Jerry Cobb is a Silver Valley native and the environmental health supervisor for the local health district in Kellogg, Idaho. He has been instrumental in keeping the remediation efforts moving forward in the original 21 square mile Superfund site.

Q: Has this been a traditional cleanup?

A: This is not a traditional clean up. Superfund was designed for 200 barrels on 5 acres, and trucks that flopped over in the night. That’s what they really designed it for. And then along came the mega-sites, like Butte-Anaconda, Bunker Hill. We didn’t fit very well into the Superfund model because we were huge, and you couldn’t come in and just do it and be done in some very short period of time.

We understood very early into this that the clean up here wouldn’t be traditional. We weren’t going to go in and get it all out, and then it’s over and have a nice life. If we had done a deep removal throughout this entire area we would have disrupted the community to the point that we couldn’t have conducted business. We couldn’t have lived here because we would have been going down six or eight feet in everybody’s yard, under the streets; and when you got all done with that, when you stepped back, we still would have left half of it behind, because we couldn’t dig it out from under all the houses, couldn’t dig it out from under the schools and the hospitals and the office buildings.

Q: What needed to be done first?

A: One of the things we did here that was fairly unique is we formed a local task force of people. It’s called “the Bunker Hill Superfund Task Force.” We basically had two targets that they felt we needed to address. One was we knew we had to get blood lead levels down in children on an interim basis and then we had to solve that problem of children being exposed. We’ve done that.

The other target was economic development. You could have the best clean up in the world here and blood leads as low as you could get them, but if you didn’t deal with residual contamination that was on individual parcels of ground and deal with it in context of the type of clean up we did, then you could still have a clean up that would have failed because there would have been no economic development.

So we set those two targets out early in the clean up, and I think we’ve hit them both squarely dead center. And that’s been probably the most dogged part of this, of trying to make sure as you are juggling all the balls – pull down the smelter, cap that, dig out the materials in the valley floor, deal with blood leads, deal with economic development – you end up with so many balls in the air that it is very easy to lose track of that big picture. And especially when you have a lot of state and federal turnover in people.

Q: How has "turnover" affected the cleanup?

A: They come and they go continually. I can’t tell you how many dozens of people have been on this project. But you end up with people coming in at a very specific time in the project to accomplish a very specific set of goals, and they get focused on that, and they have a tendency not to stand up and say, 'where does what I’m doing fit into the bigger picture?'

And that’s been one of the challenges of making sure that all of the pieces to this clean up – the hillsides had to get re-vegetated, the tailings needed to be removed from the valley floor, the CIA [central impoundment area] had to be capped, the smelter and the zinc plant had to come down, houses had to be remediated -- all of that has to be blended such that you can move on.

Q: What about the lead contamination in people's yards?

A: We ended up taking out up to one foot of contaminated material; and if contaminants remained in place -- which in most cases they do -- we put down a thin barrier fabric just to identify that juncture between the clean material and that which remains contaminated.

Then we developed and adopted a very unique program in this country called “the Institutional Controls Program” to deal with that which is left behind. Panhandle Health District was asked to do that. It took us about seven years to develop that program. We worked with our cities, we worked with our utilities because all of them are going to be affected by it.

All contractors have to be licensed and have been for the last ten years. At this site if you are going to dig a hole, you have to get a permit from us; and we will work with you to make sure that when you do that work, you don’t compromise the barrier, so that when it’s all over, when you go to sell your house, we can tell the banks that this property had a barrier, this property had work done on it and that barrier was restored, and that’s really what the banks want to know, that when they come in to do a loan in an area, that they don’t have any kind of a problem that is going to come back to bite them. And here we can say, ‘you don’t.’

It’s not a federal law, it’s not a state law. Panhandle Health District adopted this at the request of the mining industry, the railroad, the EPA, the state of Idaho. We’ve been up and running now about ten years; and even though it’s a misdemeanor to violate it -- six months in jail and $300.00 a day fine -- in ten years we have not been to court. We have been able to work with people, and say, 'look, there are no fees for any of our permits. There are no fees for disposal. We’re here to help you, and in the end your property is going to remain in our data base, and we’re being called upon by realtors and bankers continually to provide information on these barriers.'

