The Company That Calculated What 500 Poisoned Children Would Cost: Kellogg, Idaho

On September 3, 1973, the building that filtered the emissions from the Bunker Hill lead smelter in Kellogg, Idaho burned down. The company did not rebuild it. It kept the smelter running, increased production, and for the next eleven months vented directly over the town — about 35 tons of lead a month, four times the previous rate. At some point during those eleven months, a vice president of Gulf Resources and Chemical Corporation estimated what it would cost the company in liability if it kept exposing the children of Kellogg to lead. He put it at six to seven million dollars, for around five hundred children. That year the lead operation was earning roughly $25.9 million. When the children were finally tested, 173 of 175 living within a mile of the smelter had blood lead levels at or above 40 micrograms per deciliter. The average was 67.4. One one-year-old tested at 164 — the highest level ever recorded in a child. The town called the company Uncle Bunker. This is the story of Kellogg, Idaho — a century of silver, a labor war, an assassinated governor, and the arithmetic that poisoned a valley. The Bunker Hill site is now the largest contiguous Superfund site in the United States, at 1,500 square miles. The cleanup has been running since 1986. 📍 If you or your family were in the Silver Valley, tell me in the comments. I read every one. Subscribe to The Company Town — a new documentary every week. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 They Did the Math 1:36 1 - What the Jackass Found 4:32 2 - Uncle Bunker 7:42 3 - The Bullpen 10:43 4 - The Bomb at the Gate 14:03 5 - The Good Years 16:54 6 - September 3, 1973 19:52 7 - Eleven Months 22:36 8 - Six Million Dollars 26:25 9 - Gone for Good 29:35 10 - 715 Feet 32:41 Close ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES Historic American Engineering Record — Bunker Hill Lead Smelter, Kellogg, Shoshone County, Idaho (Library of Congress) Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs — Coeur d'Alene mining trouble, 1892 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Idaho DEQ — Bunker Hill Superfund site records U.S. Census, 1910–2020 Contemporary press reporting on the 1996 demolition All photographs used are public domain. Connective and atmospheric imagery is illustrated and labelled as such on screen. #Kellogg #Idaho #AmericanHistory #Superfund #MiningHistory #Documentary