A-Infos (en) The Legacy of the Bunker Hill Mine, 3/3

[Dale Pfeiffer <pfeif324@concentric.net>]

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The Legacy of the Bunker Hill Mine
by
Arthur Miller

(concluded)

It was not until 1942 that unionism returned to Bunker
Hill in a contract with the Mine, Mill Workers. By
1946 most of the district was again under union
contact. But unfortunately the unity of the district
was broken by a right wing element. In the negotiations
of 1947 one of the three locals broke away from the
other two and signed their own contract, which was
for less than the master contract signed in time by the
other two locals. When the 1949 negotiations were
taking place the same local broke away again and
renewed the previous contract. The difference this
time was that the other locals went out on strike. The
right wing element had also infiltrated one of the other
locals and forced an early settlement at Bunker Hill.
This break in unity forced a settlement for far less
than was being struggled for in the other mines. There
was another strike in 1955 with about the same disunity
and a settlement for less than they could have gotten.
After this the locals went their separate ways and there
were no more district wide Mine Mill strikes.

In the 1959 into 1960 negotiations at Bunker Hill, the
company took a hard line against the union and broke
off all talks. On May 5, 1960 the  workers at Bunker
Hill went out on strike.

This strike was to be different than in the past, for the
reactionary and business communities mobilized
against the union workers like never seen before in
the district. The first important part in this happened
in the schools. The school kids were taught about the
so-called Communist infiltration in the U.S. Included
in that was the claim of Communist control of some labor
unions, including the Mine Mill Workers. To back this
up they pointed to the expulsion of Mine Mill Workers
from the CIO ten years earlier. With the help of some
teachers, the Chamber of Commerce, the American
Legion and the Shoshone County Anti-Communists
Association, a large number of high school kids
organized the "I Am An American Youth Movement,"
and held a large anti-Communist march and rally in
Kellogg. The anti-Communist hysteria grew to the
point that union miners found their own kids turning
against them. Later even a group of miner's wives
organized an anti-Communist group. The anti-Communists
issued a rather interesting list of words used by
"Communist" that included working class, ruling class,
capitalist, tyranny, class struggle, demonstration,
character assassination, stool pigeon, coexistence,
scabs, big money interests, freedom loving people,
democratic action, democratic majority, world peace,
and the workers. They stated that "by their words
ye shall know them". And asked, "How many have
you heard locally?

The striking workers stood strong through the
summer and then the reactionaries tried something
different. A petition for decertification was started
up and those that signed on were called Blue Carders.
Later it was revealed that a  new "American"  union,
the Northwest Metal Workers, was behind this with
the help of the local media that printed their lies and
decertification forms in their papers. The Blue Carders
got enough signatures for a NLRB decertification
election. By the time the election was held in December
many of the workers were broken down by the
anti-Communists campaign (it was said that only
Communists would vote for Mine Mill Workers),
some of their kids and wives turning against them
and formed the "Back to Work by Christmas
Committee" of the Northwest Metal Workers.
This committee had such emotional pleas printed
in the local paper such as a little girl looking up
at her father saying "Will you be back to work by
Christmas, daddy?" And "Please, God! for Mommy's
sake let daddy go back to work by Christmas." Also,
the schools in the Kellogg area stopped the school
lunch program, saying that it was helping the strikers
by feeding their kids. The company union, the
Northwest Metal Workers, won the election
by 51 votes.

Thus closed out the years of the Mine Mill Workers
at Bunker Hill. The Metal Workers quickly gave the
Bunker Hill bosses the contract that they wanted. A
few years later the United Steel  Workers took over
the Bunker Hill contract along with all the other Mine
Mill Worker's contracts in the district. And that is
how I came to hold a card in the United Steel
Workers a few years later.

This story does not end here, for in 1973 a fire
badly damaged the baghouse, where smelter
emissions were being released into the air. Rather
than close down the smelter and repair the damage,
the jackasses by-passed the baghouse and the
built-up lead rained downed upon the surrounding
towns. The families, and most tragically the children,
were poisoned with lead.

