 Good morning, everyone. My name is Sam Louoma. I'd like to welcome you to this first meeting of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the future of water quality in Coeur d'Alene Lake. It's my privilege to chair this August committee. The National Academies has assembled a panel of national experts who address the question of future water quality in the lake. An issue we all recognize as one of regional and national importance. I think I can speak for the entire committee and say we're really pleased to participate in this interesting study. Our goal here is to assess what we can say about future conditions in the lake in terms of water quality and trends. We will not be talking about solutions. That's not within our remit or our charge. I suspect we'll come at a different time, but that's not our charge just so everybody is clear about that. But there's a lot that we need to learn before people talk about solutions and that's what we're trying to put together in this committee. This is a group of scientists that are highly qualified in the various areas that are of interest to assessing water quality and trends in the lake. And so I'll just introduce, I'll have each one of the committee members introduce themselves very briefly, name, affiliation, maybe a sentence about your qualifications, and I'll go last. So I would also like to introduce the staff of the National Academy without whom we would not be able to do any of this. You'll hear from Laura Ellers next. She is the, as you can see she is the person in charge for the National Academy senior staff officer. Hello, she's assisted by Rachel Silver and Calla Rosenfeld and our expert as yourself before us Eric Edkin, our IT expert. So let's go to the committee. Robert Amir. Good morning. My name is Robert Amir, I'm a geocentric consultants and my area of expertise is water quality modeling. William Arnold. I'm Bill Arnold. I'm a professor of civil environmental and geoengineering at the University of Minnesota. My expertise is in environmental chemistry. Michael Brett. My name is Mike Brett, I'm a faculty at civil environmental engineering at the University of Washington, and my area of expertise is technology. Alison Cullen. My name is Alison Cullen, I'm a professor at University of Washington in the Evans School of Public Policy my background is in civil environmental engineering and environmental health and decision analysis. Hello, my name is Jim Melser, I am a professor at the University of Montana director of the United Lake biological station. I am also a affiliated professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. And I'm a limologist and biogeochemist of a special interest in nutrient limitation and goals of nitrogen and phosphorus. Alejandro Flores. Hi, my name is Alejandro Flores, I am an associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University. My background is in hydrology and land atmosphere modeling. Pria Ganguly. Hello, my name is Pria Ganguly, I'm an assistant professor at California State University Northridge I study contaminant transport and fate with the focus on mercury biogeochemical cycling and strong interests in mining impacts. Robert Hirsch. I'm Robert Hirsch USGS research hydrologist emeritus located at USGS headquarters in Ruston, Virginia. 40 years of experience at USGS some of it in senior management positions, but my scientific expertise particularly focused on trends in water quality in rivers in particular. Lynn Katz. Hi, I'm Lynn Katz. I'm a professor in civil architectural and environmental engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, and director of center for water and the environment here. My expertise is in aquatic surface chemistry, and I'm going to pass off to Scott Hendorf, who I think we might have. Did I skip Scott, my apologies Scott, geez. No worries. Thanks for catching up Lynn. I'm Scott Hendorf. I'm a professor at Stanford University in my area of expertise is in metal geochemistry. Thanks Lynn. And thank you Scott, James Moberly. Yeah, I'm James Moberly from the University of Idaho in the chemical and biological engineering department and expertise lies in fate and transport and biogeochemical cycling of heavy metals. And Jeffrey Schlatt out. Good morning. I'm Jeff Schlatt. I'm a professor of civil environmental engineering at UC Davis and director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center, and my expertise is in environmental fluid mechanics with lake modeling and measurements being a part of that. Great. Thank you all very much committee and I'm Sam, Sam Luoma at the University of California, Joan Meir Institute of the environment University of California at Davis. I've had a long interest in the card lane region I was born and raised in Montana so I've got kind of a natural affinity for the area. And I've been studying and writing since the early 70s on the long term fate of metal associated with metals associated with mine wastes. And published papers in the Clark Park River Elk River watershed north of here the Clark Park River over the mountain Southwest England mining district. So these are these the kind of problems that we will be talking about here the kind of issues are great interest to me as well. It's a well qualified committee and it's a real privilege to to be their chair, just as briefly about the meeting are charged very as I said before is very specifically focused on the future water quality conditions in the lake or quality data and trends, not solutions we're not going to go there but we're going to set the base for the things that we have to the people have to know in order to move in that direction. The effects of the scope include evaluate current water quality. That includes the lake lower rivers and lateral lakes with a focus on trends in nutrient loading and metals, and the evaluate the effects of changes in temperature precipitation on the trends. A couple of questions I think that we're raised that the sponsors would like us to address the summertime anoxia affect the fate of the metals and nutrients are reduced levels of zinc, removing an important control on algo growth. The current trends on release of metal from sediments, the relevance of metal release written to human and ecological health. We will also ask what data are required to reduce uncertainties and assessing at the assessing future trends what can we do better in terms of evaluating those trends and are there things we can do to make our make our projections more certain. Today's meetings. First we're going to hear from the various interests who have sponsored the studies the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality Kootenai County. The court lane tribe and United States Environmental Protection Agency, each will present their role and what they hope we can accomplish. First we're going to hear however about the lakes and key findings and some just overview of the lake to get us started have to emphasize where this is the since this is the first meeting. We're in the information gathering phase we're not drawing any conclusions. At this point, it takes a lot of information to put together one of these reports as some of us have done before. And so we're in the very first steps of that so please be, please recognize that as in your questions and things like that. At the end of our session will have a, at the end of the of the talks by the sponsors we will have questions from the panel to the to the to the presenters. They probably mostly clarification questions, but whatever questions we have if there's a little bit of time at the end of each talk, we might have a minute for a single question from the panel, all these questions will be from the panel. And then at the end of the meeting, we will have an open mic and there's a list of people who will who are have signed up for the open mic. And let's see. At 950 we have a break and Laura, I didn't get that full conversation are we going to our people can people sign up for the open mic during the during the break or is it, or is that sign ups have been, have been turned off but it's the second during the second break if you signed up for the open mic session you will be pulled over into the panelists side of the zoom so that we can see you and hear you. And those people we communicated with last night over email so hopefully they know who they are and we'll ask you to use your race man feature so that during the second break, which occurs at 11am Pacific. We'll be able to hold over and be able to participate in that session. Great. So specific time the first break is 950 the second is 11. And on Fridays to Friday will do a patent will have two panel discussions one on data and one on modeling above her she will moderate the first one Jeff Slato the second one. So we will go to work, gathering information and analyzing data and we expect this to be about a year and a half process. So you'll hear now from Laura about the National Academy process. Thank you Sam. I'm now going to share my screen and give a brief introduction to the National Academies. Many of you are not familiar with our organization I think this will be helpful to put in our study into context. The Academies is a very old organization created in 1863 during the Lincoln administration. This is a portrait that you'll see in the main building of the academies on Constitution Avenue it's a reenactment of the sign of our charter. The academies was at that time, mainly a small group of preeminent scientists who would advise the government on all topics of science. Three subsequent times over the next century to have a working arm and to have two more membership academies. What does the working arm of the academies do. Our functions are to provide independent scientific and technical advice. We do this by bringing together groups of volunteer experts that meet over a period of time, and then usually produce a written report. The National Academies do not lobby or advocate. We are technically a 501 C3 organization and that's not part of the federal government, although we do many studies with funding from the federal government. As an organization there are three membership organizations the National Academy of Sciences the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine which was until recently called the Institute of medicine. People are elected into these membership societies based on a long body of work. They are preeminent scientists in their field. But the actual work of the academies is done by seven program units which of which the division on earth and life studies is the unit that this study is occurring under. And then within that division there are 11 boards and the water science and technology board is taking the lead on this project. As an organization the National Academies produces many different types of products. The one most people are familiar with are the consensus reports and this study is going to be in that vein. Consensus reports are written by expert volunteers who almost reach consensus on the findings and recommendations in their report. And they tend to have a lot of weight when it comes to impacting policy decisions where science plays a key role. However, the academies especially recently has been doing many more convenient activities such as holding workshops and roundtables which often produce proceedings. They also have a number of other educational types of products, YouTube videos, Twitter feeds congressional testimony reports in brief. At this point we have a museum on the first floor of our building and pen quarter. As a whole the academies creates about one report a day. So the water science and technology board in particular I just want to tell you a little bit about it. It has a large portfolio that kind of can be categorized into four areas, one of our main areas of emphasis are water and wastewater services. The first report in this area was the management of legionella and water systems report which came out last year. This is an intractable problem in many buildings. A second area of emphasis for us is hazardous waste cleanup. And although the most recent report we did in in this area was in 2012 the report you see in the middle. And as a whole is engaged a lot in this topic right now due to PFAS contamination of groundwater. A third area in which we've met and written many reports are aquatic ecosystems and watershed management. We've been doing work in the Everglades for example, the report you see on the far left for almost two decades. We probably have written a report about every major river basin in the United States at some point in our 35 year history. The report you see in the middle is the most recent review of New York City's watershed protection program. And then finally a broad category of hydrology hydrologic sciences. We've written reports on surface water groundwater storm water floods flood risks drought climate change impacts are beginning to get away into almost every report that we write. One of the interesting things about this quarterly study is the fact that it kind of has elements of all four of those categories, which I think is going to mean that it's going to be a really, really interesting and impactful study. So why would an organization or a group of sponsors come to the academies for a study there are a number of interesting reasons. The first being the statute the stature of our membership organizations, we often have academy members serving on committees reviewing reports of committees, giving suggestions for people to serve. Obviously to populate all of our committees so in addition of course we ask the very best scientists and engineers to serve and we're often able to get those people to serve people will change their schedules to participate it's considered an honor to serve on an committee. The third point is, by far the most important which is the pro bono nature of the committee member service so everyone on this committee is here voluntarily they're not being paid for their time. Back in the day when we had on site meetings we would put them up in a hotel and feed them, probably a little too much. But in the virtual environment there we're in right now, the voluntary nature of their service I think is particularly acute. We have a special relationship to the federal government and the water science and technology board exemplifies this maybe more than any board of the academies. And that's because almost every major department of the executive branch has some kind of program and water and at some point in the last 30 years we've likely done a study for them. We have very rigid quality control procedures at the beginning of our study process and also at the very end when we go through a lengthy external review. So taken all together. These factors lead to a level of independent scientific objectivity and balance that you'd be hard pressed to find from a similar product say from a consulting firm. I'll leave you with this last slide to give you a flavor for how this study may go well beyond the northern Idaho eastern Washington region. This is a picture of our founding director Steve parker holding a 2000 report that we wrote about New York watershed management program, but he's actually standing in Oregon, talking to a forest manager there and this is the forest managers copy of the report covered with little sticky notes he was clearly using it in his program years later after the report was written so it's just not clear, even though this is a regional study of course, and we want to be responsive to our study sponsors. It's very likely that the findings and recommendations from this report will extend well beyond the northern Idaho region. So I thank you for listening, and I'll go ahead and give the floor back to Chairman LaWoma. Thank you. Thanks a lot, Laura. Very informative for us. We're going to start now with the presentations. The first one will be an introduction to a court lane watershed court lane lake and its water quality history from Jamie Brunner of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality and Rebecca Stevens from the court lane tribe. Good morning, my name is Jamie Brunner. I work for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality as the court lane lake management supervisor. And I along with Rebecca Stevens with the court lane tribe are going to give you a broad overview of the court lane lake watershed today. So a couple of things before I get into the meat of this presentation. All the primary sources of information that I'll be including in the presentation are in a couple of different places. So one of them is here on the story map on the DEQ website. And it's still in progress. We're still under construction with it right now, but all of the maps should be there they're interactive you can click on the zoom in zoom out and move around. Look at some of the details and some of these maps and that's the website where you can find this. I'm not working on adding some narrative to it now but it should be functioning as we speak. So I encourage you to go there if you want to dig into any of this information, a little deeper. And any of the slides that have this as the source will have a little story map at the bottom right hand corner of the slide. So the other source is the core lane basin restoration plan and environmental impact statement, and the website for that is at the bottom of this screen. And the slides that include information from this source will have the reference RP at the bottom for restoration partnership. So we'll start with where we are in the world, you can see Idaho outlined there in the upper left in the Pacific Northwest quarter of the country. There's a little court lane basin outline there so we'll zoom in a little on that so you can see more of the details here. So the this shows the USGS fourth level hydrologic unit code watersheds so we've got the upper Spokane river watershed upper court lane south for court lane and the yellow shade there where the Silver Valley is in the mining district. So you can see the Yellow River court lane lake. And you can see that this encompasses Kootenai County, Shoshone County, Benawa County and also the court lane Indian reservation down here in the lower left. This is their current day reservation boundary but this entire basin that was part of their Aboriginal territory. So then getting a little view of the terrain. So we're driving on I 90 right here into the Silver Valley coming in from Montana. This is the top of the watershed driving into Idaho this is what it looks like coming into the court lane basin, very mountainous and and forested. And here's a view of the North Fort court lane river which is in this area the upper court lane area, popular fishing destination. Down here in the bottom of the watershed. And then the lower court lane river. You'll hear it referred to the lower court lane river throughout the presentations for these meetings. It starts at about this point right here where the North and South for court lane rivers come together and then flows the rest of the way down into court lane lake. And you can see here on the aerial photo. Here's the lower court lane river flowing through the valley. And you can also see that there are a lot of chat chat lateral or chain lakes that are spread throughout that lower court lane river there's a lot of wetland habitat and those lateral lakes in the lower court lane river. And then up here in the northwest portion of the watershed we have the Ratham prairie. This is formed by Missoula flood deposits and you can see in the aerial photo. It's nice wide flat valley in the lower end of that watershed land ownership you can see a lot of the upper forested portions of the watershed are federally managed us for a service there's also rural land management areas throughout there. Further down the valley is a lot of private land smattering of state managed lands throughout the basin. And you can see again here the court lane reservation boundary, which consists of allotment and trust lands and also primarily private privately owned land. The geology, the court lane basin encompasses parts of two physiographic provinces, primarily the northern Rocky Mountains is very mountainous terrain, and that's the majority of the basin. But then the lower the southern southwest portion of it also encompasses some Columbia Plateau that has some of the Columbia River basalts. So most of the majority of the watershed is belt series metamorphic rock and that's why we have all the lovely minerals in the Silver Valley that are lined out of there from this belt series rock, and then the Columbia River basalt in the southwest area in the reservation boundaries and also around the perimeter of the lake itself. And then like I mentioned this book in Valley Rathford Prairie aquifer here shown in this picture was formed by those Missoula flood deposits that's very gravelly cobbly bouldery soil soils, a lot of silt loans, a lot of organics and areas with some stony soils and rock. The upper court lane river consists of filthy and stony pazzles which is forest formed soils. The lower court lane river has a lot of wetland area like I mentioned there's a pretty thick layer of silt overlaying some silty Pete that predates the mining upstream in the Silver Valley. And then there are a lot of, like I said, silt loans in the hillsides, finer materials. And then of course we get to the Southport court lane river that has contaminated alluvium that is toxic to aquatic plants or aquatic life inhibits plant growth on stream banks and is a source of metals still today on downstream to the rest of the court lane river and Lake St. Joe River has a little more sandy granitic influence in the soils. And then the lower river also has silt loans and moderate erosion generally except for the flood plain, which is highly erodible. The climate we have moist maritime influence coming from the west from the Pacific Ocean, meeting the cold continental air masses coming down from Canada. That gives us our climate. And we, we have four lovely seasons, we have precipitation mark primary precipitation as snow October through April we do get thunderstorms mid summer, but primarily our precipitation is October through April, we have dry warm summers. Except for those occasional thunderstorms and the temperatures very quite quite a bit with the season and also the elevation we have a lot of variability and elevation from 2100 2100 feet up to a highest point of 7700 feet and annual precipitation can range from 25 to 80 inches a year. You can see in this figure from the story map that down here in the valley and when you're in the story map you can click on this and it gives you the values for each of these colors, but down here in the post falls court lane area were anywhere from 25 to 30 inches a year but then you get up in these higher areas in the watershed where it's blue. Those can be up to 80 inches of precipitation a year and regional experts are generally seeing our runoff is happening. Our snowpack is melting up a little faster each year and so we don't have hard data on. You know the trends that we're starting to see but we do have regional experts that have noted that. Here's a few figures to look at our current and expected future climate. You can see on that top graph. 