Q: Do the banks accept this approach?

A: The banks simply are not going to make a loan where they think they have risk; and we have been able to show them that they don’t have risk. We can tell them what they are buying and what condition it was in, what condition it is in now; and we give them the opportunity to make any changes to that property that they want to make, just like if they were in Boise or Seattle or Coeur d’ Alene. You can conduct business the same way. And that’s what we needed to do.

Q: Has it gone smoothly?

A: You’ve got to say in the Box [the 21 square mile Superfund site] it’s really been a pretty steady and smooth thing. There really wasn’t a lot of hysteria, a lot of outcry. It was pretty much business as usual. We’ve got a problem. It’s unfortunate. We don’t like the stigma; but with our local task force and the people, the elected officials and the rest of them, the bottom line was, we’ve got a problem; and it’s out there; and we’ve got to fix it. If we don’t fix it, we have no future.

Q: What about the children and lead poisoning?

A: As we started to see more children end up on clean yards versus contaminated yards, the blood lead levels began dropping; and they’ve been dropping steadily ever since. I think back in maybe 1990, we had around almost 50% of our kids with a blood level of 10 or greater. Now we’re down with less than 2%.

So it’s been just a tremendous amount of progress, and it’s all been a function of this task force and community leaders and others who just keep continuing to come back to the basics. We’ve got a problem. It’s got to be taken care of. We’ve got to strip away the emotion; we’ve got to strip away the agendas; we’ve got to strip away the hangovers and all of that baggage; and we’ve got to problem solve.

Here, where you have a blood lead issue, you have a service water issue, a hillside issue, a housing issue, a ground water issue,.we had to pull down 400 acres of smelters -- that’s an awful lot of opportunity to get lost in the minutia. And at the end of the day, I look at what we did, and I try and see how that fits into that big picture. We’ve got to get blood leads down; we’ve got to be able to conduct commerce. Those are the two things that absolutely have to occur for this community to end up with a clean-up that will position them to succeed.

If we had done a partial clean-up and not managed what was left behind, within two to three years, half of those barriers would have been torn up, and we would have been back right where we started. We didn’t do that. We created a program to manage that. So, it moves on.

Q: What do you tell people who are moving into the Silver Valley?

A: I deal with a lot of folks who move into this area. Those people have already been to town on the internet, on the informational highway, long before they show up in town. They probably know more about this area than the average citizen. That’s the way it works today.

And so when they come, I’m just very forthright. Yes, we’ve had lots of problems here. And I list the problems and how they came about. And then I list how they’ve all been addressed. If you have a lead issue, this is what’s happened. This is where we were; this is where we are today; this is how you get exposed in life to lead; this is how you can be exposed here if you don’t pay attention to details.

Lead in California moves at 3,000 feet per second, and it will take you off of a bench because somebody does a drive-by on you. The lead here is buried, and it behaves itself. Everybody knows what it’s going to do.

So when people start adding up their risks in life and weighing their options, most everybody I talk to just looks at you like, this is a no brainer; this just isn’t a big deal.

And those who really have a problem with it, I tell them, don’t come. If you’re really going to be stressed out by this issue, don’t come, because stress kills. And you’re going to be here driving yourself nuts and probably all your neighbors, and you don’t need it, and they don’t need it. But I can’t think of anybody who has ever said, you’re right, I’m not coming. They all look at their hold card and what they are doing and where they are doing it, and they look at what they can be doing here, and they come.

Q: What should people make of the "Just Say No to EPA" signs around the basin?

A: You see half a dozen signs around the valley. But if you look at the statistics associated with sampling and clean up in the box... we had over 90% acceptance rate. People said, 'you bet. I don’t know what all is going on, and I don’t go to the meetings, and I don’t want to get involved in all that falderal, but I don’t want any problems on my property. Get it taken care of'. That was 90% acceptance in the box. Ninety percent is a pretty impressive statistic.

