Busy year forecasted up Canyon Creek

BURKE — 2023 is going to be a busy year for the EPA’s ongoing cleanup efforts around Canyon Creek.

Beginning in June, crews under the guidance of the Coeur d’Alene Work Trust will start the first of what is expected to be a four-year project at the Star Mine Complex.

The first part of the project will entail the removal of 6,500 cubic yards of mine wastes from the site and moving them to the recently completed Canyon Complex Repository/Waste Consolidation Area (CCR/WCA), near Woodland Park.

Repositories and waste consolidation areas like these are used to store the contaminated materials caused by years of improperly disposed of mine wastes — as well as the reduction of health risks from heavy metals like lead and arsenic.

According to EPA Project Manager Bonnie Arthur, the new complex was built to contain over one million cubic yards of materials.

Work crews will also haul loads of uncontaminated materials to the Star Mine site to re-gravel and re-soil the site before it gets revegetated.

These materials were already taken up Canyon Creek and stored and stockpiled at the nearby Lower Burke Canyon Repository.

Last season, the CCR/WCA was completed, and immediately began receiving materials from the Silver Valley Natural Resource Trustees (SVNRT) repository, an older repository that was discovered to have been leaking — one of the primary driving forces behind the creation of the CCR/WCA.

The 550,000 cubic yards of materials taken from the SVNRT took up nearly one-third of the newly finished repository’s capacity.

The total capacity of the CCR/WCA is about 1.8 million cubic yards.

“This repository gives us room for future cleanup projects in the Canyon Creek area,” Arthur told the News-Press previously. “We have several projects up there as well. We appreciate how patient the community has been through all of this.”

While the work at the Star Mine Complex may be the headliner in terms of the projects going on along Canyon Creek, it is far from the only project that will be happening during this season.

Investigative efforts are underway to finish a 2022 cleanup project design at the Flynn Mine/Black Bear Fraction site.

The EPA anticipates that these plans will be completed by the end of this year.

Investigations will also be underway at the Gem Complex site, the Standard-Mammoth reach of Canyon Creek, as well as the Lower Canyon Creek Riparian Area.

These investigations include water and soil sampling, the digging of test pits, as well as installing monitoring wells at each site.