30 year average temperatures from 1981 to 2010. You can see that hot dry summer there in July and August. And this information is from the Pacific Northwest climate toolbox which we do also have linked on that story map page. And then future trends from that toolbox. We're seeing a warming trend. We're on that graph 1980 to 2015 and no discernible trend in precipitation but like I said we do we do see some earlier flashier runoff. In more recent years, some statistics for quarterly lake surface area about 32,000 acres volume of 2.3 million acre feet maximum death about depth about 210 feet. Mean retention time says here about six months but it's really variable depending on the time of year for getting spring runoff and a lot of different variables in there. So it's a little misleading but mean retention time is six months. Watershed area 2.4 million acres or right around 3,800. Square miles. We do have a shoreline length. We do have a fairly undulating shoreline and so it's 150 miles of shoreline quite a bit of shoreline habitat there. The hydrology you can see from that mountainous terrain and a lot of topographic changes that we have a pretty extensive stream network that flows into the lake. I noticed that up in this book in or the Ratham Prairie aquifer area. You don't see any because it's so permeable that streams in that area actually sink into the ground and go into the aquifer so that's an interesting feature of the landscape. And the two major rivers can see the Cordelain River here. This is the Cordelain River basin, and then the St. Joe St. Mary's down here in the south. You can look at the flow from 2004 to 2019 to give you an idea of what the hydrograph looks like. Our high flows are generally early to mid spring, although we do have some later spring runoff events in some years. You can see that in this one. This is 2008, water year 2008. You can see that this was a really late runoff year. It was May into June for that peak runoff. And this also does show you that at about 20,000 CFS, we do start to see the lower Cordelain River coming out of its banks. In this particular year, you're probably going to see pictures. I believe there's one picture later that Rebecca will show us that is from this water year during that peak runoff in May. Now you know what that hydrograph looked like for that year. Just to kind of log that away in the back of your mind. So what does the lake look like down here in the southern portion and the reservation boundary is right around right around here. So right around where the Cordelain River comes in the lake from there southward is significantly shallower. So down in the southern end, pretty shallow, pretty productive, a lot of nutrients. And the water coming in from the St. Joe moves north. Water comes in from the Cordelain River. They both move north together and flow out the Spokane River. So as you can imagine with the metals as they are coming from the Cordelain River that you'll hear more about, they're getting mostly pushed up into the north end of the lake. So you start down in the southern end where it's warmer, shallower, more productive, fewer metals. And as you move north, it gets deeper, colder, less productive. Generally the bays are a little bit different, but in general, less productive as you move north, colder and deeper. And then here's another view of the lake with our monitoring locations. So then I'm just going to walk you through a few of the trends that we've seen in the last decade or so of data. Dissolve Zinc we do see going down as the cleanup activities upstream progress we see a decrease in Dissolve Zinc in the northern end of the lake. It's holding fairly steady south of the Cordelain River. The tide meme is about the same, although we do see a little bit of an increase south of the Cordelain River in cadmium. Dissolve lead we see an increase north of the river. Relatively stable south of the Cordelain River mouth. Phosphorus we also see an increase north of the river and variable but somewhat lower in the southern end of the lake. For example, A we see no discernible trend. It's kind of holding steady in the northern end in the southern end is increasing, and then dissolved oxygen. Pretty similar it's holding kind of steady in the northern end in the lower ends are the south C6 monitoring site we do see that going down. Majoralex wise, we do see some impact from the post falls down that is near the state line of Idaho and Washington on the Spokane River downstream. And while it doesn't hold the water levels, higher than they would have been naturally it does hold them seasonally higher in the summer than they would be so the high water is the same as what the high water was but it's held there in the summer as opposed to in the spring and we traditionally would have seen that before the dam. And so that does have an impact in and dating some areas in the summer that normally wouldn't be. And with that, I will hand over the controls to Rebecca to take us into the little bit of the mining history in the Cordelain River. I am not showing my video all of a sudden. Should I stop share make it easier. I think I'm there. Okay, okay. Good morning. Good morning. And nice to see you. Thank you, Jamie for that introduction. Evens here with the Lane tribe. I am their hazardous program manager and their lake management department. And I'm happy to be today and provide you some more info to add on to what Jamie's shared. I know more of the court lanes are that since they refer to themselves as those who were found here by by the early settlers which you'll hear more about from Phillips presentation on the tribal perspective. The court lanes have always considered themselves as the, you know, the traditional natural resource managers they continue to do this work to protect the lake and all of the resources that they benefit from as well as others that have come to the area and so it's a true opportunity to be able to present on behalf of the court lanes. One of our elders Felix are repa was was a true champion we have several champions but as an engineer, a true lover of the lake. We like to honor him and share some of his quotes and how the court lanes viewed the Coraline system. We have some historical land uses in the late 1800s silver and gold were discovered near preacher to Idaho in the Silver Valley. And with that discovery logging surrounded the hillsides to support those mining activities and railroad construction. For many years, the Union Pacific Railroad hauled or down the river across the lake along some of the rail lines that went in. And you know they actually use some of those tailings to build up the real bed. And as you visit the area as committee members who haven't been up here yet. You'll also be driving on interstate 90 which was also built on mind tailings. As a result to do some of these practices, some of the mind tailings discharged in the flood plains which I'll be talking about next as well. I want to take some photos because we all love photos for over 100 years the court lane basin and Silver Valley in particular supported the production of silver, copper, gold and zinc to help further the efforts of the United States in both World War one and World War two. The heavy metals that we are concerned about in our Valley are lead cadmium zinc and arsenic, a little bit of antimony but those are the main ones that that rose to the top. And we need these ores we need these minerals we all have cell phones we'll have laptops we're on them right now. So this is just a reality of, of what we're experiencing here and mining continues to happen not at the scale at once did, but we do still have some active minds. At the time about 7.3 million metric tons of lead about 9 million or about 2 million tons, excuse me of zinc were were produced between the years of 1883 and 1997. As I said there are still active minds in the Valley. Logging supported these activities not only for producing, you know, putting up the railroads and the rail lines but also the minds themselves, the tunnels the shafts if you've ever been in a mind before you will see that there are braces and a lot of wood down So the large timbers in our Silver Valley of North Idaho, and the National Forest really supported these efforts, as well as the work that ensued, as far as like transporting timbers down our surface waterways. There's a bottom picture on the left that that shows some of the traditional practices on transporting that would and actually using it for transportation for the citizens of the core lanes as I mentioned canoeing was their traditional mode of transport, the swatters in the lake in particular were to quote Felix their highway. And so the canoe building that also traditionally was employed in this area was really significant for the court lanes. As I mentioned mining and railroad transport we had a lot of rail systems some are still evident out there we do have a trail that was converted like into a trail court the court lanes to 72 mile long trail from the southern part of the current reservation boundary up through and across the lake all the way up to Mullen near the Montana border that Jamie showed you earlier. This was a the mode of transport back then and so for most of you that are familiar with with mining. That was the way things transpired communities established of course to support those working in the mines. This was a photo idea from 1900 and in Mullen which I just mentioned, you could just see it mean to us right now looking at this photo looks like a devastation a landscape, because the easiest thing to do back then was to cut the trees down close to your major rail lines or transportation systems and build your homes and, you know, houses were stacked right up on top of each other. When you all visit the area hopefully you can go up Bert Canyon aka Canyon Creek and East for the nine mile Canyon both are major tributaries that come into Wallace Idaho. You'll see those houses built up right next to the to the road that used to be the real line. So the traditional mining practices, they didn't have a lot of protections on on how to process the ore. Fortunately, back then the, the success rate on on getting out all of the or wasn't as efficient, more like less than 75% efficient and some of the jigg tail practices that were employed. A lot of these systems tight canyons in the Silver Valley had to get out the mind tailings and the waste rock in order to continue to mine and go into the the mine shafts and, and do the processing and so in order for them to get those tailings out they use the river system the Southport core lane in particular to flush out those tailings and get them get them downstream. Right foot I'll talk about a little while but this bottom right one is of the success my mills mine and mill site the success pile. EPA is actively remedying, remediating the site and I'll touch bases on that here as to why EPA is in our neighborhood. This is the Catalo dredge right along I 90. This dredge is no longer active but it was active from 1930 to about 1968. Those mining companies upstream because they were struggling against the environmental factors that were limiting their ability to get those tailings out of the channels actually formed an upstream mining group in order for them to be able to come together and like work on putting this dredge in place to be able to get those tailings out of the system. This is actually a flood, a huge floodplain it's still evident today we have mostly frag mites growing in this area, because it's the only plant that can survive and high concentrated soils. And we're talking, you know, thousands of parts per million of lead and zinc. That that still exists there today there currently aren't any plans for EPA to do any remedial activities. And as an insult to injury the tribe actually does own this land at the time and we're trying to keep migratory waterfowl from utilizing this area. So here's the bunker hill mining and metallurgical complex site. In 1980 circular was enacted the comprehensive environmental response compensation liability act. And due to national attention from doctors and the CDC on blood lead constant levels in children and pregnant women in the silver valley. It raised awareness to the top. Thank you for Nixon signed in the EPA as the environmental protection agency is the lead agency for conducting cleanup, where hazardous substances have come to be located. This site did rise to the top, along with hamford and for those familiar with Tar Creek site in Oklahoma. The whole site down here is a central treatment plant and central impoundment area and the central treatment plant I believe you will hear more from Ed marine from EPA later on today about this. This photo is from 1990 when the smelter went down. The area was the as the Anaconda site and butte Montana, that community rallied and actually had their smelter put on the National Registry of Historic Places so their smelter is intact. This smelter went down after bunker hill fight all bankruptcy with gold resources. And this is just a photo of the community rallying on that historic event. Let's see what we got here. Okay, so for those that have worked in Superfund sites before the way that EPA works with these sites that have been listed on the national priorities list is by breaking them up in chunks or operable units. And so the first operable unit was identified in 1991 as the 21 square mile box around Kellogg, which was the most populated area within the facility. They started assessing and doing their remedial investigation feasibility study within this 21 square mile box, and in 1992, they issued operable unit to, which was the non populated areas outside the box. After about 10, 10 or so years in 2002, EPA expanded their operable units to operable unit three and with each of these operable units comes a decision document, a record of decision on assessing what is in what's out there in the landscape and what type of remedies are are possible. With that expansion of operable unit three to the, the rest of the basin where hazardous substances have come to be located 2100 square mile box or square miles goes all the way down to where the Coraline Lake dumps into the Spokane River and the Spokane River leaves out the Columbia. However, with that listing and that expansion of the site. There was no remedy identified for the lake. The lake is in the heart of the Superfund facility. It's right in the middle and it drains all the water the 2.3 million acres that make up the Coraline basin. But due to political pressures locally and at the state level during this time, there was a lot of resistance to having EPA come in and assign a remedy for the lake. This has always been a really tough pill to swallow for the Coralines. It's it's caused a lot of heartache for the Coralines who were put here to protect the lake as the center of their heartland. And so, after all these years and you're going to hear more about the lake management plan later today from Jamie and Philip. This continues to be a concern and this is one of the reasons why the tribe withdrew from the lake management plan and why the state has called upon you all from the National Academy of Sciences to assist us in looking at our data. This is a map of the lower Coraline River starting up near the Cataldo area going down into Harrison and then the river flows north through the lake. These are concentrated levels within the sediments and we also sampled for water potatoes when we were proven up injury under our natural resource damage assessment claim which is a whole different story but it's definitely part of this story. We have these these high levels within the sediment of lead lead and cadmium and zinc and the river as she flows continues to transport these metals in a dissolve form down the Coraline River and through the lake system. This whole area has always been considered the bread basket for the Coralines and in 2002, after the issuance of this third record of decision under operable unit three, our tribal council, sadly had to issue a moratorium on gathering of water potatoes, fishing, swimming, any traditional practices that the citizens used to rely upon. So now we have a picture of this aerial photo that Jamie referred to from the May 2008 high water event. This is the outlet of the Coraline River. Over here is the city of Harrison as the arrow indicates. And this is just, this is just an imagery of how those dissolve metals and sediment in the plumes that we see during high water events not always flood just even high water events. We can see. Thanks to our trustees at EPA they were able to get this aerial footage. Grab some grab samples and on this one day event, the water samples that they were able to grab were about 22,000 parts per million lead. So most of this and these little curls that you might see. That's the influence from the St. Joe River which flows north from the bottom of the lake and coming in so it's it's a pretty dramatic photo. So let's look at some current trends and land use. We do still have some agriculture which I'll touch on timber management and harvest is really just in the last 20 years have been an all time high. So that's land use development we have we see an influx of a lot of people moving into our area. And I use the term unbridled development but that's just my own take on it. We see a lot of residential development along our shorelines of which are left for development. A lot more use up in the river systems that flow into the to the lake so those those pressures are evident tourism. We have a time high, especially with the COVID-19 pandemic. We're seeing a lot of people coming in and utilizing the basin and the bounty of the natural resources and recreation opportunities we have here from more restrictive states Idaho has has been less restrictive on the social issues and the things that other states have seen being protective and I got an update from one of our colleagues the regional director of the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation not too long ago that just this last summer they saw 400% increase in Idaho State Park usage, of which they saw a lot of out of state license plates. Those pressures are realized for sure. I'm mentioning when I spoke about timber and agriculture we have, you know, a mixture of timber land out there mostly Idaho pan international forest with a speckling of Bureau land management state of Idaho land that they manage is mostly along the waterways. We have some tribal land management. And with that timber comes the harvesting. We do have an Idaho Forest Practices Act that does put upon the those that are harvesting whether it be private industry or private landowners, things that they need to do to replant, receive things of that nature but it seems like every year more and more we're seeing more active harvest of timber lands, which we need, but we all and we need it for fire management as well but in areas that you might see and what will hook you guys up with the Google Earth link to see the land change over the last 30 years. It's a, it's pretty evident that our timber production is doing well here. And agriculture, we used to have a lot more ag agricultural practices up on the wrath from Prairie above the aquifer that now is growing houses and development. We do still have some active farming down on the reservation along the southern shores of quarter lane lake, mostly bluegrass winter and spring