Waste Storage a Toxic Topic
Spokesman-Review on East Mission Flats Repository
Spokesman-Review photo of repository construction site
CATALDO, Idaho – A blue heron rose from behind a screen of cattails near Old Mission State Park, while a redwing blackbird let out a raspy call. East Mission Flats was full of humid heat and competing birdcalls on a recent morning – deceptively tranquil for a spot that’s become a battleground over mining waste storage.
The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality plans to dump more than 40,000 truckloads of Superfund waste at the East Mission Flats repository, a 23-acre site across Interstate 90 from the Sacred Heart Mission at Cataldo, Idaho’s oldest building. More than 2,000 area residents signed petitions objecting to the location. The Coeur d’Alene Tribe, whose ancestors built the mission with Jesuit priests in the 1850s, also opposes the repository.
The controversy could be a taste of things to come.
Over the next 25 years, DEQ will need storage space for 600,000 truckloads of waste as state and federal agencies clean up a century of mining pollution in Idaho’s Silver Valley. That much waste would fill 15 repositories the size of East Mission Flats.
