Re: Cutting into an old oil tank


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Posted by David Sherman on Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 11:10:28 :

In Reply to: Re: Cutting into an old oil tank posted by Keith in Waswhington on Wednesday, June 06, 2007 at 10:48:51 :

No, this is in Wallace, Idaho, and it's the Bunker Hill smelter (Kellogg) fallout they're remediating. I grew up within a mile of 3 tree point on the "mainland" side. It's a small world. I was lucky to get a tour of the ASARCO Tacoma smelter when it was still in operation. I don't believe there's a single smelter left in the US today. Of course we still like things made out of copper and other metals, but we can afford to import them from places where people are too poor or to brutally governed to worry about pollution.

The Tacoma smelter, when it was still operating, was one of only two in the world that would handle high-arsenic ores. The sulphide ores from the North Cascades were very high in arsenic. The Everett smelter, which only operated for a few years, actually built an arsenic plant to extract the arsenic and sell it as a pesticide. The result of all that, however, was arsenic contamination downwind of both plants, but especially the Tacoma one because it operated for a much longer time. I still have my doubts that anyone was ever actually poisoned by eating vegetables from their garden around Vashon Island, 3 Tree Point, or anywhere else, but who am I to argue with the EPA? The ores from the Coeur d'Alene mines have no significant arsenic in them. The main poison is lead oxides, and the biggest share of that came out of the smelter back in the 1970s when Gulf Industries had just bought the place and was running it into the ground. The bag house (smokestack filter) caught fire and the bags burned up, but management made the deliberate decision to run the smelter anyway, calculating that whatever fines and damage claims they'd have to pay would be less than the revenue they'd lose by shutting down. As a consequence, lots of lead oxide dust blew out of the stack and settled, mostly in Kellogg, but also further up the valley. The dead trees all around the smelter were killed by the acid in the smoke, not by the lead. They're starting to grow back pretty well now that the smelter's been shut down for 20+ years.



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