wheat, of which mostly gets shipped off to China. Rhodes, going back to the Idaho Forest Practices Act roads should be buttoned up. When there are harvest practices being employed on the landscape but that doesn't always happen. Here about a decade ago, if not 15 years ago we started seeing this logging with the intent to build. And there are some local developers that have taken advantage of the ability to log the land, put in punching some houses, but the roads that they've built for logging do not meet the county standards for for safety. And then when that comes the leading streams and undersized culverts and ditches that are just continuing to transport system and sediment into our surface waters. Back to that tourism and recreation this bottom left photo is of a popular resort in core lane, Hangadon resort, core lane resort, very popular. And it's I think it's made national news, you can see all these little specs out there that's just a typical summer day of the number of boats and recreation we have on this lake. When you look out on our gem core lane lake, she looks beautiful, you know diamonds on the water surface and she just looks like a beautiful water body. Not knowing there's about 83 million metric tons of contaminated waste at the bottom of the lake from the upstream historic mining practices. So, people come to town, they don't know that history they don't get that history unless they do their own research. We have our golfing community like I said boating is huge there's no limit to the number of boats on our surface waters. The only limit that can limit the only thing that limits the number of boats on our lakes is parking. So, people will do what they have to, they will park their vehicles and trailers illegally and pay the $300 fine just to get out on the lake. We love this lake and we're loving her to death. And that's kind of just the reality here because it's a beautiful place. This upper right photo is of Silver Mountain in the Silver Valley right there in Kellogg hopefully you all see it when you come to visit. It's doing very well with its winter and summertime recreation with biking and hiking in the summertime and skiing cross country and downhill in the wintertime. And what all these things do well all of our land use activities as most of you know contribute nutrients to our waterways, mostly nitrogen and phosphorus is what we're talking about. Pets don't pick up after themselves, although that would be great. With some of the farming practices still going on up in the lower portion of the Coraline River, you know, lack of fencing and whatnot we do have open range laws here in Idaho so you can cattle and other livestock can access our national forest and you don't keep track of where where our animals are going all the time when it comes to that nutrient loading. Another thing you might be all hear about when Jamie and Philip present on the lake management plan is that that plan did not have any new regulations. That was something that the locals did not want. We have been relying heavily upon the current regulations on the books, and in particular cuten county has a site disturbance or setback ordinance on our on our lakes. And ours is about 25 feet from ordinary high watermark, excuse me or not ordinary high watermark, and that's on a slope. We're in midgy Minnesota and ours is 200 feet and so while looking at the shoreline if you can get out at all while you're here and get on a boat and take a look at the shoreline and lack of consistent right pairing and buffers. It'll, it's a true story that it tells that we lack those. We have folks that move in and plant non native vegetation that requires fertilization and heavy watering, which then contributes to run off and when there's no protective buffer that little minor buffer of riparian zone. We see that that's one of many things all the other land use changes or land use characteristics that I've explained all contribute to the nutrient loading. Panhandle Health District along with DQ Department of Environmental Quality work together on the septic tanks and septic systems. However, if there are septic systems that are out there on the landscape prayer or circa 1974, then they're not in the database and so we know that there are some out there that are contributing, not knowingly to the landowner probably but all these contribution or contributions add up. And to quote Laura and fill up in a number of my colleagues you know it's death by 1000 cuts when it comes to living on a lake. Here's just it's very boring but I pulled it off Cutie County's website and it was the most current from census data. We're seeing a 25% growth increase in the last 10 years. There's about 177,000 people right now, and it continues to grow from folks moving in out of the area, and mostly due to the lax regulations that that we have in north Idaho, due to the voters voting, and that's what they want they don't want any new regulation and my own private Idaho is kind of the consensus amongst some of the some of the folks that live around here. It's just a reality. And so, before that my last slide this is something you're also going to see during the lake management plan update presentation on anthropogenic eutrophication. It's eutrophied. It's a natural process, basic limnology 101 nutrients and lakes, they work together but it's the speed of which we increase that process, and the pressures that we put on the landscape. Why we care about it here so much is because of those heavy metal concentrated those heavy metals at the bottom of the lake that are currently bound to sediment. So the USGS studies that you all be looking through and the data, the, the lack of oxygen and those anoxic conditions at the bottom of the lake. Release that oxygen cap and then metals do have that ability to resuspend and remobilize up into the water column. There are a lot of factors in the biogeochermistry around it, you're going to hear about from Craig and Dale on Friday. But this is just an introductory slide that we like to use with our community when we're trying to express why we're concerned about it. And just to make people aware of what they do on the landscape can contribute to these things. So with that, Jamie and I will end our recording because we're going to be with you live on Wednesday morning to take questions. All right. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you everybody. Thank you both very much. We do have a minute or two for if there are any clarification questions from the committee. Raise your hand please. You have a question. No questions at this point it looks like we'll just move on. And from next we will hear from Dan McCracken. This is these are sponsored presentations. Talking about the role of each sponsor and why they funded the study and what they hope to gain. So Dan McCracken first from the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. Dan. All right. Can everyone hear me all right. Yep loud and clear. All right, very good. All right, very good. So my name is Dan McCracken. I serve as the regional administrator for the state of Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. And I really wish we could we could be meeting in person here in Idaho so you guys could all see our subject matter firsthand. But I've tried to include as many photos of the lake as I could squeeze into the presentation and hopefully that helps break up our screen gaze that we're going to inevitably have from this PowerPoint zoom marathon that we're all going through. So bear with me on that. Today I'm going to be sharing the state's perspective as a sponsor for the Quirling Lake study. So just a quick overview of the presentation. I'm going to talk about Idaho DEQ role in the Quirling Basin. Why I requested the study specifically talking about the importance of Quirling Lake to the state concerns that we have with what we're seeing in current water quality trends. And really what we're hoping to get out of the study confidence in understanding the science and and hopefully that rolling into consensus for action moving forward. So our role at DEQ at the Department of Environmental Quality. Our mission is to protect human health and the quality of Idaho's air land and water. So we're the state's environmental regulatory agency we're charged with ensuring compliance with state and federal environmental regulations. So we have specific programs that we oversee for air quality, water quality of surface water groundwater drinking water and wastewater, and then waste and remediation including solid waste and hazardous waste and then cleanup of, of legacy sites where those ways can be present, similar to what we have throughout the Quirling Basin. In our region we have 36 employees in the Quirling Regional Office and six in the Kellogg Superfund project office located specifically for work in the Quirling Basin Superfund work. So the big roles that we have in the basin. We do work closely with EPA and all Superfund activities. We serve as the lead agency on implementation of the human health remedy, which consists of partial removal and consolidation of contaminated soils, primarily residential and recreational areas, and that's intended to reduce exposure to lead and arsenic in soil and house dust. The cleanup of residential and commercial properties is largely complete, but recreational areas along the river continue to be a source of exposure in children, and remediation of those areas is ongoing and being coordinated with some of the ecological and water quality remedies that the EPA will tell us a little bit more about later today. We provide local oversight out of our Kellogg office for for other ongoing remedial actions, and we also are responsible for long-term operation and maintenance of all federally funded remedial actions. So within the Quirling Basin, we have a fair amount of work that was funded directly by EPA. The state is responsible for maintaining those into perpetuity and we work with the Panhandle Health District on overseeing institutional controls. Within the Quirling Basin, the state of Idaho legislature established what's called the Basin Environmental Improvement Project Commission, also referred to just as the Basin Commission, and that provides a forum for local government and public involvement in the cleanup process. So DEQ participates in the Basin Commission, which includes the Board of Commissioners that has representatives from the state of Idaho through DEQ, Kootenay County, Benawa County, and Shashone County, the Quirling Tribe, the state of Washington, and then the federal government through EPA. DEQ also implements the Quirling Lake Management Plan, which seeks to protect and improve lake water quality by limiting based-wide nutrient inputs that impair lake water quality conditions, and in turn influence the solubility of mining-related metals contamination in the lake sediments, which kind of Rebecca just showed that that good overview slide just a couple of minutes ago. So we're committed to implement that program collaboratively with the Quirling Tribe. It was intended to function outside of CERCLA at the state's request in response to opposition to superfund action on the lake when the Basin Recorded Decision was developed in the early 2000s. DEQ also participates in the restoration partnership as part of the Quirling Basin Natural Resource Trustees, working to restore natural resources that have been injured from legacy mining waste in the basin. So talk a little bit about the importance of the lake to the state. So Quirling Lake really is an important cultural and economic center for the state and the whole region, and has been for a long time. So the city of Quirling is situated along the north end of the lake, and over the years that's kind of provided the most popular, I think, viewing point and access to the lake. A lot of the prominent public images of the lake are taken from that northern corridor. This is a photo from the Quirling City Beach in the 1940s with the Historic Playland Pier, which operated from the 1940s to the 1970s. Another photo of the same area into the 1960s. And throughout this whole period, you know, we had been seeing impacts from upstream mining activities, nutrient inputs. And the lake continued to be, you know, a popular destination throughout all that. There's kind of a typical modern day shot of the same area at the Quirling City Beach with the Quirling Resort in the background. It really, the northern corridor of the lake provides easy public access for both locals and tourists. It's visible from Interstate 90 and provides many travelers a glimpse of the beauty into North Idaho. And Rebecca also had shown kind of that population slide showing the rapid growth that we're experiencing in our area. And it's not uncommon to meet a new resident in the area and ask, you know, what brought you to Quirling and find out that they have been driving through the area at some point, maybe stopped and got something and just fell in love with the area and decided to move here. In 2019, this is a snapshot of an article from Forbes magazine, listing the Quirling metro area as one of the nation's best small places for business and careers. It has several economic indicators, $6.4 billion in gross metro product, 161,000 people in the metro area. And it describes that the city, which is located on the north shore of the lake, owes a large part of its growth to a substantial increase in the tourism industry, encouraged by several resorts in the area. And I think really serves as kind of a headliner for our area in terms of economics and cultural importance. And so just recognizing that importance obviously it's important, very important to the state to continue to protect that as such an important part of our community. So that brings us really to the reason that we requested this study. We're concerned at the state about what we're seeing in water quality trends. This screenshot here in the lower right hand corner shows our report card of the trophic status to the lake from our lake management plan report. I don't expect you to be able to read the numbers that the important thing is kind of the color coding there so where a cell is filled in with green that means we're meeting our trigger criteria. When we see things in yellow that means they're approaching the criteria and when we see something in orange we've exceeded the criteria and we're not meeting the criteria that we need to meet for maintaining healthy water quality. And one of the challenges that there doesn't appear to be one easy solution. Rather, we have dozens of contributing factors, all with the role to play in helping reduce nutrient loading. So, so in moving forward with solutions. We need to get an approach that's going to be, you know, broad buy in throughout the entire watershed. And so to get that kind of support throughout the watershed, we really need confidence in the science we need a clear understanding of the scope of the problem. We need to make sure we have a clear understanding and clearly communicate the urgency of the situation. How soon do we need to do something how how much do we need to do. And need to know the consequences of the decisions that we make and how that's going to affect ultimately water quality in the lake. So we're hopeful that with a clear understanding of these things that will help us build consensus for actions taken to improve water quality and particularly. So I had shared that 2019 article, Listing Coraline Lake is, you know, one of the core reasons for the region being one of the best in the country for business and careers. This is another headline from 2019 with a much different tone, a dangerous cocktail threatens the gem of North Idaho. This is an article that was in high country news and received quite a bit of attention locally from local residents and, you know, certainly spurred a lot of concern. And I think really the article that describes many of the struggles surrounding the lake and and the headline really really hits on one of the most important differences in understanding that exists about the lake. It seems to imply that we have an imminent risk of human health, imminent risk to human health and based on the state's understanding that's, that's not quite what we have on our hands in Coraline Lake. Certainly in the basin we have some immediate human health risks and are working with EPA to address those through the cleanup in the basin, but in Coraline Lake itself we really do the task at hand is much more of a long term water quality and ecological health challenge. So we continue to view the lake management plan as an important part of that long term approach, but we recognize that our partners at the tribe are frustrated. So this is another headline from 2019. And I think another important part of how we landed here. So this, the state, you know, we feel like we committed to manage this outside of the Superfund process. We feel like the tribe is frustrated with how it's going. And we're hoping that this, this study will help us gain a better understanding of the sense of urgency that seems to be kind of the major, major differences I think of where we are today. So, one of the, one of the challenges for the state in turn, in terms of understanding and communicating the urgency of the situation is that the problems with metals and nutrients in the, in Coraline Lake are really not new issues these are things that have been going wrong, going along for a long time. I, I appreciated in Laura's slide the photo of the National Academy report with all the book Mark. This is this I'm holding up here is a copy of the 2005 in a study on the Coraline Basin, specifically looking at, you know, Superfund and mining mega sites. This is a quote actually that was in the historical background for that report. The state of Idaho legislature had established the Coraline River and Lake Commission in the 1930s to try to deal with some of the challenges they were seeing with tailings disposal. And they wrote to federal experts requesting helps saying, our river is gone for the time at least but we would really like to save our lake we help. The background photo there shows the South for the Coraline River just completely filled filled with tailings and was devoid of aquatic life at the time and they, they recognize the need to try and that you know they were seeing what was happening to the river and hoping, hoping to take action to save the lake. They didn't ultimately get to the, the, the bottom of the issue at that time and so we've been working on it for a long time but we're hopeful that we're getting closer to a solution. In addition to metals in the watershed. We've also had ongoing challenges with nutrients raw wastewater was directly discharged into surface water throughout the basin for for many decades. This is a photo of Burke Canyon along Canyon Creek showing here we have outhouses for the homes perched right over the creek. And this was the common, you know wastewater disposal practice throughout the basin for a long time. The interactions between metals and nutrients in the water should continue to be a water quality challenge, you know into 1960s 1970s, as regulations were developed to push to eliminate discharges the tailings into surface water. You know there were discussions about how does that, what's that do for the lake how, how do we, how do we deal with that. This is a quote that came from a from a mining history journal, stating that with raw sewage still entering the river in 1967. The Jordan and Lake Property Owners Association appealed to the Idaho Department of Public Health to ask the mining companies to continue discharging tailings into the river, since the tailings would destroy the bacteria from the sewage. So, I think we all agree that fortunately, we, we move forward with eliminating both tailings and raw wastewater discharges from the river. And then we've continued to see positive trends in the river from the efforts with the super plant clamp. But in the big picture, you know we still have long term concern over, over how those things are influencing the lake in the long run. So we really see at the state we see the need for for long term solutions that there doesn't appear to be a quick easy fix. Rebecca had, you know pointed to the, you know the problem, you know is is coming, but you know depth from 1000 cuts. And the solution is you know taking each one of those 1000 things and and addressing them so the solutions are going to take time to develop, take time to implement, and ultimately take time to see the results. And with that slow response of work at a watershed scale. It becomes how much more important that we have confidence in what we're observing and then what our predictions are for how our actions are going to influence water quality conditions. So we, we see that as you know really behind the need for a strong understanding in how the ongoing work in the basin will influence the dynamic between metals and nutrients in the lake. Zink is going to continue to decrease as we complete more remedial actions upstream and improve the river. And we need to have confidence in what that means in terms of what's happening in the lake. We also think that continuing the lake management plan is important in the long term approach. We believe that this decision that was made to manage like outside of the Superfund process really was made in good conscience in response to input from the public. And so we're committed to continuing on that path. I think really particular interest I think in the findings of the committee with respect to the urgency of the water quality conditions, and really what, what does that mean in terms of what poses a threat to human health, and what poses a threat to long term ecological recovery So overall the state is really hoping for these outcomes of the study. We want confidence in the science with a clear understanding of the scope of the problem, the urgency what those things, you know what the, what the conditions in the lake mean for human health and ecological health and understanding the consequences of the decisions that we're going to be making. And ultimately we hope that that can help us build consensus for action moving forward to restore the watershed and protect Portland Lake. And so with that I'd like to thank the committee members for your participation in the study and providing your expertise to help us with the problem. And I think I might have just a minute or two for questions. Yeah, we've got one minute for any clarification questions from the committee please raise your hand. If you have a question. Seeing no hands. Thanks for the great presentation and we really appreciate it. I'm going to shift the order just a little bit here. We're going to ask EPA if you don't mind it we're going to ask EPA to give their presentation now. And then we'll, then we'll try to get Kootenai County after that. So at Marine from the EPA region 10 will speak. And then can be grand and Eddie will also speak. So, thanks very much Ed. My name is Kami grand and Eddie and I work in EPA region 10's water division. I'm the branch manager of the standards assessment and watershed management branch. