Toxic Town To Blow Its Stacks -- Community Tries To Erase Historic, 100-Year Idaho Mining Legacy

SMELTERVILLE, Idaho - Alice Van Kleeck lived in this town in the Northwest's richest mining region back when there were few trees and no birds or living blades of grass. Smoke that continuously poured from the Bunker Hill lead smelter had killed them all.

She lost her husband, a miner, when a fire raced through nearby Sunshine Mine in 1972. She was also here in 1981, when the smelter closed and all her friends and neighbors were thrown out of work. In the ensuing bankruptcy, thousands of people lost their pension benefits.

Today, her entire town, population 800, is a Superfund toxic-waste site, as is neighboring Kellogg (pop. 2,650). The smelter had coated the landscape with lead and arsenic for miles around. One in five children in the area still has elevated levels of lead in his or her blood.

But despite this legacy, mining is so central to the existence of people like Van Kleeck that for her and many other longtime residents May 26 promises to be a sad day in the ore-laden region known as the Silver Valley.

At precisely 2 p.m., a couple hundred pounds of dynamite will blow up all that's left of the smelter - its two famed smokestacks. Both major stacks are taller than the Space Needle and have lit up the night sky with airplane warning lights for 20 years. They will be felled like giant trees and buried, wiping away forever the Northwest's most visible symbols of a century of mining history.

"They're trying to turn this whole valley into something it isn't," said Van Kleeck, 55, who wants the 715-foot-tall stack looming over Smelterville's Main Street to remain. "This is a mining town - period. Now they're building that Bavarian ski village over in Kellogg. What is that? What's that got to do with mining?

"They can't just bury the past and make it all go away."

If only they could, other residents say. Demolition of the stacks will be a dramatic event expected to draw 30,000 spectators and force a temporary closure of nearby Interstate 90. But it's only a small step in a 21-square-mile toxic-waste cleanup scheduled to last 10 more years and cost $175 million.

That price tag doesn't include the bill for cleaning up widespread contamination in the rest of northern Idaho. Earlier this year, the federal government sued eight mining companies for an estimated $600 million, alleging their digging and processing of silver, lead and zinc since the 1890s has devastated a 1,500-square-mile area in the Coeur d'Alene River Valley.

"The stacks are the icons of all that contamination," said Cliff Marshall, a businessman and member of the "Blowing Our Stacks Committee," which pushed to bring the stacks down. "Every day when people look at them, they are reminded of the waste and the lead poisoning and the false promises made by the mining company.

"When they're gone, maybe we can get all this behind us and get the valley going again."

The stack demolition is the biggest thing to happen here since 1990, when the city of Kellogg opened the world's longest ski gondola. Before that, essentially nothing had happened since the smelter shut down in 1981, putting 2,200 people out of work. Virtually every adult in the valley was jobless. Kellogg still has only half the population it did 15 years ago.

Today, city officials are trying to turn Kellogg and Smelterville into a skiing and mountain-biking destination. The stacks, the pollution, the bad reputation all interfere with that goal, they say.

The amount of pollution spewed here over the years is incomprehensible today. In 1973, the smelter's air-filtering system burned, but the company continued to operate anyway. The plant belched 30 years' worth of metals-laden smoke during an 18-month span.

It was only during the past five years that the hillsides left barren by sulfur dioxide in the smelter smoke were replanted with more than a million trees, for instance. Only about half-finished is a $40 million project to replace the top 18 inches of lead-laced top soil in the yards of 1,500 homes.

Downtown Kellogg, once a series of brick buildings essentially owned and run by "Uncle Bunker," was recently converted into an alpine village complete with Bavarian-style storefronts and places with names like "Edelweiss Restaurant." It's all to serve skiers visiting the Silver Mountain resort.

In Smelterville, the City Council recently discussed changing the town's name. The current name has a bad stigma, some say, and once the stacks come down, there won't be any remnants of a smelter here anyway. Ideas for new names included Silver King, Mountain View or Syringa, a plant similar to a mock orange that is Idaho's official flower.

The stack demolition, which likely will be a national media event, could draw favorable attention to the area for the first time in decades, Marshall said.

But no amount of civic transformation can alter a reality of the Idaho panhandle: It's still the home of some of the world's richest metal-ore deposits. This spring, as city officials were planning how to bury the town's defunct smelter, rising metals prices triggered the re-opening of three idled mines.

One of those is the old Bunker Hill mine beneath Kellogg. Spokane-based Royal Silver Mines Inc. announced last month it will spend $40 million extracting lead and zinc from the historic mine, a vast series of caverns stretching as much as a mile beneath the surface.

When the stacks fall next weekend, it won't mark the end of mining here in the mining capital of the Northwest, residents say.

"When they go down, we'll all know Uncle Bunker is gone for good," said Donald Jasberg, 70, who worked at the Bunker Hill zinc plant from 1943 to 1981. "But they'll still be going after that ore, you can be sure of that.

"All this skiing and tourism can't compete with the riches still buried down there. We're a mining town, and I think we always will be."

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Facts about the Smelterville stacks:

Height: 715 feet, 610 feet (two main stacks).

Weight: 14.5 million pounds; 9.75 million pounds.

Age: 20 years.

Width at base: 83 feet, 68 feet.

Distinction: Lead smelter stack is third-tallest ever built in North America, tallest ever demolished on this continent.

Why they're being demolished: Aviation hazard, high maintenance costs.

How: Up to 500 pounds of explosives to demolish two large stacks and two smaller stacks.

Demolition cost: $75,000 for both stacks, plus two smaller ones.