The family of miner Bill Yoss, who had worked
underground for 25 years at Bunker Hill, was
tested by doctors from the Center for Disease
Control. His daughter, Arlene, was found to have
more than four times the threshold then considered
dangerous. The lead had settled in her bones, and
her legs grew twisted. Only hot soaking baths would
ease her continuous pain. Her mother was told, after
the tests on Arlene and her two other children, that
she had "three walking dead babies." In 1975 Bill Yoss
visited an attorney in Spokane to see what could be
done. While he was away he was fired. The Yoss
family filed suit against Bunker Hill. The information
gathered for the suit told a story of corporate crime
almost beyond comparison. Bunker Hill settled with
the Yoss family and the families of 35 other children
in 1981. All records and information gathered were
sealed by the court, and it was not until 1990 that
the records were opened and the story of the
poisoning of the people of the Silver Valley
became known.

Within the unsealed documents was found a
two-page memo in which the vice president of
Gulf Resources and Chemical Corp. (the company
that owned Bunker Hill at that time) calculated an
estimation on how much Gulf would have to pay if
it continued to expose children to lead emissions
rather than shut down the smelter and repair the
baghouse. His estimate came to $6 to $7 million
for poisoning 500 children. He also examined the
possibility of discrediting the doctors who warned of
the dangers of lead poisoning. At the time, prices
for lead ore were high, so Gulf decided that the
profits were far greater than the "costs" of poisoning
children. That year Gulf raked in $25.9 million from
lead ore. Some of the costs to the workers and
community included:

1) The lead pollution was so bad that the State of
Idaho was measuring it by tons per square mile. A
reading in Kellogg showed in excess of 30 tons of lead
per square mile in the year after the fire. Smelterville
was put at 25 tons per square mile. "I had pictures I
took at 2 PM," Bill Yoss said. "it was so dark you had
to have your headlights on." The residents of these
communities were exposed to mega-doses of lead
greater than any other community anywhere else in
the world throughout history.

2) The hazardous threshold of lead, back then, was
1,000 parts per million. Sediments along the riverbank
were measured at 40,000 to 50,000 parts per million.
And by 1987, when they were finally measured, 75
percent of the yards in Kellogg and 81 percent of the
yards in Smelterville exceeded safe levels.

A study of workers who had worker at the smelter
between 1940 and 1965, found that deaths from
kidney disease were four times higher than expected
based on U.S. death rates. Deaths from kidney cancer
were nearly double, and deaths from strokes were
one-and-a-half times higher than expected. Since
the fire, 56% of Bunker Hill workers have come
down with kidney disease, including myself. It was
not until the 1990s that this information was made
public. Kidney disease takes a while to hit you after
exposure. Many workers, like myself, moved on
to other jobs and thus cannot prove that their
illness was caused by exposure to lead at Bunker
Hill. They cannot even prove that it is job related.
Thus, the figure of 56% has to be a low figure.
They came up with that figure by tracking workers
through their Social Security numbers and records,
medical claims and the National Death Index. How
many workers like me that are not included in that
56% no one will ever know. Maybe I will be included
when I die. Like many other workers, working with
the pain of kidney disease is hard. I had to quit my
last job because of it. I have no medical coverage,
no ongoing medical treatment; I keep myself going
with roots, herbal teas, lots of cranberry juice and
pain killers that I have to go up to Canada to get.
Even as I write these words, I am struggling with
pain to do so. Even the workers who stayed at
Bunker Hill lost their medical insurance because
Gulf went bankrupt.