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about the Clean Water Act authorities and tools and how they're used in and around Coeur d'Alene Lake. The state of Idaho has been delegated Clean Water Act authorities and those include the ability to establish water quality standards. Water quality standards are levels of pollutants or contaminants that are set to protect the designated uses. Designated uses are for example, if a water body is is recreational use if people swim there if they fish there if they drink the water or if they're salmon spawning all of those uses will be protected or should be protected by the water quality standards that are set by the state. The state also the authority to identify impaired water bodies and that is done by comparing the water quality against their standards to determine whether or not the water body exceeds those standards and whether they should be listed on the 303d list. Once water bodies are identified as impaired and listed on that 303d list, then there's a requirement to develop a total maximum daily load and the state also has that authority. Total maximum daily loads establish the maximum load of pollutants or contaminants that can be discharged into an impaired water body for both point sources and non point sources. Point sources are easy to describe and see their their pipe discharges that go directly into the water. Non point sources are are harder to see. They're the diffuse runoff that comes from all of the land within a watershed. So think of runoff from a field from forest from developed lands from parking lots from residential areas. Everything that flows off of all of those land areas and finds in that water that finds its way into creeks and streams and eventually into the lake. All that is known as a non point source. In Idaho, the court of lane tribe also has treatment estate authorities under the clean water act for the water bodies within the reservation. Currently, the court of lane tribe has treatment estate for what for setting water quality standards and they have done so within their reservation and that includes the lower third of the lake. The court of lane tribe does not currently have treatment estate for assessing water quality listing impaired water bodies or developing total maximum daily loads. Let's talk a little bit about TMDL's and listings in and around the lake in 2000 Idaho and EPA jointly established a metals total maximum daily load for court of lane lake. EPA was part of that and issued it for tribal waters since the state or since the tribe does not have TAS to do that for its waters. That TMDL was challenged and ultimately vacated by the Idaho Supreme Court in 2003 for failure to follow state rulemaking provisions. The state has not as of yet replaced that metal TMDL. Court of Lane Lake is not currently listed as impaired for nutrients and this limits further clean water act work such as developing a total maximum daily load. There is a potential that the lake could be listed as threatened on Idaho impaired waters list in a if Idaho did that it would be limited Idaho would be limited to doing it only on state waters. The lake management plan was developed by the state and the tribe together to and it outlined a strategy for evaluating water quality and identifying sources of nutrients to the lake. This is important as you'll see in the stated goal of the plan and that was to protect and improve lake water quality by limiting base and wide nutrient inputs that impair lake water quality conditions which in turn influence the solubility of mining related metals contamination contained in lake sediments. The state and the tribe knew that in order to protect and keep the lake healthy and keep the metals in the bottom of the lake that are buried or that are very deep below the surface. It's important to manage the nutrients within the watershed. Managing nutrients in this watershed is important not only for containing metals but also in reducing or managing algal growth. You may be hearing more about what we call harmful algal blooms or HABS and harmful algal blooms are algal blooms that end up releasing toxins and those are extremely toxic to people and pets or can be when you're exposed to them in the water. Nonpoint sources as we've learned are significant sources of nutrients and nutrient loading to watersheds is a big contributor to algal blooms and potentially to harmful algal blooms coming out of those. So addressing nonpoint sources in this watershed is key to the health of the lake not only again for metals management but also algal bloom management. Nonpoint source management under the Clean Water Act has been delegated to states and tribes with treatment estate. And I just have a picture here on the right of Lake Fernand which is just northeast of Coeur d'Alene Lake just right very close to it in fact. And unfortunately every year now they're starting to see large algal blooms there. And I grabbed this picture you can see in the foreground the algal bloom that has formed in this in this picture and hopefully that doesn't happen in Coeur d'Alene Lake. That concludes my presentation. Thank you. Good morning. I'm Ed Marine at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. I work in Region 10. My title is Section 1 Chief. I oversee 10 remedial project managers and multiple cleanup sites. I'm going to give you a brief overview of the Bunker Hill Mining and Numerical Complex Superfund site. The photo you see is the former lead smelter operated by Bunker Hill Company in Kellogg, Idaho. Kevin Radinetti has given you an overview of the water division's role in the Coeur d'Alene Basin's watershed. Now I'm going to give you an overview of the Superfund's program in the Bunker Hill site. In addition to the role I'm also going to talk about geographical orientation and terminology. I'll very briefly touch on the Superfund remedial investigation feasibility study process. In addition I'll tell you about our decision documents, cleaner priorities, and show you some snapshots of success for the cleanups that have happened to date, along with our next section's plan. So the remedial investigation feasibility study process under Superfund is performed after a size list on the national priorities list. The remedial investigation component is the mechanism for collection of data, the determination of the nature of waste, assessment of risk to human health, and the environment. The feasibility study component of the remedial investigation feasibility study process is the mechanism for the development, screening, and detailed evaluation of remedial action alternatives. The Bunker Hill site was listed because of releases from mine operations and from the sponsor complex itself. So the focus was on those releases, as well as the mining and milling operations. Nutrients have not been a focus of the cleanup response unless they were tied directly to mine processing activities. CERCLA is the Superfund law. CERCLA stands for the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act. CERCLA guides EPA on which sites warrant further investigation. EPA's mission and authority to address sites is pursuant to CERCLA for protection of human health and the environment. CERCLA enables EPA to conduct remedial investigations. It also includes provisions to require that polluters pay, responsible parties perform cleanup, and or reach financial settlements with the United States government. On slide five, you will see displayed the ecological risk assessment map that was developed in the late 1990s to go along with and guide the ecological risk assessment. There's some key points on this map that I want to draw your attention to. The Montana border is on the eastern boundary of this map. The Bunker Hill box is the gray shaded area that surrounds Kellogg. That's a 21 square mile area. It's bounded by Pinehurst and Elizabeth Park. It's the location of the former Bunker Hill smelter. The lower basin is everything to the left or west of the gray box, the Bunker Hill box, and the upper basin is everything including the box and to the right. The South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River is the primary stream running down the center of the valley, and it flows into the Coeur d'Alene River at Kingston. The South Fork Canyon Creek and Nine Mile Creek, along with Pine Creek, were the areas of the predominant mining and milling in the history. Lake Coeur d'Alene is between the Coeur d'Alene River and the Spokane River, and the Spokane River with the outlet of Lake Coeur d'Alene. To understand the site, you also need to understand how large this mining district was in terms of production. So the Silver Valley is a fond term. It's commonly used for the Coeur d'Alene mining district. And you can see in this graph, the amount of ore production in terms of megatons is longest. Along with that production, of course, came a lot of waste, and we will talk more about how the waste was handled over time. It's important to recognize that there were some significant changes over time. Early on, the recovery processes were poor. Jig tables were common, in which only 50 to 80% of the lead would be covered. Later on, flotation processes were used in the late 1930s. And with that, we had finer material and lower metals concentrations in the waste material because the recovery rates were better. It's important to note that until the 1930s, 100% of the zinc was discharged as waste product. It was not a commodity in those times. EPA initiated a remedial investigation in 1998 to investigate mining contamination at the broader Coeur d'Alene basin. The area of coverage included the Coeur d'Alene River and its tributaries, Coeur d'Alene Lake and the Spokane River. The study excluded the Bunker Hill box, but evaluated impact to the South Coeur d'Alene River where it ran through the box. This is because EPA had been addressing mine waste contamination in the Bunker Hill box inoperable units 1 and 2 for some time. Collaborative effort involving many stakeholders was undertaken. We'll get into the sources of the contamination now. This photo shows the South Coeur d'Alene River near the eastern end of the site in Milan, Idaho. It's called the Morning Mine in Mill. The river is the South Fork. As you can see the waters opaque and is running in the foreground. The reason it's opaque is because it's carrying tailings and you can see that the channel is surrounded by tailings. There's a tailings pile on the far side. There's also a sluice line and you can see that there's water running from the outlet of that sluice line directly into the river carrying tailings with it. There were many, many mining features in the Coeur d'Alene basin. This map generated by the Bureau of Man Management displays a black X for each mining feature. Some of the data used to support EPA's remedial investigation included BLM's identification of 1080 mining related source areas in the basin as you saw in that previous map. There were nearly 18,000 sample results of soil, sediment, surface water and groundwater used. More than 10,000 samples were collected by EPA. Another 7,000 additional samples were collected by the states, tribes, mining companies, the US Geological Survey and the US Fish and Wildlife Service and others under agreements and funding by EPA. The remedial investigation revealed that mining waste contamination was widespread in the Coeur d'Alene basin. This depiction displays that you can see red squares coming down from the near the Montana border on the upper portions of the South Fork and the Coeur d'Alene river. There are two creeks that are coming in. Those look like prongs. That's the 9 Mile and Canyon Creek also showing high concentrations on down the South Fork. The conglomeration of squares that makes it look like a larger red square is actually located near the former lead smelter. And you can see it continue on down into the lower basin of the main stem of the Coeur d'Alene river and on into Lake Coeur d'Alene. Red squares indicate concentrations greater than 2,000 parts per million lead. And the blue circles indicate concentrations 500 to 2,000 parts per million lead in the soils and sediments. Slide 12 displays zinc exceedances with respect to ambient water quality criteria in the Coeur d'Alene basin. This slide is depicted from the left to right upstream to downstream. There's four bars that jump out of you off the slide. One is at Canyon Creek. The other is at 9 Mile Creek. And there's the South Fork Elizabeth Park and the South Fork at Pinehurst. Those last two bound the Bunker Hill box and the groundwater collection system has been recently installed. You can see a significant increase in concentrations there. Another thing to point out here is the dashed line that's 10 times the ambient water quality criteria. Again, so these bars are well above that and are many times the ambient water quality criteria. Due to the large amount of contamination being spread throughout the system, several landowners downstream were complaining and filing lawsuits against the mining companies. So the mining companies installed plank dams across the South Fork and the Coeur d'Alene river and one across Canyon Creek. None of them lasted long, but they did hold back some of the tailings that were discharged for a certain amount of time. The mining companies tried to reclaim some of those trapped tailings, but of course nature had its way and blew out those dams. And as you can imagine, spread those tailings downstream as usual. Contamins from the smelter also rained out of the neighboring communities in Kellogg and other areas. Bunker Hill smelter operated from 1917 to 1981. The 1973 bagged house fire burned the smelter's primary pollution control system, resulting in uncontrolled emissions. Particular emissions increased from 10 to 20 tons per month to up to 160 tons per month, containing 50 to 70% lead. Blood lead levels also skyrocketed when launch and began in the 1970s, some of the highest blood levels ever recorded from this area. You can see in the middle photo the result of sulfur dioxide being emitted from the stacks, mixing with water vapor, creating acid drain, killing the hillsides, demuting the vegetation. Air inversions were also common, as is evident in the photo on the right. This photo is of the central impoundment area looking from the west. It was constructed in 1928 by the Bunker Hill Mining Company, kudos to them for jumping out and constructing tailings of the impoundment. Unfortunately, they sided on top of riverbed at a time when there were no environmental studies or liners in use. The Bunker Creek runs to the right of it, and the South Fork of the Coraline River runs to the left of it. This happens to be the most significant loading reach of dissolved metals to the South Fork in the entire basin. Slide 16 also shows a photo of the central impoundment area. We have pivoted 90 degrees and now the top of the photo is north. The central impoundment area is in the center. I-90 runs from east to west on the north side of the central impoundment area. The yellow indicates losing reaches on the South Fork of the Coraline River, and the blue indicates gaining reaches in that South Fork. The colored dots are wells that were monitored, and the color indicates concentrations of dissolved zinc. A red well or a red circle indicates 20 to 40 milligrams per liter zinc in those wells. This is a picture of a lower basin riverbank. Notice the depth of the contamination. It's about six feet because that spade is about three feet tall. The concentrations are characteristic of riverbed banks in the lower basin. Notice that the higher concentrations are in the lower strata. They decrease as mining operations became more efficient. These metal contaminations are present in beds, banks, and flood plains of the Coraline River, lateral lakes area, and in some patches in the Spokane River. There's also widespread groundwater contamination. Flooding continues to redistribute these contaminants throughout the system, and contaminants in the communities can be up to 10 feet deep. The remedial investigations for surface water findings are, the Tiamia water quality criteria is exceeded by varying degrees throughout the entire 166 mile basin. Species density and diversity have been reduced throughout the basin. Nine mile and canning creeks are essentially devoid of fish and other aquatic life. The habitat fragmentation and destruction also prevents a sustainable fishery. The largest dissolved zinc and cadmium loading is occurring in the Bunker Hill box, adjacent to the central impoundment area, and the largest increase in total lead occurs in the lower basin. The fate and transport of mine waste materials is affected by several factors. One, the fluvial processes where tailings are transported downstream, especially during high flow events. Those tailings are then deposited in downstream beds, banks, and flood plains. The fine grade material might wash through Lake Coraline and be deposited in the Spokane River. Groundwater is also affected by several processes. One, just between groundwater and surface water interaction. There's also chemical and biological electrochemical reactions. Long-term process of source depletion is also at play. And, of course, acid-mind drainage discharges the surface waters directly from mine edits. In the past, tailings and mine waste was also used as fill beneath communities, and in road and other infrastructure construction. Before we go on to more site-specific activities, it's important to understand superfund risk assessment fundamentals. From a human health risk assessment standpoint, it's important to determine the safe level of each potentially dangerous contaminant present. At the Bunker Hill site, it's heavy metals as a result of mine waste disposal practices of the past. From an ecological risk assessment standpoint, you look at risk determined by a function of red receptors. The nature of adverse effects caused by the contaminants. Again, at Bunker Hill, that's heavy metals and the desired condition of the ecological resources. Slide 21 displays the chemicals of potential concern and the affected media as part of the Bunker Hill risk assessment. As you can see, the metals are listed on the left-hand side. Those are all from mine wasting and mine waste contamination. And you can see the affected media scrolled across, and if those chemicals pertain to that media on the right-hand columns. Slide 22 is a summary of the ecological risk assessment findings from the Bunker Hill Superfund site. For birds, there was risk found to 21 of 24 species. There was high waterfowl mortality due to the ingestion of lead contaminated sediment. And the risks posed by elevated lead, zinc and cadmium were common. With respect to mammals, 12 of 18 species were at risk. Zinc, lead, and arsenic were the most common risk drivers. There were three remedial action objectives identified in the feasibility study for the site. One, aquatic life protection for dissolved metals in streams and rivers was essential. Zinc and cadmium were the primary drivers. Waterfowl protection from lead in wetlands and flood plains was another objective. And three, the reduction of particular lead, transport, and surface water. For example, recontamination issues and downgrading impacts. Four primary decision documents were issued for the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex Superfund site. Record of decisions for Oppable Unit 1 and 2 were issued in 91 and 92. Those pertain to the populated areas