Silver Valley Restoration

As someone who has lived and worked in the Siver Valley for over 20 years I learned a lot of new and useful information about the work being done to restore many areas of the Silver Valley.What is hard to wrap around my mind is that the area of the contamination actually goes from Mullan to where the Spokane River dumps into the Columbia River. This means that all the waste is going through Lake Coeur d'Alene. We took a road trip up Nine mile Creek to observe the Waste Consolidation Area where they have currently moved 259 thousand cubic yards of waste and are still far from finished.  They are moving mountains of waste to create a mountain that will be safe for the area water systems. After seeing and hearing about the engineering processes being used to create a safe mountain, we went to an area further down stream that has been through the remediation and restoration process.  They are seeing areas come back after all their hard work. Fish are still not in the streams, but that will take time. We then went up Burke to Canyon Creek and saw areas where clean up has been tried but the levels of success are not as high. The old Hecla Mine was built on the stream so all the waste could easliy run down and out. The buildings are still standing in this area and most of the area has remnants of buildings, One of the questions the group pondered was, should money be spent to remove all the buildings and then clean up the waste from the mines or do you leave the buildings alone and try to work on the mine waste? This is an area with a few families still living and they don't want people messing in their business. Many residents of the area believe that the government is trying to shut down all mining, taking away their livelihood. Rebecca Stevens said it can be a very tough line to walk to help the citizens understand what the different agencies are doing in the area to make the Silver Valley a safe place to live and visit again.  They are finding that there are no quick fixes and sometimes the early restorations weren't as good as the things they are capable of doing now.