its workers until 1979, 16 years after it bought the mine. Earl Lovick, who managed the Libby mine […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
‘It’s like sacking feather’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Former Grace worker Lester Skramstad is slowly dying from asbestos-related diseases. His wife and two children, now in their 40s, have also contracted asbestosis. The following is taken from his testimony in court. Lester Skramstad: “We built a screen, jig sort of a situation, […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
‘Grace is going to have to own up’
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Don Judge is executive secretary of the Montana State AFL-CIO in Helena. Don Judge: “For many years, neither the union nor the workers knew that the dust had asbestos in it, but we asked the company to clean it up. In 1964, the union […]
Posted inMarch 13, 2000: Libby's dark secret
A barbed tragedy is lodged in Libby
Note: This essay is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story,”Libby’s dark secret.” You remember asbestos: It used to be the hottest little insulator around. For years we crammed it into buildings and warships, wrapped it around water pipes and brake pads, wove it into fireproof clothing and flame-resistant drapes. Then we found out how […]
Posted inNovember 8, 1999: A new road for the public lands
Floyd brings on a hurricane of hog waste
Note: in the print edition of this issue, this article appears as a sidebar to another news article,”Can a hog farm bring home the bacon?“ Hurricane Floyd vividly demonstrated the downside to factory farming. Televised images of bloated hog and poultry carcasses and vivid accounts of a floating soup of agricultural, human and industrial contamination […]
Posted inOctober 11, 1999: A home-grown Water War
An ancient ditch hits a glitch
For about a year, pollutants from a defunct gold mine have been leaking into the Rito Seco Creek near San Luis, a small farming community in southern Colorado. The creek feeds the San Luis People’s Ditch, the oldest irrigation ditch in the state, and many farmers fear their water supply is being destroyed. The Texas-based […]
Posted inAugust 2, 1999: Jon Marvel vs. the Marlboro Man
Life in the dead zone
BUTTE, Mont. – For years, engineers have assumed that the water inside the Berkeley Pit, an abandoned copper mine on the edge of this hillside town, could not support life; the water has the pH of battery acid. Then a few years ago, a curious analytic chemist, William Chatham, noticed a small clump floating on […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Beware of orange clouds
Earth-shattering explosions are a fact of life in northeast Wyoming’s Powder River Basin. Each week millions of pounds of explosives are detonated as the basin’s 17 open-pit mines rearrange thick layers of earth and extract the coal beneath. Sometimes blasting also creates clouds of nitrogen oxide gases. Luann Borgialli was alarmed in January when one […]
Posted inSeptember 28, 1998: A senator for the New West in the race of his life
Mining: There’s a reform-blocking rider
It’s not easy fighting mines. Under the 1872 General Mining Law, mining is the “highest and best use” of federal public lands, and every anti-mine effort is an uphill battle. But buried in the Bureau of Land Management code of regulations is a glimmer of good news for activists: a directive to the secretary of […]
Posted inMarch 30, 1998: A bare-knuckled trio goes after the Forest Service
Mined-over region resents EPA scrutiny
For 15 years, the Environmental Protection Agency has removed mine tailings, covered contaminated lawns and monitored people’s blood for lead and other dangerous heavy metals found within the 21-mile-long Bunker Hill Superfund Site in northern Idaho. Now, with the work nearly done, the federal agency has set its sights on something much bigger – the […]
Posted inNovember 10, 1997: Drain Lake Powell? Democracy and science finally come West
League of Women Voters
Colorado phones will ring soon, and the Colorado League of Women Voters will begin to survey the public about their knowledge of the causes of water pollution. The League has received a $150,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to educate people about how to prevent household-generated contaminants such as motor oil and lawn chemicals […]
Posted inSeptember 15, 1997: Yellowstone at 125: The park as a sovereign state
Heavy metals move
Heavy metals accumulated from 100 years of mining in Idaho’s Silver Valley (HCN, 11/25/96) are spreading into Washington state, and environmentalists and state officials there want a say in how to stop it. “Just having Idaho control the cleanup doesn’t hold any promise,” said Michele Nanni of the Inland Empire Public Lands Council. Last year, […]
Posted inDecember 9, 1996: Motorheads: The new, noisy, organized force in the West
Judge tells EPA to hurry up in Idaho
Conservationists won a major court ruling this fall in their two-decade-long battle with the state of Idaho and the Environmental Protection Agency to implement and enforce the Clean Water Act. In a sharply worded opinion, federal district judge William Dwyer, of northern spotted owl fame, chided the EPA and the state for failing to develop […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
River cleanup is slow, expensive and maybe hopeless
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. CANYON CREEK, Idaho – Thick mud gushes beneath Marti Calabretta’s high rubber boots as she walks from her office, a much-used house trailer, to the dirty pickup truck. The raw landscape looks like a construction site before the pouring of a foundation, but Calabretta […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Logging, floods push metals downstream
Note: This article is a sidebar to this issue’s feature story. Heavy metals don’t recognize state boundaries. That’s why some people in Spokane, Wash., 30 miles downstream from Lake Coeur d’Alene, are worried. “The metals are coming this way, and we hope to slow them down so they don’t also poison the Columbia River Basin,” […]
Posted inNovember 25, 1996: Pollution in paradise
Pollution in paradise
A robust service economy can’t bury mining’s toxic waste
Posted inOctober 28, 1996: Has big money doomed direct democracy?
Polluted waters divide Oregon
PORTLAND, Ore. – One side has a punchy message: that cows and clean streams don’t mix. The other side warns that fencing cows off from hundreds of miles of streams will be a worse failure than the Great Wall of China. At stake is the Oregon Clean Streams Initiative, one of the toughest sets of […]