and the non-populated areas in the Bunker Hill box. Oppable Unit 3 is everything outside of the box. And that's commonly referred to as the Coordinated Basin Rod. It was issued in 2002. The 2002 Rod was amended by an Upper Basin Rod Amendment that was issued in 2012. Slide 25 is a short summary of the Oppable Unit 3 Record of Decision. It was issued in 2002. The estimated cost was $360 million and it was predicted to operate for 30 years. The final cleanup for human health exposure to residential and community soils was selected in this record of decision. It was deemed to be an interim cleanup for ecological protection based on benchmarks. It does not meet protecting the standard or applicable or relevant and appropriate requirements. It does not include groundwater or Coordinated Lake. It also does not allow for the practice of tribal or subsistence lifestyles. The remedy for Lake Coordinated was deferred due to the low risk associated with the metals that reside in Lake Coordinated. The Upper Basin Rod Amendment summary is found in slide 26. I'll go over briefly. It was issued in 2012. The cost was estimated to be $630 million and it was expected to take 30 years to implement. Source control actions that Upper Basin mine and mill sites due to consolidation and isolation was one of the primary remedies. Also construction, operation, monitoring and maintenance of repositories to house those contaminated soils is a key ingredient. Remediation of road surfaces was called for. Implementation actions to protect remedies from erosion and recontamination was also a primary ingredient. Completion of the human health remedy was called for. It also called for the implementation of upgrades to the central treatment plant and a construction of the groundwater collection system in the box to address the highest loading stretch in the basin. It also called for implementation of groundwater remedies in Nine Mile and Canyon Creek watersheds, among other things. We're going to shift gears now and highlight some of the cleanup actions and successes we've had at the site. You can see it on the left-hand side is a property remediation during remediation and after in the lower photo and then road existing conditions on the upper photo and post remediation in the lower photo. The thing about the roads is you can see the alligator cracks are occurring. It's very reddish in the hue due to water pumping up through the roads itself and carrying dissolved metals with it. Here's another snapshot of success. This is remedy protection. I discussed that a little bit earlier, but you can see there's a new concrete box culvert on the left. And on the right you see a new retaining wall because drainage coming out that hillside was actually streaming down and washing out the newly remediated property behind this house. Slide 29 displays the eastern portion of the Superfund site. You can see the towns of Mullen working from right to left, Wallis, Silverton and Osborne. The blue arrows are calling out various projects in the communities that for the most part remedy protection projects, as we'd seen photos of earlier. There are mine and mill sites which are designated by M&M on the east fork of Nine Mile Creek. Interstate Callahan Mine and Mill was the first. Success was the next mine and mill site to be cleaned up. Those are all done. And there's a waste consolidation area located on the upper portion of the Nine Mile drainage. Here's a snapshot of the success mine and mill. Thing to note is the left hand side, that's all mine waste. Waste rock and tailings plugging in the drainage. You can see the drainage being cleared out and reconstructed and revegetated here in the photo on the right. Slide 31 is the blood lead level monitoring for the Bucker Hill box from 1970s to recent days. As you can see, the communities are different colors, red, blue and green. They all approximate each other with time. The black line is the center for some disease control, lead health standard, and the dash line is the U.S. average, which approximates the local monitoring data trend line. Slide 32 is an aerial photo of the Bucker Hill box. You can see the central impoundment area that sits in the center of the photo. There's a black line to the north and west of the central impoundment area that's depicting a groundwater cutoff wall along with extraction wells denoted by targets. Slide 33 to the southeast of that is the central treatment plant, which treats groundwater from that extraction system, as well as water that flows out of the Bucker Hill mine. The Bucker Hill mine is depicted to the southeast of the central treatment plant. The town of Kellogg is to the east, the town of Smokreville is to the west, and the former Smokre complex sat to the southwest of the central impoundment area. We can see some results from the recent monitoring of the influent and effluent. Slide 33 displays the zinc monthly average CTP loadings, which is loadings to the central treatment plant. Effluent was less than two pounds per day, while influent in pounds per day at one point was a thousand in August and is down to about 680 in December. It is somewhat variable due to the mine flows as well as the groundwater and the system coming online and being calibrated. The next slide is still focusing on the effluent from the central treatment plant. Slide 34 displays TSS, which is total suspended solids, total zinc, total lead, and total cadmium in terms of effluent as compared to the discharge limit. As you can see, the blue effluent is much less than the orange discharge limit for each one of these constituents that is monitored. Phosphorus is not a constituent of concern or is it on a discharge permit, but we are monitoring both influent and effluent at the central treatment plant. As you can see by the blue bars, the influent loading is variable. The effluent loading is very consistent and is averaging 0.15 pounds per day. This is a very short period of record. In fact, we don't even have a good data set here to be doing a significant analysis on. But we will continue to collect data. We'll be interested to see how this plays out over time and after the plants has been shaken out. Slide 36 depicts a agricultural land that has been converted into a wetland through an easement. The photo on the right displays tundra swans, which migrate through on their spring migration north each year. They suffer large mortalities in the basin due to lead ingestion and poisoning. Shifting gears from snapshots of success to how do you manage and protect this remedy? And the answer to that is institutional controls, which are non engineered instruments such as administrative and legal controls that help minimize the potential for human exposure. To contamination and to protect the integrity of the remedy. 3 primary components, protect the remedy, protect public health and assist with land transactions within the site boundary. Key take home message from this slide is that contamination exists at depth throughout much of the Silver Valley, even after remediated properties. In this case, you have soils that are 27,600 parts per million lead and created than 12 inches of depth, even though there's a clean, overlying barrier above that. This requires resources to manage in the communities of the Silver Valley at all times. Slide 39 displays the challenges throughout the corn lane basin that present themselves to the agencies that are responsible for clean effort protection of human health. You can see people playing in the creeks, you can see boaters and kayakers playing on the. You can see the corn lane river and lounge on its banks. You can see folks having mud bogs. You can also see dead swans and you can see water percolating out of a mine site that's probably out of water. These are ongoing issues site wise. It's important that we recognize all the EPA and its partners have accomplished in the corn lane basin. The accomplishments include remediating over 7000 residential commercial and public properties. Remediating over 500 roadway segments. Continuing to treat over 16 billion gallons of acid mine drainage prior to discharging clean water into the South for the corn lane river from the bunker hill mine. Consolidating and managing millions of cubic yards of contaminated soils into repositories. While operating and maintaining and monitoring repositories. We've installed and refurbished remedy protection storm water systems to prevent recontamination of remediated properties. We've addressed recreational sites, which is a highly dynamic world. You've stabilized abandoned mine sites and consolidated mine wastes. You've stabilized and we vegetated thousands of acres of hillsides. We continue to monitor children's blood lead levels and perform lead health intervention as needed. We have ongoing outreach and education and we have ongoing implementation of the institution controls program. The next steps for the super funding program is to continue to address the source areas in the upper basin. Nine mile and the candy creek drainages are the primary areas for that activity right now. We will continue to address recreation sites as they rise. We will continue to establish clean water foul habitat actions. We're going to implement pilot actions to address riverbed contamination in the main stem of the core line river. We're going to continue to operate and maintain the central treatment plan to ground water select collection system. That system will be operated by Idaho beginning in October, but that operation and maintenance will continue. It's important to recognize the many stakeholders involved in the site like this. Citizens, we have three counties. She's shown in Benoa. We have the Basin Environmental Improvement Project Commission. We have the states of Idaho and Washington as well as the cord lane tribe and the Spokane tribe. And the natural resource trustees. As well as community leaders. In summary, the Silver Valley was one of the world's most productive mining districts for the better part of the century. Historic mining waste disposable practices led to widespread contamination of heavy metals and rivers flood plains and lakes and community areas. Risks from historic mine waste are real and not theoretical. There was high historic blood levels and children. The annual waterfowl mortality is high in this basin. Surface water concentrations are 10 to 100 times higher than site specific standards. EPA with the support of IDEQ has been leading the cleanup for over 30 years and will continue for at least that long. EPA's mission is to protect human health in the environment and therefore is the appropriate agency to address these issues. EPA would find it to be of great assistance if the Academy reviews all relevant data sets in order to identify spatial or temporal trends and biogeochemical processes impacting metal and or metalloid and nutrient levels and cycling within the cord lane. As well as identifying pathways and processes impacting nutrient levels of Lake Coraline that can be used to inform local management options to protect our gym. Furthermore, examples of other lake environments with similar conditions and a summary of successful efforts to address those conditions could be very beneficial for all involved. In closing, I'd like to say thank you for your attention to this brief introduction to the Coraline Basin Superfund site. As you now are aware, extensive studies have been conducted. Human health is the first priority in the cleanup program and we have and continue to address exposure and risk to people. Source control is a key component of the cleanup and will take decades. Choices regarding prioritizing work for ecological risk will continue to focus on targeting actions that address the most significant risks. Engineering controls and institutional controls will always be a critical part of the overall remedy. Thanks very much. I would ask all the speakers to remember to hang around after the break but first we're going to go for another short talk from Chris Filios from Kootenai County Chris. Okay so good morning everyone can you hear me. Yes we can hear you fine thank you. So thank you very much for your time. I think it's a privilege to be able to participate in the study I understand I've got five minutes so I'll be taken to the point. Let me start off by explaining a little bit about Kootenai County. Arguably we're one of the fastest growing counties in the in the nation probably within what some would consider to be the fastest growing state. Unofficially, I believe our population is pushing now somewhere close to about 170 plus thousand people. When we refer to Lake Coeur d'Alene as our gem it truly is and I have made the statement more than once on different occasions that this community will live or die by the health of Coeur d'Alene Lake. And just so you have a little bit of understanding how the county is structured. We have 44 counties in the state of Idaho and the way we operate. I am part of a three member board. My two co-commissioners are Leslie Duncan and Bill Brooks. And every decision we make is a vote of two out of three individually, none of us has any authority but collectively they say we're second only to the governor. And so that's the structure we have, we do have nine elected officials, the other six are the coroner, sheriff, prosecutor, assessor, clerk, and so we're a total of six, a total of nine, excuse me. And we control all the facilities and all the budgets, but we have no operational authority over the other electors. So that just gives you a little bit of a background. The county, the state rather does permit for a different structure what's called an alternative form of government. There is a study group that's going to be formed to study that and it will look more like a corporate structure if it's adopted, I doubt it will be it was voted down handling back in 2012. The reason that we're participating in the study, and I was the one who initiated the request before my board for the $200,000 is that I have long felt that Kootenai County was really not so much underrepresented, but I think under and failed to participate sufficiently and I think the tribe, the court of law and tribe would certainly agree with that. And I don't understand why that is, but I think sometimes, you know, some of the past county commissioners were in a state of denial. And if I truly believe what I've said that will live or die by the health of the lake than this study is absolutely crucial so we don't excuse me donated $200,000 to the study, and that was a two to one vote by the way it was not a unanimous vote not surprising by the board. One of the concerns that I have and one of the reasons that I wanted to participate is that if you look at our zoning here in Kootenai County, the zoning in the shoreline areas or zone what we call restricted residential, which is five units per acre. So the natural question and you're probably asking of yourselves is, why would you take the most sensitive ecology and permit them the densest zoning that we have in the county. Some of the other zonings, for example, ag suburban is a two acre minimum rural is a five acre minimum. And I don't know that I can answer that because it probably goes back decades but what I can say is virtually, all of the discharge systems, if you will, all the their individual septic systems there are very few package systems around the lake. And so that's one of the concerns that I have. Now, have they been an issue. Probably not. We're not sure and I guess your study might help determine this how much discharge is actually attributable to those septics. We do support the efforts of DEQ that's why we contributed. We'd like to have a seat at the table when your study is completed that is to say that we can participate in the analysis. We do realize that we're essentially a minor player in this, especially if we go back to the legal arrangements back to the heckless suit and the other legal determinations but we do want to have a hand in the, not only in the regulations regarding any recommendations but if there is a phase two, we will probably be a key player if there's any remedial action to be taken. And I suspect that's going to come down to the issue of cost. And so that's where we're coming from specific challenges for us as a county. This is not going to surprise many of you. The biggest challenges that we face is what we refer to as property rights issues. There are groups and certainly individuals who feel property rights are paramount so much so that there's almost an attitude among some that it's my property and I'll do as I please. And just to put that in perspective for you. amended our land use comprehensive plan back in the fall. There was a group that argued for the insertion of the word primacy into the into the land use regulations well primacy to me means that it's my property I can do as I please and I can never be challenged. And I say that because years ago, the state of Idaho abdicated its opportunity for primacy on the Spokane River and Washington took it. And the end result was that the discharge rate from the sewage treatment facility that is required is one minute scientific impossibility but in any case, that's going to be the chief challenge if and when it comes to remedial action but I look forward to the study and I welcome it. Thank you very much appreciate it very much we're going to go on break now, and we will please convene only a five minute break. We're running a little over. Let's reconvene at at 10 o'clock, start again in five minutes appreciate it very much everybody take a break. And again, speakers please stay around we've got another talk after the actually two more talks after the after the break but there will be committee questions after that we'd like all the speakers to be here for those of you. Let's reconvene if we can please. And next we're going to hear from the quarter lane tribe presentation Phil Kurnera of the quarter lane tribe will speak next. Phil. Thank you. Does everyone hear me. Oh, great. Thanks very much. Good afternoon and has to squeeze them. Good morning. It's really an honor to be speaking today about something very near and dear to my heart and a paramount importance to the quarter lane people that being the protection of their homeland. This is a very particular late court lane. So what I'd like to do today is provide you with a little historic context of the tribes involvement as the original natural resource manager in their homeland. I'd like to do a little understanding of the contemporary measures that we are involved in, and finally discuss our thoughts about the NS study as we move forward, and what we are currently embarking upon. I'm really sorry we can't be in person. I feel that this is a topic that really needs close contact with another one another people looking in each other's eyes, feeling each other's spirits, and their hearts and their souls. And this is problematic and will probably remain so for quite some time until we are able to meet again so I look forward to that time. So briefly a quick historic perspective. As Rebecca mentioned from time immemorial the tribe utilize the natural resources of their homeland. The sacred packed between the creator that put the chinch people on in and around late court lane. They were to protect the natural resources in their homeland. And in return, the people would always have healthy natural resources to sustain their lifestyle. They were a gathering tribe. They were a hunting tribe. They were a fishing tribe. They fished for Chinook salmon. Those days are long gone. So as you can see here. The homeland of the tribe was vast and included just some amazing countryside late court lane at the center of their universe. If you look at that Hayden Lake Spirit Lake, then you've got massive Lake Ponderay mountain streams with Jamie showed the network, the dendritic network of waterways that with the life blood of the people pre contact. Others used to say that they lived in a utopian society. I park in and mentioned Mr Henry side john's name, often, because he was our spiritual leader on this endeavor. So post contact, as we all know disease. Logging mining road building armies coming through trespass establishment of the reservation where they had to give up nearly all of their homeland to have a reservation that was supposed to be preserved forever into perpetuity for the people. Those promises were made those promises were broken with the allotment act that allowed for white settlement throughout the quarter lane tribal reservation. What you see as the reservation now is a diminishment of the reservation from two previous reservations that were bigger. The states government couldn't allow the core lane people to have their original reservation because of all the minerals and all the timber. So all these things disenfranchise the people from their homeland. And they were down, but they weren't out. And I'm here to tell you that the court lanes are revitalized. They're here. They've always been here, and they will always fight for the protection of our gem late quarter lane. So this is just a real quick snapshot of sort of the tip of the iceberg that most people might look at and say okay yeah we recognize what tribes are all about. And really what tribes are all about is what you see underneath world views, our world view about the