Tainted Earth: Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment

4. Bunker Hill

73 In the spring of 1972, within a few weeks of the El Paso lead poisoning crisis becoming public, ASARCO chairman Charles F. Barber sent a letter to Frank Woodruff, the president of Bunker Hill Mining Company near Kellogg, Idaho. Barber was writing to alert Woodruff to the lead poisoning problem found in El Paso. He sent along an internal ASARCO report on the matter, which summarized ASARCO’s views on and response to the crisis.1 Woodruff oversaw the operations of the Bunker Hill smelter in northern Idaho. Built in 1916, Bunker Hill was an enormous lead-zinc smelter that processed much of the vast mineral wealth that was laboriously extracted from the deep mines of Idaho’s Silver Valley. The smelter took in raw ore and turned out silver, gold, lead, mercury, cadmium, and zinc. By early 1980 the area around it had earned the dubious 4 Bunker Hill FIGURE 4.1 Pollution pours out of the Bunker Hill smelter, 1969–1970. Courtesy of MG 367, Special Collections and Archives, University of Idaho Library, Moscow, Idaho. 74 TAINTED EARTH distinction of being the site of the “worst community lead exposure problem in the United States.”2 Barber’s note did spur Bunker Hill to act—top managers initiated an investigation into whether children living near the smelter were being poisoned—a seemingly responsible step for the company to take. However, this was not an ordinary public health investigation. Rather, it was a secretive study of local children that was also methodologically flawed.3 Despite the study’s flaws, a prudent interpretation of the results would have led to an acknowledgment that children in the Silver Valley were being exposed to lead in 1972, and some were almost certainly poisoned, particularly children who attended the elementary school closest to the smelter. Bunker Hill, however, did not interpret the study results this way and did not alert the community that children could be at risk of lead poisoning or reduce its lead emissions. Instead lead emissions drastically increased in the coming years, and a public health disaster was uncovered. Although it may seem incomprehensible that Bunker Hill could surreptitiously study local children in the 1970s, this was possible because Kellogg, Idaho, was very much a company town where few residents or community leaders were inclined to ask critical questions of a dominant employer. The pointed questioning of industry’s right to pollute that was occurring in Tacoma and elsewhere across the United States was not happening to the same degree in Idaho’s Silver Valley, where the mining and smelting industries were significant players in the state’s economy and politics. When the lead poisoning crisis became public in the ensuing years, the company experienced public support from critical segments of the community, including some local doctors, many in the business community, some in public health, and local and state government, even though Silver Valley’s lead poisoning epidemic was arguably the worst the United States had ever seen from an industrial point source. The Bunker Hill disaster starkly illustrates how high the cost of lead smelting can be in the absence of effective regulation for people living in nearby communities, particularly children. A detailed look at how the Bunker Hill disaster unfolded and the industry, government, and community response to it sheds light on the complicated dynamics of such disasters and on how politics, power relationships, science, and the “manufacture of doubt” over harm may shape the public’s understanding of risk as well as the response of regulators.4 In the face of limited community questioning, organizing, and advocacy, Bunker Hill largely succeeded in controlling the public discourse over risk and harm after the lead poisoning disaster was discovered. The central role of Bunker Hill and the support the company received from the State Health Department in responding to the crisis had grave consequences for community health. Despite the diligent efforts of some government scientists and regulators, the Bunker Hill disaster shows state and federal governments largely abdicating their BUNKER HILL 75 newly codified responsibility to protect public health and the environment. The involvement of the International Lead Zinc Research Organization (ILZRO) attests to the significance of Bunker Hill and other smelting communities in the unfolding national policy debate over regulating airborne lead. Bunker Hill’s study of lead exposure in Silver Valley children was conducted mostly during June of 1972, just a...