Flood Waters lap at East Mission Flats Repository

January 20, 2011

America has a handful of "Sacred Cows." Not very many, and in a nation as young as ours, they tend to come and go. One of our "Sacred Cows" du jour is wetlands. A definition of wetlands from the online Merriam-Webster is:

land or areas (as marshes or swamps) that are covered often intermittently with shallow water or have soil saturated with moisture

Important, yes, without question. Wetlands, in their many forms, provide a home and a living to a myriad of creatures from  the microscopic to the magnificant. Much of the surface water that irrigates, cools and cleanses our lives is filtered through wetlands in the form of runoff, both before and after we use it, in a continuous cycle.

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The EPA in the Silver Valley: the rest of the story

September 25, 2010

In September of 1983 the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, took up residence in the Silver Valley. Over 100 years of mining and the refinement and shipping of the metals that came to the surface as a result of that mining had left its mark in and on our community. The story of what brought them here is pretty well known. Very briefly, Gulf Resources, had recently acquired The Bunker Hill Co, the company for which the Bunker Hill Superfund Site was named. Soon after, the result of poor management and aggressive corporate raiding put Gulf into bankruptcy. Brief ownership by a small handful of others proved no more effective that Gulf's. Nothing stopped the doomed company from continuing its downward slide. In the words of one of Bunker Hill's vice presidents at the time of its closure, "The old girl's going down."

And down she went.

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