4) Over 5,000 people have been exposed to the
lead fallout. In 1974 the Center for Disease Control
tested children for blood lead levels and found that
all the children living in Smelterville had unsafe levels,
as did 99 percent of children in Kellogg and 93
percent of children in Pinehurst. This came to nearly
600 children known to have been poisoned by
corporate greed at that time, as documented by the
government. No one knows how many other children
in the area were poisoned. The government left it at
that and did nothing until 1980, six years later, when
they found that 75 percent of the pre-school children
(not even having been born yet at the time of the
great exposure) were poisoned. No follow-up studies
were done to see if this was a continuing trend, to
determine the long-lasting health effects on the
children known to be poisoned, and no testing was
done on the adults. Again this information was not
released until years later, and nothing was done to
stop the continuing poisoning of children. It was
not until 1994 that another test was done on
children, and it found one-fifth of the children
had blood-lead levels greater than the
harmful level.

Are there words to really tell you how I feel about
all this? Even saying that this was premeditated mass
murder seems not to be sufficient. To knowingly
cause deaths of workers, to knowingly cause the
great suffering of little children with their twisted
bodies, and to knowingly allow this to continue
year after year; there are just no words in any
language strong enough for such a crime. No matter
how many years pass, this crime haunts my very
being; it sickens me. With the mixed emotions of
sorrow for the victims and immense rage for the
profiteers and the government, I will carry this
with me to my dying day.

Through a conspiracy by the federal government,
the state of Idaho, the courts and Gulf, the people
of the area did not know about how badly they
had been poisoned until 16 years later. The only
action that was taken was by the Public Health
Service which went into the schools and would
put on puppet shows to teach children how to
play (among the effects of lead poisoning is reduced
mental ability).

In 1985 Bunker Hill became the second largest
Superfund site in the country, covering an area of
21 square miles. The following is but a small
sampling of what was found at the site:

1) Trees, grass and other vegetation did not grow in
much of the area because of toxic metals in the soil,
and because of high soil acidity caused by sulfur
dioxide emissions.

2) The smelter contains at least 36,500 tons of
toxic heavy metals including lead, zinc, cadmium,
mercury, cobalt, copper, beryllium, arsenic, asbestos,
antimony, selenium and PCBs. If all the buildings
were to be demolished the hazardous debris
from that alone would fill 22,500 dump trucks.

3) The Central Impoundment Area, a level dike
of smelter waste piled over 70 feet high and
extended for a mile, contains 20 million tons of
highly toxic mine tailings. When the wind blows,
"fugitive dust" blows into the surrounding towns.
Until recently, the town of Kellogg, not knowing
of the toxins in the waste, would crush slag from
these piles and spread it on icy streets.

4) The yards, playgrounds, schools and even the
rugs inside of homes were found to contain lead
and other toxic material.

5) The South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River and
many other streams were found to be repositories
for lead, cadmium and zinc. Fish that found their way
into these waters were killed. An estimated 72 million
tons of mine tailings remain in these waters, and an
estimated ton of heavy metals are washed down the
river every day. The EPA says that cleaning up the mess in
these waterways is beyond the Superfund capabilities.

6) The problem is yet to end, for heavy metals are
still coming out of the portals of the mines.

I wish I could take pity on you, dear reader, and tell
you that this corporate crime was confined to the
Silver Valley, but it is not. The Coeur d'Alene River
feeds into the Coeur d'Alene Lake, which is full of
toxic sediment, and from there it goes down the
Spokane River which feeds into the Columbia River.
The toxic sediment collects behind dams and washes
all the way down the Columbia River to the ocean.
Adding to this problem has been clear cut logging,
road building and commercial development. All this
adds to runoff from rain and melting snow which picks
up the toxins from the ground and washes it into the
rivers. This also increases the amount of flooding in
the area. In years of great flooding, toxic sediment is
dispersed throughout the flooded area.

The federal government and the state of  Idaho take
the attitude that once the toxins are washed away
over a long time, that new clean sediments will
cover over the toxic sediment in the waterways
and flood grounds, sealing in the heavy metals.