relationship that the people have with the natural elements of this basin. It's not one of dominion. It's one of relationship. It's one of compassion. It's one of love. And the mission story. They were found here. The chunx people means those that were found here. So that's what they believe, and most people can't even understand that values seven generation thinking. But really, people need to start thinking about what is it going to be like in seven generations from now, if we continue on this unbridled path of consumption and abuse of our natural resources. It's like seven of five senses. The court lane people recognize the problem. When it started, all they needed was their five senses to tell them what was right and what was wrong. We can still look at that. But we've done studies. We studied this place to death. As a matter of fact, 30 years ago when I started working on this project, people were screaming about no more studies. Well, we're embarking on another study now. What have we been up to as far as resource management. It all starts with the tribal membership, which elects a seven member tribal council, which then over time we've developed a natural resource department, which has such programs as lands environmental planning fire forestry fisheries wildlife air. We have a lake management department that I have the honor to direct, which includes programs such as hazardous waste management, recreation management, water resources shoreline protection. We have the bomb GIS department that has been working for the cause since 1992. We have legal and legislative experts and we all know why we need those guys. We have a cultural department that really provides the overall tenor of how we go about dealing with our business. And we have various committees that we utilize to vet ideas before they ultimately get brought before tribal council. Brief chronology of tribal involvement in the basin. It's really hard to put on one slide 30 years worth of efforts, but a lot of people have already mentioned a lot of the stuff that is in this slide. I just want to highlight a few of them of course in the 90s EPA really came into town with records of decision one and two, and we filed a natural resource damage assessment lawsuit, because at that time, EPA had carved the lake out of any EPA remedy at the behest of the state of Idaho. And we also had to sue the state of Idaho to reaffirm our ownership of the lake. And let me be clear. The only adjudicated portion of Lake court of lane has been the southern portion, the northern portion of the lake the tribe claims complete and utter ownership of, and those are considered disputed waters, because the state claims ownership as well. I'd also like to point out in the 90s. I was involved in writing a little thing called the lake management plan from 1993 ultimately finalized in 96 with the division at the time of environmental quality. It was basically a status update on water quality and some management actions to try to improve water quality. There was no funding. There was no regulation, and it basically died on the vine. The 2000s found us victorious in our lake ownership efforts. It found us somewhat victorious in our nerda litigation where we received over $140 million to do restoration, though that's pennies on the dollar of what was extracted out of our basin. And now we're still suffering from the billions of dollars that are needed to actually do the remediation and restoration needed in our basin. We got wrapped up in FERC relicensing of the post falls dam. We rewrote the lake management plan. And of course that came out of the record of decision three where EPA was coerced by the state of Idaho to continue to carve the lake out of any super fun remedy. So we took seven years to rewrite that lake management plan. And that lake management plan I'll talk about in the next talk, but it wasn't much better than the original plan that died on the vine. We also got swept up into water rights litigation by the state of Idaho. Imagine a people who roam 5 million acres of land now having to fight for their very existence and every drop of water. The state of Idaho has opposed all of our water rights, they claim we don't have any rights to water and lake border lane. 2010 finds us implementing the lake management plan, our restoration plan, being involved in the quarter lane basin environmental improvement project commission still warring like dogs fighting in water rights and implementing FERC for e conditions to mitigate the vast injuries and damages that we find from post falls dam. We also developed the lake management critique, which we can provide an AS with explaining why we think the lake management plan is a failure. 2020 2021 basically we're doing a lot of the same stuff we've been doing for 30 years, and we're taking more strident steps right now to reintroduce salmon back into our territory, and I guess now we're involved in another AS study. So this was an excerpt from the letter from Governor little to the quarter lane tribes chairman and understand from my perspective, the reason and AS is in town is because the tribe divorce themselves from the lake management plan, and asked the governor and the head of region EPA to come before them to talk about a super fund remedy for the lake. The state was very concerned and EPA was very concerned and they knew actions needed to be taken. Quite frankly, EPA just basically stayed silent and wanted to sit back in like they've been doing forever on the lake and see what the state and the tribe were going to do. So, in bold here you can see that the governor was looking to have a third party review of any identified concerns. So that's why the tribe decided to support the nas study. The original statement of work that the tribe worked with the EPA or excuse me with DEQ on and ultimately EPA as well included 13 tasks. The ones in bold are the tasks that nas is now going to be doing. But what happened was DEQ director tip is started shopping this around with nas and nas said, Oh my gosh, this is pretty onerous it's going to take many years and it's going to cost millions of dollars. So what the state decided to do next slide please is to put it into phases. Phase one through five is what nas is charged with now. And I want people to really understand that from my perspective, a, all of these tasks should have been done by EPA. For me, phase two is just out there. It's yet to be determined. But there are some very serious things that need to be dealt with in phase two that from my perspective we may never even get to. And in specific terms, I'd like to point out that number four and five of phase two actions to reverse trends pretty darn important. I think we should be at that right now. And five identify remedial technologies. We want to know what are the technologies out there to address the metals at the bottom of the lake. Forget this lake management plan. We want to know what it costs to do the work and how long it will take to do the work. And next slide please. What is missing from phase two. There was one of these tasks back in the original scope of work of 13 tasks. And this is a big one too. And this is really something that is disturbing. EPA defers a remedy on the lake pending the development and effective outcomes of a lake management plan that is proven ineffective now. So what we had asked and asked to do in the statement of work is to evaluate whether EPA should continue deferring the lake remedy by determining the LMP effectiveness and identifying funding sources. This is egregious. We've been asking EPA for several years now after our data came in saying that our water quality is declining to address this issue. Sammy Grandinetti who was presented prior suggested that she would convene a group to begin considering what evaluation criteria would be used to determine whether the LMP is effective. That's years ago. I have a binder from 1992 of the correspondence that I've written in the tribes written to the state and to EPA. It's 30 years worth of back and forth letters about the lake and about the basin and our homeland. And we want to give this to NAS as well because you will see all the shenanigans going on to try to keep that lake from ever being protected. Next slide. So what are my thoughts about the NAS study? Obviously I'm disturbed but understand that originally and to this day we still support NAS moving forward with the study. We also need to keep in the front of our minds the fact that I'm holding the Superfund book that Dan McCracken discussed right in my hand now. It's like my holy Bible. It's got scribbles all through it. It's got recommendations and conclusions throughout it that nobody has acted on in now published in 05. Here we are 2021. We haven't acted on this. So why are we optimistic that we're going to act on anything else? So we need and we hope that this evaluation proves our data is sound and I am certain it is sound. I have highest regards for DEQ's limnologist and staff as well as my tribal staff. The data is rigorous and sound. We need your conclusions to be straightforward because if they're not we're just going to be bickering over them. And political support. We need this to be the neutral review that the state requires as their political cover to actually begin doing strident measures. And finally, I think I'm throwing this idea out. I think while NAS is doing phase one right now, which EPA should have done, EPA should start doing phase two immediately. So at the end of 18 months from now, we have both phases done and a complete understanding how to move forward. We do not want to be sitting here in two years arguing over information and what we're going to do in the future and continue to kick the can down the street. The time to act is now. We need action now. We can't wait for the catastrophe to occur before humans take any sort of proactive measures. So with that, I thank you and look forward to this study. Thanks very much, Phil. Thanks a lot. And it's next step is you along with Jamie Brunner. Kurtle Lane Lake management plan. Good afternoon, everybody. This is Philip Sonera again, and I'm going to be talking today with Jamie concerning Lake management plan. Hi again, everybody, Jamie Brunner with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality. Okay, so to start this off, I'd like to give a brief history of the Lake management plan. Many folks might not know but in 1993, the tribe was involved in developing the first Lake management plan that became finalized in 1996. It was part of writing that plan that the time the division of environmental quality. It was a plan that basically described the status of water quality, and also talked about some general actions that agencies were involved in to deal with nutrient management in the basin. It had no funding or regulatory teeth to it. So in essence it really just died on the vine. Moving forward in history, after EPA developed their record of decision three, their basin wide record of decision at the insistence of the state of Idaho, the lake was once again carved out of any remedial decisions by EPA. As a result, EPA wrote in their record of decision that they were going to defer a remedial decision pending the development adoption and effective implementation of a lake management plan by the tribe and the state of Idaho. So it's interesting that the original EPA game plan was for a $1.5 billion cleanup. But as I said, the state of Idaho who has concurrence authority over the EPA records of decision told EPA that they would not concur with any remedy that included the lake, thus the deferring the remedy ending this lake management plan. So we worked with the state from 2003 to 2009 to develop the lake management plan that we're talking about right now. And quite frankly, there was a lot of back and forth and wrangling over that plan. And the tribe pretty much looked at the 96 plan and said, for all the reasons that failed, we don't want this new plan to fail. As a result, we wanted to have strident enforcement actions regulatory mechanisms schedules detail budgets, and none of that actually got into the plan because, like I said, we were doing a lot of wrangling with the local county commissioners as well as the state Department of Environmental Quality at that point. I also mentioned that during the development of the plan. We also were involved in the NAS first study. And that was a direct result of the state of Idaho, not wanting EPA to move outside of the box, the 21 square mile box in the upper basin. There's a lot of stuff going on. But at the end of the day, we did adopt this plan. It had no committed funding, no new regulations and as I said no schedule for actions. But also, and primarily, it had no EPA involvement, except for EPA throwing some money at the state and the tribe to hire a mediator to in essence get to go on this plan. I think that was a real problem and something that the tribe in the state should have realized back in the day that this plan needed EPA involvement. 10 years later, we're here. We've got declining water quality. We've got far greater influx of anti regulation population coming into the area, greater pressures on the lake and ecosystem climate change. And now we have another NAS study. So that's kind of the history of the lake management plan from my perspective. Thank you, Phillip. So the lake management plan that we're working with today from 2009. This is the goal verbatim from the plan. You can see in the figure. This is the graphic version of what we're trying to do in the management plan. Essentially, limiting nutrient inputs, watershed wide, basin wide to maintain a metabolism in the lake that keeps oxygen down there in those deeper waters, so that the metals that are down in the lake bed sediment stay there. And again, like I mentioned, this is a basin wide plan, just a little refresher on the court lane watershed about 3,800 square miles, including the court lane rivers, St. Joe and St. Mary's Rivers, and all of the tributaries that drain directly into the lake. We do the objectives that are outlined in the plan in order to pursue that goal, improve our scientific understanding of lake conditions, establish and strengthen partnerships to maximize benefits. Because like Phillip said, we're utilizing existing regulatory frameworks. So these partnerships are essential to a successful plan. We develop and implement a nutrient reduction action plan based in wide increase public awareness of lake conditions and influences on water quality. And of course, we always need funding so establish funding mechanisms to support the goal objectives and strategies. And I'll just walk through each of these briefly. Objective one, improve scientific understanding. We've been continually monitoring in core locations in the lake since 2007 and we continue it today, both the state and the tribe are still monitoring. We have conducted a variety of special studies to answer specific questions. And the tribe has been working on what was the Elcom Kaden model is now AEM 3D or aquatic ecosystem model three dimensional. And you'll hear more about that from Dale on Friday. So here are the core monitoring locations you'll see there are a lot more points on this map than are described in the list. These three sites in the list are the sites that in the lake management plan we committed to monitor regularly but within the resources we have available we do also roll in other sites as we can. So C1 is up here near Tubbs Hill. C4 is down here near University Point and C5 is down here at Chippy Point, which has also been called Blue Point. So those are the three in the plan that we've committed to. Objective two, establish and strengthen partnerships. So in the lake management plan we have management action tables and the appendix and I'll show you an example of that here in a minute. And those basically lay out all of the entities that might be involved in nutrient reduction activities throughout the basin and some actions that they could pursue and who the lead entities are. We also coordinate with other efforts that are ongoing the TMDL process through under the Clean Water Act. In the VISTA Corp they have a FERC license for operation of the post falls dam and within that there are conditions under their FERC license to provide funding for water quality monitoring, wetland enhancement, fisheries and erosion control. We coordinate closely with those folks on those activities. And then also the restoration partnership, which is the team of trustees involved in developing that restoration plan that I showed in the introduction with the plan and the environmental impact statement as a source of information. There's a pretty good plan that's been under implementation that addresses restoration as opposed to above and beyond remediation. So we work closely with that group as well. We are also a member of the Basin Environmental Improvement Project Commission. And you'll also hear them referred to as the Basin Commission, the seven member commission that oversees the implementation of EPA activities and restoration efforts in the basin. And we also coordinate very closely with the University of Idaho, their good partner with our outreach and education and also in performing research. So the management action tables in Appendix C of the Lake Management Plan, they fall under these seven categories. And if you want to read those in depth, like I said, they're in Appendix C and the Lake Management Plan is available online if you don't have that available already. Here's just a snapshot of what one of those action tables looks like. So they're under each category. This one's Development, Erosion, and Stormwater. There are a series of actions listed. If you look at, for example, Action 3 at the bottom, Improve Improve Enforcement of Existing Stormwater Treatment and Erosion Control Requirements. And it lists the lead groups as the city's counties and EPAs. And that's a good example of where those existing regulatory frameworks can be utilized to make an improvement. Objective 3 is Develop a Nutrient Reduction Plan. So we started out with a nutrient inventory report that incorporates a variety of data that were available. And through that inventory, we identified some data gaps that we're currently working to monitor. And in the meantime, we do continue to pursue partnerships that reduce nutrients. And this is just a list of examples of projects we've been pursuing over the last several years. So the nutrient inventory report we have out now, this is just a snapshot of the results. You can see the court lane and the St. Joe River have pretty significant nutrient loads coming through there. You also notice in the tributaries to the lake, the yellow area, our confidence level isn't that high because this is where we have some data gaps. And so we're working in those areas currently to get better data to get a better feel for what those are looking like. Objective 4, Increase Public Awareness. We have a variety of education and outreach programs that we've pursued over the years. Make sure assessment system or lake assist is geared towards landowners to implement best management practices that reduce their impact on water quality. The Panhandle Stormwater Interaction Education Program is geared towards the development and construction community. Our Realtor surf and turf training is very popular. We talked to Realtors about why water quality is important, why the water quality regulations are there, and what those regulations are. Baywatchers are the program we have to foster community liaisons throughout the lake watershed. And we have workshops to both listen to what the concerns are out there and also to share information from both regulatory agencies and other groups that have information to share. We have a wide variety of this week's world and community events that we engage in. We coordinate through our watershed advisory groups and our basin advisory group. And our most recent collaboration is with the RGEM Collaborative. It's basically the group of folks that have helped us organize what we've done for RGEM Cortilane Lake Symposia so far. And so our planning team, which is Cortilane Regional Chamber of Commerce, PDA 2030, State, the tribe, Kootenai Environmental Alliance, Kootenai County. I think that's awesome. But it's a great group of people that we've decided we had such good momentum after the last symposium. We wanted to keep that going. So we've worked as a group to continue to put out press releases in the Cortilane press. And we've also done a couple of speaker series that have gotten really good reviews. So that's an ongoing partnership. Establish funding to support the LMP goal. The state of Idaho has some general funds that they've directed towards these efforts. We get EPA lab support to provide analysis of our metal samples that we collect during our core monitoring and other monitoring efforts. We coordinate, like I said, with a VISTA on their FERC license requirements. So they provided funding for nutrient monitoring. A lot of bank stabilization work, wetland enhancements, fisheries enhancements, and that's ongoing. Throughout the years, we've had a variety of funding for our funding applications for research through the University of Idaho and NSF. Some of those have been funded, some of them have not. But that's how that goes. We collaborate