Silver Valley, Idaho

It was stunningly beautiful," Tina Paddock said, recalling the first time she laid eyes on the Coeur d'Alene River Valley.  "We were driving from Oregon to visit family in Montana and just happened to stop overnight in Wallace, Idaho."

The Paddocks loved Wallace, an old mining town full of 19th century Victorian homes, and moved there in 1997, soon after their first visit.  They bought an old house and started remodeling. They enrolled their three sons in local schools and packed their daughter off to college. Then came the day they discovered, after much sleuth work, that their new home was dangerously contaminated with lead, which can cause permanent brain damage.

"We packed our clothes and got out of there immediately," Paddock said. "We left everything else behind - our furniture, appliances, everything."

Where had the lead come from?

From the nearby Bunker Hill Smelter and other mining facilities owned and operated by ASARCO and Hecla, which for decades had spewed lead, arsenic, cadmium, and other toxic pollutants into the Coeur D'Alene River and surrounding area, known locally as the Silver Valley.

The Paddocks house had three times the amount of lead required to trigger emergency cleanup.

The story gets worse. Not only was the Paddocks house contaminated, so was just about every house, school, and store in Wallace.

The Paddocks, it turns out, had moved to the nation's largest Superfund site, covering 1,500 square miles of the Coeur D'Alene River Basin - an area larger than the state of Rhode Island.

"You just don't know that you're driving into a Superfund site from what you're seeing on the surface," said Paddock.  "You can see slag piles but you don't know what's there."

In the 1970s, there was a large fire at the Bunker Hill Smelter, which destroyed the equipment that filtered out lead and other pollutants.  For six months, the smelter operated without filters, spewing the same amount of pollutants into the air that it would have taken closer to 20 years to emit had the filters been in place.

But the Bunker Hill smelter was only part of the problem.  Few places in the world had been mined more heavily in the last century than the Silver Valley.  According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, mining operations in the valley had dumped an estimated 100 million of tons of mine waste into the Coeur d'Alene River and its tributaries since the 1880s.  Entire towns had been built on mine waste.

Today, the Silver Valley has the highest cancer rate in Idaho and the occurrence of attention deficit disorder among children in the state - health problems associated with heavy metals poisoning.  Children continue to be exposed to lead levels in their homes and schoolyards that are orders of magnitude above the level considered safe, according to EPA.  Some 20 miles of streams in the Silver Valley are so toxic that they cannot support healthy fish populations, and another 10 miles of streams have virtually no aquatic life at all.

The Paddocks are now settled in their old house in Oregon.  Their place in Wallace is for sale, but they worry about the people who remain in the area.  Although lead-contaminated soil has been removed from the yard, the house still contains harmful amounts of lead.  Even if cleanup of the nation's largest Superfund site is fully funded, which seems unlikely given budget and tax cuts, it will take years to reduce lead levels significantly.

Two mining companies - ASARCO and Hecla - are responsible for at least half of the pollution that turned the Silver Valley into a Superfund site.  In 1991, the federal government went to court to force ASARCO, Hecla, and other responsible mining companies to cleanup or pay up.  Federal District Court Judge Edward Lodge recently ruled that ASARCO and Hecla would have to pay their share of the cleanup costs.  Exactly how much the two companies will have pay has not yet been determined.  EPA estimates that the first phase of the cleanup will cost $359 million and could take 30 years to complete.