Tuesday Video: Cataldo
Last night I talked a little bit about the Eastern Mission Flats Repository. Piggybacking off that post, I wanted to share this video from Frances McCue's book “The Car That Brought You Here
Still Runs: Revisiting The Northwest Towns Of Richard Hugo.”
East Mission Flats, the Superfund cleanup storage site, is two miles
west of Cataldo, north of Interstate 90 and across from the mission. It
is a repository for the waste from the mining in Silver Valley. The site
is adjacent to wetlands – though the EPA says it isn’t wetlands. This
area contains the largest load of mine tailings in the Coeur D’ Alene
basin, and the EPA is almost poetic in its description: “In the heart of
the Silver Valley, down below heights with such old West names as
Grizzly Ridge and Cougar Peak, lies a twenty one-square mile Superfund
site, the nation’s largest.” Cataldo is well within the box – it’s eight
miles from the epicenter, the Bunker Hill Mine.