Now that Superfund has expanded outside the Box to the rest of the basin, do you have any advice you'd care to give these folks?

The problem isn’t mining today, and the problem isn’t EPA today. The problem is we have a priority pollutant on our property. And if that doesn’t get taken care of in a manner such that blood leads go down and you can sell your property, you have a real problem.

Once people realize that we truly do have a problem, and it’s got to get solved, and it’s not going to go away -- it's just going to get more expensive and more embarrassing the longer we watch and do nothing -- I think you’ll see things begin to move ahead.

But the basin has been off to a pretty rough start. But they really truly just need to get it done. Just get the job done. Let’s get these people off the spindle we’ve been on for years. It’s only when this thing is done can we get both the state and the federal government out of here. And we can’t get them out of here before it’s done because, when they leave, the money goes; and quite honestly we need their certifications, we need their acceptance. So whether they know it or not, it’s a symbiotic thing where they need what we have, which is cooperation to get all of this done, and we need what they have, which is process certainty and an end to the story.

Truly, the key to the kingdom here for both the Box and the basin is the Institutional Controls Program, because when everybody leaves, if we don’t maintain what we have, it starts over again. That lead is still underneath this park. You dig down one foot, it’s there.

Our whole program boils down to about 15 pages and the first four or five are the guts to the rule. When the state met with contractors and asked about an ICP in the basin unbeknownst to us, the contractors said if we have to have a program, that’s the one we want. I don’t want to have to dig different in Wallace than I’m digging in Kellogg. That’s a recipe for failure

We get a lot of assistance out of those people, and I thought that spoke volumes. You go to the guys who have to get permits and these are all the contractors. They are pretty much like the rest of us – red necks, don’t like getting permits or anything else. I don’t blame them a bit; but they recognized the fact that the ICP brings things to the table for them. Like certainty. If I do it this way, it’s going to be accepted.

If we don’t have the same thing in the basin, they’re going to go through all of the things we did. We spent seven years developing the ICP. We looked at every aspect; we looked in every nook, every cranny. We dealt with everybody we could deal with. It’s no different out there. It’s the same contractors working in Wallace that work here. It’s the same utilities up there that we have here. They’re going to have to have this system, or they’re going to have to clean it all up. There isn’t enough money in the world to clean it all up, so they’re going to have to do a partial removal, and then they’re going to have to manage it.

We’ve got a template in the Box that shows that it has been extremely effective.In fact, there’s probably not a week that goes by that I don’t wonder why it’s worked as well as it has; because when it came on line, we expected contractors to be upset about being licensed. I had my whole punch list of things that I thought I was going to have to respond to. And then I remind myself, well, we worked seven years to put it together. We built it from the bottom up. It just always amazes me when something actually works.

Q: How concerned are you that floods could upset the work that has been done?

A: I’ve been here 30 years and have gone through 13 floods; three of them have been 100 year floods. So my perspective of flood plains and how you do clean ups in flood plains is always tempered by the fact, if you can’t keep the river out of it, don’t try and clean it up too much, because the next high water or flood you have you are starting over. And to me it becomes education and management, because you’re just not going to beat Mother Nature. You’re just not going to do it.

This Bunker Hill Box is a template. We’ve gone through every issue that all of these other people are going to go through, and we’ve been going through them for 25 years. I try to tell them, look to the Box. There are answers right here. It’s just that you have to accept that answer with the fact that it isn’t perfect. Nothing is perfect in this whole world. And oftentimes we get people on both sides of the agenda or both sides of the issue who won’t settle for anything less than perfect. Well, it doesn’t happen.

So give me a room full of people who are trying to solve their problem and let those who won’t accept anything less than perfect hold their own meetings; because 50, 100, 500 years from now, they’ll still be in their meetings and they still won’t have done a darn thing.