continually with community partners where we see opportunities for value added. We utilize Clean Water Act Section 319 funds to implement non-point source pollution reduction projects. And then the state and the tribe both utilize heck with settlement dollars to help support lake management activities. So looking to the future, as I alluded to in the introductory presentation, and as you'll hear more from Craig and Dale Friday, we are seeing trends going in a direction we don't want to see them go. And those triggers that we have in the lake management plan that basically serve as an early warning system basically lays out what levels of different water quality parameters raise a red flag for us. And what do we do when we see that? Basically the lake management plan says if we see those triggers being approached or exceeded, that's when we need to dig a little deeper and see what's going on. Which brings us to why we're here today. The state of Idaho decided that it's time to pursue a third party review and engage with the national academies to make that happen so that we can take a closer look at what's going on and hopefully have that inform our path forward. And that last bullet there I will defer to Phillip to address. Thanks Jamie. I guess just in closing the tribe develop the critique and stand by it and certainly NAS will have the opportunity to look through it. We understand that no matter what the cost to protect our lake will be in the billions and will require landscape wide changes. If we all face up to these needs, I really don't have any hope that the voluntary process to reduce nutrients to manage the hazardous wastes will work. We understand that EPA needs to conduct an RIFS for the lake to evaluate cleanup remedies and or EPA needs to embrace the lake management plan, help with the tribe and state in rewriting it, and take that under their super fund and institutional control as one mechanism or one approach to remediating the hazardous substances in the lake bed. So with that, I believe we've covered the basics and we'd love to hear from you and provide answers to any of your questions. Great. Thank you very much. Thank you. The next segment of our meeting is to address any questions the committee has. Please committee members raise your hand if you, if you can think of some questions. I'll keep an eye out here. I think Laura, Laura, did you have a question from an earlier talk that you wanted to start with. Yeah, there you are. I did Sam, thank you. First of all, as as the representative from the Academy is running the study I first want to say thank you to all of our speakers. We've, we've crammed a huge amount of information into this, this first morning session and I really appreciate the hard work that you went to to, in some cases pre record your presentations and really fine tune them so I know people are going to have a bunch of questions that the person I'm talking to that can be grand and Eddie is still here but I wanted wondered if can me if you could just speak in a little bit more detail about why there is no TMDL in the lake for the metals or phosphorus. Just, you know, you mentioned that you know that the process started for metals fell apart. It's never been restarted, and then that the process for phosphorus I guess just never got underway. Clearly there are phosphorus violations in the lake so I'm wondering if you can provide the committee with just a little bit more background on why the Clean Water Act process was not led to any type of regulatory actions in Fort Lane Lake and what you see the prospects for in the near future of the Clean Water Act taking a larger role. Okay, I will do my best to answer that question. So first I just want to clarify that the metals TMDL was challenged in court for basically rulemaking administrative administrative procedures act violations and the that has not been picked back up again. Nutrients are a harder issue right now both the state and the tribe have water quality standards for nutrients but their narrative. They say that in the in the state standards it says surface waters of the state shall be free from excess nutrients that can cause visible slime growths or other nuisance aquatic growths and pairing designated beneficial uses and, you know, narrative standards you can list water bodies for not meeting those. EPA would support and and has been supporting the idea that there could be numeric standards. Lots of other states have developed those it makes it a little bit clearer when you're evaluating water quality. I don't know whether or not, I guess, to get more specific about why this hasn't happened. EPA doesn't do this, we approve the state and the tribe listing water bodies the tribe doesn't have that authority under Clean Water Act but the state does, and I would have to defer to the state for where what they're seeing in their water bodies and and their process for listing. I hope that answers your question. I think the EQ maybe give us a little more insight into possible nutrient standards and whether or not. Sure yeah so this is this is Dan McCracken so I guess with regard to the metals. I would just echo I guess what what Kami mentioned about it was challenged in court. I mean in terms of the priority for repursuing that through negotiated rulemaking. It's right now, apparent to us that really the major, I mean the major benefit to going through a metals team the L would be to assist in establishing limits for dischargers. Because we know from all the work through Superfund that the, the overwhelming largest source of metals loading is coming from the riverbed sediment itself. And so until the cleanup progresses further, there hasn't, we haven't seen a huge benefit to to establishing those those loads through it through pursuing that TMDL. We do, we have the process kind of initiated with developing a watershed advisory group, but but in terms of the prioritization of that. It's not seen as a high priority, just just because of the all the other factors playing in the metals loading with regard to nutrients. I think Kami. Kami's point really kind of gets at the crux of it is that based on the standard. We don't see when, when we look at the lake today we don't see an impairment to beneficial uses from nutrients. And I guess, you know, the issue there is that we, we likely start to see issues with with metals mobilization. We don't see, you know, kind of those visual indicators of impairments that beneficial uses from from nutrients so that's something that you know that I think has been a topic of discussion for, you know, is that is that perhaps a tool that we do that a little bit more proactively beyond what the narrative standard would would lead us to do. But that's kind of the status of it today. Final clarifying questions Dan if I could. So, assuming that the nutrient loading were to increase to the point where the lake bed became the largest discharger of metals. That changes the situation for the metal team deal does it not. If you have a TMAs remedy which doesn't fund anything going on in the lake. Then you'd have the largest source being an uncontrolled unmanaged situation that perhaps would make a TMDL more palatable or more. You could actually implement a TMDL in that case. Yeah, I think the biggest thing with with the TMDL at this point is, is just understanding what you know what tool does that provide to us that we don't have at our disposal today. And so, certainly if you know, I guess a better understanding of, you know, how much, how much is the bottom of the lake contributing to the overall loading certainly helps us decide further questions from the committee. If you can't find your raise the hand button just kind of speak out. I have a question maybe for for EPA or for the EQ whoever wants to answer it actually. We saw some early slides from the, even through the 80s if I remember right in the 90s of rated streams and and big floodplains with rated stream like channels. At the very end of the EPA talk you talked about bank stabilization. Have you worked on bank stabilization in the, in the parts of the, the, the quarter lane river affected by the mine impacts and if so, like how many miles or how much bank stabilization is done there as a possible. I didn't hear too much specific about that. Yeah, I'll go ahead and take that question I'm admiring it's environmental protection agency. So, the primary source of solids, led in this case to the lake quarter lane is from the lower base of river bed itself. The banks are a contributor but we estimate those to be about 15%. EPA has implemented a pilot project to remedy bank stables to basically stabilize river banks. There has been ongoing stabilization done by other agencies, part of the natural resource conservation service. I think they've stabilized about last count roughly about 20 river miles of banks using rock for the most part is their stabilization issue. Right now we're focusing on a river bed pilot to address that source of contamination. That's something that's just in the early planning stages at this point, and any river bank pilot would also include stabilizing the river banks at the same time. Our primary goal was to want to make sure that if we're out there doing river bed work that we're going to be stabilizing those banks but until we do so, the ongoing remedial the ongoing contamination being mobilized out of the river bed would be a major problem until we're addressing that. That's the highest priority right now in the lower basin. Thanks. Committee. I'll ask another one if nobody's got one yet. This is a little more esoteric and maybe harder to harder to answer but I think it's important to the committee. Maybe Phil and, and Chris, perhaps Dan can address this. I know Phil mentioned the importance of public and political support for the conclusions of our study. Do you have any suggestions for us as to ways that that we that that we could improve that. I mean beyond credible science and incredible analysis of this. If it's possible that's that's a hard question to answer but but any but anything that could help us, you know, get some hints about how we could how we could get more traction with with this report with the with all aspects of the I open. I could, I could chime in for a second on that. I think from my perspective and I'd be interested to hear what Chris has to say is, as you proceed, the more you can engage the public as well as political leaders, the better. If you're not with a book in 18 months, it's probably not going to be as well received, as if we were involved in the process and as Chris has mentioned, he wants to have some skin in the game. So, I think that would be the skin in the game. Chris, any comments. Okay, I think I missed that last comment you want to repeat, and then maybe I can respond. So let me see if I can, if I can restate that and feel correct me if I'm wrong but I think Phil said if we can engage with political leaders and and the public as we go along that that might help help get buy in and make people feel like they use his quotes have some skin in the game did I get that right Phil. Yes, sir. So how can we improve our public and how we how can we improve our report in ways in our work in ways that would that would improve our public are buying from political and local. I think Phil is absolutely right. I was wondering why I didn't invite the press to participate and I think if we can get the press to monitor some of the presentations. That will essentially open it up to the public and I think you'll see more political involvement as well. I do think there was exactly right on. But those of us who didn't who didn't hear, I think, Phil are Chris also mentioned getting the press involved and as best we can, and within the limits of how the National Academy works. I get that right Chris, we could not everybody could hear you very well. Yeah, that is correct. Bob purge. Thank you. Great presentations everyone. Thank you so much for joining me today and super fun program. I'm interested in my little bit of reading I've done so far indicates that there's a history of phosphorus extraction and fertilizer production in the within the mining district and and the focus of course is on the metals. And could you comment about the role of fertilizer production and whether the super fund address that in any way. Yeah, so there is not a known source of phosphorus in the district. At one point they were importing phosphorus, and it was being processed at a phosphorus by phosphoric acid and fertilizer plant as part of the Bunker Hill smell complex. They had a number of processes there. So there was imported phosphorus in that case and there was a gypsum that was produced that ended up being high end phosphorus as part of a waste product. Most of that gypsum has been placed in the central impoundment area and is under a geomembrane covered surface. There are some existing gypsum ponds that are continuing to be monitored, and they have the responsible parties as part of an agreement with the governments on their consent decree. So there is, I guess to the, to the extent they've been addressed in the past I mean that whole smelter complex has gone there's been substantial remediation cells have been removed, kept consolidated, etc. And then so that the big question for us is how much phosphorus is still moving around in the system in that area. And that's why we're monitoring the influence and effort to the plant itself, just to know what kind of capture and effectiveness. We have in that treatment stream. Okay Bob. Any further. Let's see. Laura, do you have a question or is your hand still up from the last day. No, I have a new question. Sorry. All right. So, I wanted to go back to the very brief mentions that have been made of a VISTA and and the operation of the post falls Dan if someone could just explain what the implications of that dam are on the water quality situation in the lake just so that we all have a shared understanding that would really be helpful it wasn't really touched upon anybody's talk. Hi. This is Phillips and I can at least tell you the tribe's perspective. Since we worked with through the first process to ultimately receive $100 million in for a condition mitigation dollars to try to ameliorate some of the impacts of the dam. The dam backs up artificially the lake in the summertime, and it backs up the water up to Katal del, which is about 30 miles upstream on the court of lane, and up the St. Joe river. We have gotten just amazing amounts of problems related to that artificial lake level. So from the tribes perspective, those are lands were flooded. So we lost thousands of acres of wetlands. Our river banks are unraveling because of the summer winter drawdown creates a situation where our cultural artifacts get unearthed and exposed in these massive mud flats that ultimately people go out and loot our artifacts so we have cultural resource protection program going on to try to deal with that. We also have water quality plans going on and monitoring to be able to better understand how the water quality is changing as a result of the high summer waters in the southern portion of the lake, which creates very large areas of warm aquatic habitat that's perfect for invasive species such as northern pike, which are now destroying all of our cutthroat and potentially bull trout. And we also have a little problem called Eurasian milfoil, which is supercharged by warm shallow waters that are nutrient rich so we have been engaged in over 10 years of trying to deal with aquatic invasive species. And quite frankly, the cats out of the bag on that one and it's basically impossible to control that problem. That problem is now moving up into the northern portion of the lake. So we're collecting information now for the next re licensing which will be in about 32 years or no less than 30 years from now. We'll be once again at the table with whatever re licensing process is going on to be able to better express our concerns about how to go about mitigating the problems related to the artificial high levels in the summer. Laura, if I may weigh in a little bit from a different perspective, EPA has been studying the lower basin pretty intensely for the last 12 years developed the model and you'll hear more about that on Friday from Kim prespo. But the operations of the dam itself influence the flows in the river significantly. The lake is operated for recreational purposes in the summer and then the winter straw down to allow spring runoff capture head. But often when we get a large runoff event the lake will fill up and if it fills up and floods continue to occur or subsequent floods to can you continue to occur. It ends up pushing more contaminated water distributing sediments far and wide in that lower basin in the latter lakes and the flood plains. When the water is low like winter water level eight feet below summer pool, then obviously the water will flow through the lower basin much quicker be less distributive and get into the lake quicker. But the dam was increased twice. It's a natural dam. The lake is a natural lake and what they've done is just increase the pool elevation two different times over history. So that's what I guess that's how it influences the operations and how it influences just how runoff events occur in the basin which is a significant issue when you're trying to manage contamination and understand how to remediate it. I'll leave the rest for Kim to talk about on Friday. Just piggyback a bit on the quarter lane system that had talked about. Yeah, right. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to also mention that the tribes doing some work on the lower quarter lane system now, looking at the deep meander bends and finding out that in the summertime, those are stratifying the lower meander is actually kind of an extension of the lake. So in the summertime, it stratifies. It goes an oxy, those deep bends are going an oxy, and we are finding amazing amounts of metals releases during an oxy and nutrient releases from those contaminated sediments coming out of the river. And in particular, when drawdown occurs in after Labor Day, we basically see the metals and nutrient flux increasing as waters move down the river system and into the lake. So that's another very disturbing trend that we're seeing the anoxia in the river that's causing mobilization of metals and nutrients. Robert Steed had a had a question or a comment. Go ahead, Robert. Yes. Good morning committee. My name is Bob Steed. I'm with the quarter lane DEQ and I'm the surface water manager. I did work on the relicensing for the abyssa dam. One of the, one of my understandings is that the lake level and flooding conditions are really controlled mostly by the sill at the inlet or the outlet of cord lane lake right at the North Idaho college area. The abyssa operates that dam to run, run full, full water through it during the peak of the hydrograph and any flooding and that type of stuff that occurs is really a result of the sill upstream of the dam. They do catch the last portion of water that that as the as we're descending on the limb of the hydrograph and do store the lake level. You know, this the dam is, you know, it's it's it 1214 feet deep. It's not it's not a 100 foot dam. So I wanted to get that in perspective for the group. It's it's relatively shallow. The state of Idaho did have the water quality certification authority during the relicensing and for the Idaho portion of or the state waters, we did have we did find that the dam caused some water quality issues and we do have conditions in our water quality certification for both upstream and downstream effects of the dam. And we do have a mitigation fund which a VISTA has been a good player on and we do work through improvement projects throughout the basin. And I think Jamie brought that up in her presentation but we do have a water they do provide mitigation and help us with our water quality monitoring portion. We do have an erosion component fisheries throughout the basin and a wetlands project wetlands committee as well that works on that. Thank you. We got one more minute if anybody on the committee has any more questions or the other any others want to make a quick comment. And Laura I thought that I remembered that we were going to have a break before the open mic session but I don't have that on my agenda are we going to go right into that. We're going to have a break and during the break we will pull over people who are going to speak in the open mic session. Okay, so let's 10 minute break. Be back at 10 after 11 for the open mic session please. Thanks very much everyone. Great presentations thank you very much for all the cooperation and for the really excellent presentation. So we're going to get a list up here Laura. Great. Thanks Kyle. All right. So it's time to start our open mic session. And I presume Cal if I miss anybody here you will speak up and let me know that the ones I have on my participant list I will take and remember that we have three to four minutes. I'm going to be really strict about the time on these just because we've got quite a few people who want to speak. So please stick to the time as best you can and I'll remind you of when it's three minutes with by with a one minute morning. Okay, the first open mic is bill Irving on bill. I'm not sure I'm trying to unmute. I hear you right now. Okay, very good. Okay, so I have two questions. They both are in regards to climate change impact on the health of the lake. That's probably best for DEQ and the tribe. First question is the additional phosphorus from wildfire smoke has that been studied as to the impact of that on the health of the lake. That's the first question. Do I wait for the response. Okay, second question is back in 2015. We had a horrendous wildfire season with very high temperatures. A lot of smoke stratified the lake early and for a longer period of time. So the second question is related to also that harmful algae algal blooms. So the question that's more of a general question about whether the effects of climate change, not just in 2015, but additional phosphorus from wildfire smoke, whether they have been studied and would be, and would then be reviewed by the NAS in their work. I think it's good idea. Does somebody want to address that. So Craig, this is Rebecca with the tribe. Would you mind addressing those. Yeah, hi, this is Craig Cooper, the limnologist for Idaho DEQ. With regards to the climate change and wildfire smoke questions. Two things. One 2015 was widely viewed to be an example of expected future climate by regional hydrologists. And that year we did see earlier and stronger stratification. We have looked at the potential for wildfire smoke to influence late chemistry. It's a really complicated question because it impacts both weather patterns and the hydrology for multiple years. We don't yet have enough data to say what's happening, but we do think we're seeing an effect, but it's something we certainly are looking at. Does that get the question. Well, is there enough been studied that the NAS would be able to review it and at least any kind of interim conclusions in regards to climate change impact. There's enough data for the NAS to take a look at. It's a very small time data set. And we don't have any reports on it yet, but certainly I think there's some things there for them to look at. Okay. Great, thank you. Next bill. Thank you, Craig. Okay, thank you very much. Next is a Adriana Hummer. Yeah, hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you fine. