Bunker Hill: Lead in the Children's Blood

In September of nineteen seventy-three, a fire broke out in the bag-house at the Bunker Hill lead and silver smelter in Kellogg, Idaho. The bag-house was the facility's primary emission-control system, a network of filters that captured the lead-laden particulate before it could leave the smokestacks and settle over the Silver Valley. The fire destroyed it.

The company, Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation, did not shut down the smelter while the controls were repaired or replaced. It continued operating. For more than a year, the stacks ran without emission controls, releasing unfiltered lead particulate directly over the town of Kellogg and the surrounding valley. The company's internal records, later reviewed in federal proceedings, documented that the decision was made with knowledge of the consequences.

By nineteen seventy-four, the Centers for Disease Control had dispatched investigators to the Silver Valley. What they found was among the most severe childhood lead-exposure events ever documented in the United States. Blood-lead testing of children living near the smelter showed levels high enough to cause measurable cognitive impairment. More than five hundred children received treatment. The cognitive damage that had already occurred could not be reversed.

The Environmental Protection Agency designated the surrounding area a Superfund site in nineteen eighty-three, covering approximately twenty-one square miles. It was, at the time, the largest Superfund site in the country by area. The designation acknowledged the contamination. It could not restore what had already been taken.

Gulf Resources declared bankruptcy before the full remediation costs were assessed. The federal government and Idaho taxpayers funded the cleanup. No criminal charges were ever filed against company executives for the decision to operate without emission controls during the year the children's blood was being poisoned.