Caroline Fraser

But they were full of metals like lead and copper and silver and gold and melting those rocks in these giant furnaces.

And all of this put off an enormous amount of pollution, you know, particulate pollution that was going up the smokestack.

And they were, you know, the companies that ran these things were keeping all the valuable metals that they could for themselves, you know, the silver and the copper and all of that.

And so they did have filters on them, but...

One of the things that happens sometimes with these smelters is that they would kind of fail or the filters would fail.

There's this horrifying example in Idaho.

It was a company called Bunker Hill that was one of the largest silver mines, I think, in the world.

And they had a lead smelter in this town called Kellogg, which is right on I-90.

If you've ever driven...

on I-90.

you know, from Missoula, Montana or something like that to Seattle.

You've driven through this place.

And they built, you know, this giant smelter facility to handle all the stuff they were pulling out of the mines.

And in 1973, they had a fire in their filtration building that destroyed most of the filter.

That was the thing that was supposed to keep lead from going up the smokestack.

And there were kids in this town.

There was an elementary school right across the street from the smokestack.

Jesus.

And the descriptions of that school are so horrifying because the teachers used to think that sometimes that the facility had caught fire because there was so much smoke.

But in fact, it wasn't – there wasn't – it was just what the smokestack was putting out.