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, my question is, has there been any involvement from local public utilities that utilize the lake as their source of drinking water in any of the management plans and or in this process. Any speakers want to take that. This is Rebecca I can touch on it briefly. Just in the last five years or so we've really garnered some great support from the city of Port Elaine and their stormwater division, as well as their wastewater treatment facility they've gone through very high extensive areas of which their outfalls or effluent does go back to Spokane River, which is downstream from Port Elaine Lake so we do work closely with them. As far as drinking water all the drinking water and in this area comes from the Ratham period aquifer. So that's the ground water source just to the north of Port Elaine Lake. Can I change my name that to your Jamie. Yeah, I wasn't sure if Rebecca mentioned stormwater with the city of Cortilane we have had a lot of good conversations and more recent years with the city of Cortilane. They're trying to identify some of their stormwater outfalls that they can take offline and use some low impact development style treatment systems for those outfalls. Excellent. Thank you. I want to just ask for some qualifying clarifications from Rebecca or Jamie so the city of Cortilane is I assume Seward, and the outfalls go into the lake or elsewhere. So the city of Cortilane is Seward but their stormwater is not part of the wastewater treatment system they have outfalls that go either into, they either have injection wells that go into groundwater, depending on where they're at in the city or there are outfalls that that drain directly to the lake and the Spokane River. Okay, thank you. Are there any other Seward cities that discharge effluent into the lake. Let me clarify that last thing the Cortilane wastewater treatment plant discharges downstream of the lake into Spokane River. Thank you. And then I think Laura you had a question about municipalities that do discharge wastewater in the lake. We have the city of Plummer, city of Harrison that both discharge portions of their effluent to the lake, and then further up in the watershed, we have cities that discharge to the rivers. Those, those are like secondary treatment or tertiary or primary just secondary I don't have tertiary treatment on the city Cortilane does but the smaller communities upstream. I believe the city of St. Mary's is on tertiary treatment with some, some upgrades and significant upgrades as well. All right. Did we answer that one okay. The next one is Bradley Barnett, excuse me Mike screen keeps flipping around, Bradley Barnett. Thank you Sam. I'm the Vice President of sustainability of Bunker Hill Mining Corporation. We're a team that just arrived on the scene at Bunker Hill mine about a year ago, and started conducting the first exploration that's occurred at the mine in over 30 years. But as you know, the, the mine is the major contributor range of constituents of concern into the central treatment plant. Later processes that water and discharges into the south or to the Cortilane River. I guess I just didn't have a question but wanted to say if there's any way that Bunker Hill mine could contribute to the study or or further understanding in any way. We're happy and available to do so. Great Bradley. Thanks very much. Next we have Norman. I'm sorry again my screen and Norman Semenko. Good afternoon. Appreciate the opportunity to talk with you folks. My name is Norm Semenko and I'm an attorney with Parsons Bailey grew up in the area in Cooney County and here today observing on behalf of Haggadon hospitality. They were referred to earlier that's the court lane resort and golf course on the North Shore. And we really appreciate the good work that you all are doing. We think science is very important. As you can tell, even today in a scientific discussion. There's a lot of emotion and attachment to the lake. I get that I grew up in the area. And that's appropriate. But having this group come in and look at the science is very important. And we're certainly supportive of that. I really appreciated the clarification at the beginning that that you're not here to provide solutions you're here to look at the science and help us understand what what the challenge is. I also really appreciated Mr McCracken comments on behalf of the state, the importance of the economic and cultural center at the north end of the lake, how that is differently situated than than some of the issues that you had highlighted today that's important to understand the fact that the lake continues to be popular. And the public statement, and the public access from I 90, which was mentioned as well as us 95 which is the north south highway and that north south highway connects cord lane to what wasn't mentioned today is another resort and a casino golf course another golf course. I think it's the tribe that I think is very important part of the economic analysis here as well so really appreciate those comments focusing on the importance of the area. The several several resorts that were referenced by Mr McCracken I think may have been a reference to the fact that you've got the, the resort at the north end and then also down in worldly, the one owned by the tribe. The reality is vitally interested in the outcome of this. What kinds of science is identified again really appreciated the stout study outcomes that were suggested by Mr McCracken. There needs to be a high level of confidence in the science. I'm talking about things that could potentially change the lay of the land there alarm bells that can be rang by certain suggestions being made in terms of the future of the lake. It's critical that there be confidence in in the science so I really appreciate that. There's also a clear understanding of the scope of the urgency and also consensus going forward that there be consensus on on where we need to go so we're here to listen will be here to listen on Friday as well. We were involved, obviously we were involved in the relicensing those settlement negotiations on the abyss to post falls dam, and in any number of other machinations around the lake, and we'll appreciate being able to be involved in this process, and watching your good work as well. Thank you. Thanks very much, Norman, Brendan Dowling. Let's see we haven't heard from Brendan unless you're on mute. Oh, you are. Let's go on to Sally Emerson will come back to Brendan if he's if he's here. Sally Emerson, Sandy Emerson, I'm sorry, Sandy Emerson. Eric, are we having trouble with people's mutes. I'm back off here. Okay, Sandy Emerson is that you sandy. This is Sandy Emerson. Okay, we hear you. Thank you so much. I'm a member of a couple different natural resource commissions and committees here in court lane and I've been was on some of the formative committees for the lake management plan and the basin commission so I've been doing this for a while myself, but as a citizen. My question is just is the lake effect of reactivating or mobilizing the lead in the bottom sediments a proven fact when the phosphorus increases or the oxygen becomes a more of a factor or is that mostly theoretical at this point I heard what Phil said. It sounds like there's some measurements going on that might be answering my question. And over time it's kind of been theoretical. Thank you. Hey, Sandy, this is Craig Cooper again. We did a three year study at a very small an ox bowl in the far northwestern corner of the lake that's not represent the overall late just a small microcosm. It does go an ox in the summer times. And we did in that very small place outside of Black Island Marina do find the metals released from the sediments with the waters go hypoxic and both an ox. And don't know what Dale is seeing in the south but I think he's seeing something similar. And yes both legs ink and cadmium come out. Thank you. This is Dale Chess. Yeah, I can add to that so. So the metals that we see released in the lower Coeur d'Alene River during an oxy conditions are lead dissolve lead cadmium and zinc and arsenic. In the St. Joe, when the St. Joe goes an oxy, which it does also, we see high levels of arsenic being released from, from those sediments. And with that, we see high levels of reactive phosphorus also being released from the sediments. Yeah, us too. So it is not theoretical. It's happening we've been measuring it for quite a long time now. I don't agree. It is real it happens. We see it in the hard data and it's consistent with biogeochemical theory. So yeah, Sandy. Thank you. Appreciate it. Right. I'm going to move Brendan Dowling. Are you here. No, I'll go on to Greg. If you're on mute, please. I guess we don't have Greg either. Again, we're not having trouble with mute or anything. Are we, are we Eric. Okay. I think that's all that's all that I can see on my list of open Mike. We might. We might have a couple more people if we could just take like a 30 second break to see if there are a few more people that might not have understood how to use the raise hand feature. Okay. I'll wait for Eric to let us know if there are any more that might be coming over. Okay, very good. Yeah, so those on the attendee side if you raise your hand we can give you the ability to speak if you want to take additional questions. I think people to raise your hand that they're in different places in different systems. Okay, so Sam if you look at your zoom on the attendee side the attendee tab you should see two hands raised, and we can allow those participants to speak. And now I think they're, I think they're transferring over to the panelists side so they're they're on their way over. Okay, thank you. Sorry for the delay folks. attendees. And on the panelists side you should see two hands raised on the panelists and on the under the panelists tab. Oh yeah there we go. Okay Tom McLaughlin. Tom McLaughlin I'm the conservation chairman with the North Idaho flight casters. A few questions. As you look at the heavy metals that are in suspension in the water column. What percentage of percentage of those are migratory coming out of the river system. That's first question. Second question. Are there any technologies currently employed in other situations to filter these suspended metals out of the water column. And then the third question I have. Is there any technologies out there to encapsulate the metals that are in the sediment base of the lake. And I use an example and well drilling the bentonite that would encapsulate it so it can't refind its way back into the water column. Anybody want to address those questions from the speakers. Yeah. Oh, sorry. First. Yeah, let's do it first. At first and then Craig. All right. Thank you, Mr. Cooper. I'll just say Tom, there are high levels of dissolved metals through moving through the South Fork and the main stem of the Coeur d'Alene River. The lateral lakes and into Lake Coeur d'Alene. There's there's a huge source out there. What Craig and Dale are talking about our individual data studies they've done. I think Dale's done several of them in different deep pools. But the overall concentrations of dissolved metals is significant, especially with zinc moving through the system. It's a constant flow from many sources. So that's that's something that's ongoing. And I think that's just going to continue it even as we attack it in the upper basin and attack the various sources. I think Craig's going to talk more about his knowledge on on metals going into solution. And that's a little bit different about nuance on the conversation. I will say with respect to technologies, there are certainly capping technologies out there and can find a quality disposal cells or something that are used by EPA and other, you know, and other agencies on environmental cleanups commonplace throughout the world. So those technologies are viable. There's there's a lot to them and it's complicated and system like this that wouldn't be an easy answer but it is something that could be done if it were right and if you can get the sources under control which is what we're working on right now. I'd like to reinforce that the dominant source by far of metals into the lake is coming from the quarter lane river. There are some northern lake there's a small spot where it comes out in the summer but it's a very, very, very minor and very localized. Again, I don't know the situation down in the south but I think there's a lot of sediment force down the south from correct Dale. As for technologies, yes it is capping technologies that would be very hard to do but there's also techniques for doing monitored attenuation using national sediments that come in from the rivers. It's a very hard large complicated system and I'm not an expert on it, but they do exist. I just add add a couple other comments to that I think, I think for the technologies that we run into is the scale, and we're talking about capping the entire bottom of the lake. You know, just becomes a feasibility challenge. And then with that, I mean, even if we were to completely be ensured that the metals wouldn't release off the bottom of the lake. We don't need to manage nutrients because as Kami showed pictures of what we have what we have happening right now in Fernand lake, where we don't have metals, we still have issues that excess nutrient loading still causes issues for us in terms of water quality. So we still have kind of the same issue whether or not the metals come up in terms of making sure that we don't get to a state where we have excess nutrients in the lake. I'd like to follow up with Andrew briefly is that from a nutrient management perspective on the lake. We are in a position now where look at the ratio of nitrogen to phosphorus that in the summer we are at risk for algae blooms, even though we don't see them in the lake yet. I would, I would like to add something. So I think we do have some you'll see it on Friday at site C five. We do have I think some evidence of some, I would call it enhanced benthic flux due to low oxygen in the hypolimnion at C five in the southern basin, and that in itself looks like it could be increasing the benthic flux rates of zinc from those from from that hypolimnion. So, in the summertime and I think cool bar is study well when a cool bar studies cool bar at all. I don't I forget what year. Describe that, I think it was during the summertime that benthic flux in the lake could supply as much zinc to the water column as the Corlean River can. So there is there is some evidence that that the benthic flux of zinc itself is very important from a seasonal aspect seasonal standpoint. Right, thank you. Let's see. Have I gotten to everybody. Shelly Austin, are you a new person on here have we gotten to you. Hi, I am a new person. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ask. I was just digging around through my notes and unfortunately I can't identify the woman who spoke about funding sources and how they that person. I really wish I could remember who it was, but my question is, this was a either Idaho or I'm sure it wasn't tried. I think it was. Thank you Dan, I think it was. And you talked about other funding sources you talked also about the opportunity to work with partners and other organizations but my question for you is. Are you not funded by the state, why are you seeking additional funds for these projects outside of your own purview. So we do have some funding through the state to perform some of the core functions of the lake management plan. And unfortunately that primarily covers staff time and the monitoring activities equipment and supplies. So we can outreach all those activities that we do project implementation on the ground project implementation and research we do try and reach out and find more funding sources to kind of leverage. We use our state funding to leverage some other funding sources to do more, more with the resources that we've got. So there's a combination of state and also outside. So the HECLA settlement funds and also the Avista funding that they provide as part of their for license as well. So that's your question, sort of so you are seeking private donations. We don't necessarily seek private donations is more on the level of grant funding for example the restoration partnership they have a restoration plan that they have money available for on the ground restoration projects that enhance habitat and our focus of course would be reducing nutrient inputs to the basin. Right. So we don't look for private donations but we do look for funding sources that are out there for the specific purposes that we're trying to accomplish. Okay, thank you so much and I do want to introduce myself. I'm Shelly Austin and I'm the new executive director for the Kootenai Environmental Alliance. I just just started we have not been able to send out a press release but I'm really anxious to meet all of you individually and continue this discussion. Thanks for including me today. Nice to meet you Shelly. Yeah, I'm glad to be here. Okay, next we have Sky Walden. I am the committee chair for the climate and and and I'm sorry I'm a little nervous you guys I follow a lot of you guys doing stuff and I just have sort of a bit of envy and, you know, a lot of respect for all of you. But I'm the climate and environmental justice chair for the NAACP, the local chapter, and I hopped on here late so unfortunately I missed everything up until this last, you know, hand raising section I was wondering if this is going to be posted anywhere I see it's recording. The recording of this session will be available in about a week or two. It'll be on our event page. Okay, awesome. And then I just also it sounds like this is a lot of stuff that was talked about during the RGEM collaborative speaker series from the 2020 September edition. Has anybody talked about bioremediation at any point. We did not hear anything about it today but if anybody has any comment about bioremediation from the speakers now. Any bioremediation within the cord lane basin from EPA's perspective I'm Ed Murray. One of the challenges we have is that concentrations are so high in this area that bioremediation oftentimes creates another waste product. So you create a waste product that has to be managed so if the plants are up taking the vegetation, you don't want it to be by deer or cattle or what have you so it's it's a challenging situation. It is always appealing and we'd love to find an easy way to deal with the widespread lead and other heavy metals in the system, but today has been no maxi magic dust and so to speak. Thanks for asking. Thank you for taking my question here and I look forward to actually getting to see what was discussed here today. Thank you. So let's ask again Brendan Dowlin, or Greg Deleban. It looks to me like that's everyone then is there are there any others. Eric, I don't see any other hands. I guess that is everything for today I'd like to thank everybody for all the attention and for their excellent presentations and the excellent questions and excellent open mic session. And we'll look forward to seeing everybody on Friday. See you on Friday. Thanks much.