Who will pay for the clean-up, and what
happened to the corporate criminals? Keeping
the crime a secret allowed Gulf to sell Bunker
Hill and take their assets to New Zealand where
they cannot be touched. They then filed for
bankruptcy in the U.S. This gets them out of
paying for the clean-up or other law suits by
poisoned people, and leaves Bunker Hill
workers without their pensions and medical
benefits. The new owners were able to profit
from the cover-up of the truth and the slow action
by the EPA, and ran the mine for a while; they then
closed it down and sold off contaminated equipment
and rail ties. They then diversified their assets to the
point that there was no company left.

This story of the Silver Valley comes to an end where the
history began, with the Coeur d'Alene Indian Nation.
They are suing eight mining companies still left in the
area, the Union Pacific Railroad (because of the
uncovered rail cars that went through their land and
the toxic material that blew off them) and the state
of Idaho to force a clean-up of the waterways, flood
grounds and land along the rail line. The Coeur d'Alene
Nation's land is downstream from this dreadful mess.
This is the first such suit by a Native Nation.

A mine owners’ association has recently "fixed" the
blame for the closing of Bunker Hill on "environmental
extremists, the Coeur d'Alene Indians, and disgruntled
miners who exaggerated the harmful effects of (toxic)
materials from mining." And to show just how sick
some people can get, there are those who want to
create a Bunker Hill National Park to honor Bunker
Hill's great history.

The mine owners, the politicians, the U.S. government,
the state government of Idaho and the pie-card leaders
of the United Steel Workers were all partners in the
crime that took place and the long cover-up of their
misdeeds. If a poor person steals a loaf of bread to
eat, that "criminal" is hunted down as a threat to
humankind. If a rich person causes the deaths of
workers, poisons children, fouls Mother Earth,
they are allowed to live their lives in the luxury
gained by their crimes. When I speak of class
struggle, it is not some ideological  philosophy,
but rather a struggle for survival and the hope
that someday we can make the worst criminals in
history pay for their crimes against us.

The lessons to be learned from the legacy of
Bunker Hill are many, a book could be written on
that alone. But the heart of the matter is very simple:
we, the workers, the oppressed and exploited
people, cannot find any justice or ethical values
from any bosses, politicians, judges or so-called
labor leaders. We can only find such things among
ourselves. And we, organized as a great power, are
the only ones who can put an end to this historical
human tragedy called capitalism. Our power should
be delegated to no one, for we can trust no one
but ourselves.

After researching this report, I pulled out my old
Steel Workers card and looked at it. It seemed not
a thing of pride and honor, but a thing of shame--a
card of union betrayal. I have always been a card
carrying union man. And I intend to continue to be
one until my body is placed into the ground of Mother
Earth. But I also know how the Steel Workers got
control of Bunker Hill, and how the pie cards sought to
cover-up a great crime. I then burned my card in honor
of the Coeur d'Alene Nation, in honor of the long miner's
struggle, in honor of the workers who died because of
corporate greed, in honor of the 91 miners who died in
the Sunshine Mine, in honor of the poisoned children,
and in honor of Mother Earth.

--

Write letters to demand FREEDOM FOR LEONARD PELTIER NOW!

Clemency:

US Pardon Attorney
Roger C Adams
500 First Street N.W. Suite 400
Ref:Leonard Peltier #89637-132
Washington D.C. 20530
(202) 616-6070

President Bill Clinton
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington DC 20500
202-456-1111

Senate Hearings:

US Senator Orin Hatch, Chairman Judicial Committee
SD-224 1st and C Sts., NE
Washington DC 20510

US Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell
Chairman, Select Committee on Indian Affairs
SH-838 1st and C Sts., NE
Washingtion DC 20510


Letters for Leonard: (money can be sent to Leonard
in the form of US Postal money orders. He must buy
his own phone cards and his communication with the
outside has proven to be life saving. He can also receive
photos if they are not Polaroid.)

USLP
Leonard Peltier
#89637-132
PO Box 1000
Leavenworth, KS 66048

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