$400 Million Taxpayer Financed Superfund Clean-up Effort and Tourism Dollars Revive Idaho Mining Town after 1981 Mine Closure

A Mining Town With a Bleak Past Starts to Blossom

DOUG GREENWELL and his wife, April, took a ski holiday to Jackson Hole, Wyo., five years ago with the idea of looking for a vacation home. She found it too cold. He found it too expensive.

Besides Jackson, the Greenwells, who are from Richland, Wash., had been considering several other upscale ski areas in the West, including Bend, Ore., and Sun Valley, Idaho. None satisfied. But Mr. Greenwell had been following the environmental cleanup under way in the north Idaho town of Kellogg, a mining community at the center of one of the country’s largest Superfund sites.

With the cleanup nearly done, the Greenwells saw potential for the mountain town to grow into a resort community built around the Silver Mountain ski area. In 2003, they paid $42,000 for a 100-year-old miner’s cabin a few blocks from the base of the gondola that carries skiers and snowboarders from the town to Silver Mountain’s slopes.

“Our thought was, ‘Can we get something very affordable, enjoy it and see some appreciation,’ ” Mr. Greenwell said. “And it’s worked out pretty well.”

The couple are part of a wave of outdoors-oriented second-home buyers who are making over the once woebegone Silver Valley, which straddles Idaho’s panhandle. Kellogg is reinventing itself, as buildings are being renovated and condos and lofts built. And those who have a second-home pioneer spirit are taking notice.

Born in the 1880s silver boom, the valley’s 14 communities — with names like Smelterville and Silverton — thrived for decades on the mineral wealth taken from the Bitterroot and Coeur d’Alene mountain ranges. Then in 1981 the Bunker Hill mine in Kellogg — known to locals as Uncle Bunker — closed. Some 2,100 jobs vanished. The population, which peaked at midcentury at more than 5,000, dropped below 3,000.

Two decades of hardship followed, during which the Environmental Protection Agency declared a 21-square-mile chunk of the valley a federal Superfund site because of mining and smelting waste. The E.P.A. has spent about $440 million on the cleanup. Yards have been scraped of tainted soil and replanted with grass.

Now, million-dollar condos are rising above rickety miners’ cottages on McKinley Avenue, the town’s main street. Just two blocks from Gondola Village, though, there still stands a mountain of mining waste as big as a city block.

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US Environmental Protection Agency forces paper companies to begin $400 million clean-up project to deal with PCBs in the Fox River

EPA orders start to Fox River cleanup in Wisconsin

Federal and state officials have run out of patience with paper companies' inability to reach a financial settlement for cleanup of PCBs from the Fox River.

Now they are using their enforcement powers to get them to work on the project.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice, with agreement from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, is expected to issue orders today to require six paper companies, including Georgia-Pacific, to site a landfill, prepare the area and order equipment next year.

The companies, along with the Menasha Corp. and P.H. Glatfelter Co., will be ordered to start dredging the river north of the De Pere dam in 2009.

The $400 million project includes the dredging or capping of 3.7 million cubic yards of PCB-contaminated sediment from the dam to Green Bay.

The contamination occurred when the paper mills discharged waste from recycled carbonless paper. It is the largest PCB (polychlorinated biphenyls) river dredging project ever undertaken by the EPA.

"The project is no longer a cooperative operation," said Bruce Baker, deputy administrator of the DNR's Division of Water. "I've been working for 30 years on Fox River projects and this is the first time we've had to take this kind of enforcement action. But the driving force is keeping this on schedule. We couldn't wait any longer."

Mary Jo Malach, spokeswoman for Georgia-Pacific, said the company has not received a cleanup order from the EPA and could not comment on it.

Company representatives met with a mediator throughout the summer in an effort to determine financial responsibility but couldn't reach agreement.

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