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Cataldo, Idaho · Photographed June 9 and 10, 2026 · Updated June 10

When you sandblast a 1936 bridge over the Coeur d'Alene River, where does the paint go?

On June 9, a Cataldo-area resident photographed crews blasting the old Canyon Road truss bridge where it stood over the river, inside one of the largest lead Superfund sites in the United States. She said the cloud carried so far she first took it for wildfire smoke. When she asked about lead reaching the water, workers told her there was a protocol and that air quality was being monitored. By the next morning the truss was off the river, and the open-air blasting continued on the ground nearby. These are her pictures, both days.

Photographs and video taken June 9, 2026 by a Cataldo-area resident and shared with the Silver Valley Community Resource Center. Note the worker in the white suit, the mesh netting along the lower steel, and the bulk bags staged on the closed road.

Update, June 10: the truss is out of the river

The resident went back the next morning. The truss has been lifted off the river and now sits on the ground a short distance from the bank, where blasting work continues in the open. At the old crossing, a crane works from a temporary trestle over the water. Getting the steel off the river is the right direction, and it is the second item on the list of fixes further down this page. What remains is the other half of that fix: the truss is still being stripped in the open, in the floodplain, a short walk from the water, instead of inside containment.

Two more things are now closed. The access road is barricaded well short of the site, and, according to the resident, the river itself is closed to the public through the work zone. A river does not get closed for work that produces nothing worth keeping away from.

The protocol also has an address now. When the resident asked the owner of the sandblasting contractor, a company she identified as Sand and Air, for the contamination protocol and who wrote it, he referred her to an industrial hygiene contact at (208) 378-7789. A protocol that exists can be shown. If the air monitoring numbers from question 3 below exist, that phone number is presumably where they live.

Photographs taken June 10, 2026 between 10:50 and 11:10 a.m. by the same Cataldo-area resident, from public ground. From top left: the road closure on the approach; the removed truss on the ground near the bank; the crane on the temporary trestle at the old crossing; the trestle from the riverbank.

What is happening here

The 1936 Canyon Road bridge at Cataldo is being replaced by the East Side Highway District, about 400 feet upstream of the I-90 bridges that the Idaho Transportation Department is rebuilding through the end of 2026. The historic steel truss is not being demolished. The City of Star, near Boise, is acquiring it to reuse over the Boise River. Before it can travel, the old structure is being stripped and prepared on site.

Steel truss bridges built in the 1930s were, as a rule, coated with lead-based paint and recoated with it for decades. Abrasive blasting turns old paint into fine dust. Whether the paint on this specific bridge was tested for lead before blasting began, and what the result was, is the first question on the list below. Nobody we know of has seen that answer.

Why this particular riverbank is different

This is not a clean river that can absorb a small insult. The bridge stands inside the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex Superfund site, where EPA has spent four decades and well over a billion dollars trying to get lead out of this exact floodplain.

Figures from the Coeur d'Alene basin cleanup program and USGS transport studies, linked in the sources below.

The floodplain problem is bigger than one bridge, and it did not start with one. A century of mining and smelting at the head of this valley, the Bunker Hill smelter, the Wardner mines, the Central Impoundment tailings, loaded the river with lead long before any cleanup began. The animation below shows the whole sequence on real terrain: the historic sources load the valley and the lead works its way downstream, then the modern remedy digs the top foot off yards in the towns, trucks it west to East Mission Flats inside FEMA's mapped flood zone, the flats flood, and the river entrains the material and re-deposits it along the banks toward Lake Coeur d'Alene.

Rendered on USGS 3DEP elevation data. Flagged sources are the Bunker Hill smelter, the Wardner mines, and the Central Impoundment Area tailings. Blue areas are FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer zones A, AE, and AH from FEMA's live map service. River, towns, and the repository and impoundment footprints from OpenStreetMap. Downstream is west, toward Lake Coeur d'Alene.

What full containment looks like

Removing lead paint from steel by abrasive blasting is a solved problem. The industry standard, SSPC Guide 6, Class 1A containment, means a full enclosure with sealed joints, air kept under negative pressure, and exhaust pushed through HEPA filters. Over water it means a sealed platform under the work, not netting. Netting catches debris. It does not catch dust.

It also means perimeter air monitoring with results written down, spent abrasive collected and tested before disposal, and, inside a Superfund site, coordination with EPA and the state, plus notice to the people who live there.

Photographs from two days cannot show what the work plan says. They can show what was visible from a public road: open steel, mesh netting around the lower chord, a cloud a neighbor mistook for wildfire smoke, and, by the second morning, the truss being stripped in the open on the ground near the bank.

Seven questions with simple answers

Every one of these is answered by a document that either exists or does not.

1. Was the paint on this bridge tested for lead before blasting began?

   A paint chip test costs about $50 at a lab. If it was done, the report has a date and a number on it.

2. What containment class does the contract specify?

   If the spec calls for full enclosure, why is bare steel visible from the road during active blasting?

3. Where are the air monitoring results?

   Workers told a resident on June 9 that air quality was being monitored and within safe limits. On June 10, the contractor's owner referred her protocol questions to an industrial hygiene contact at (208) 378-7789. Monitoring produces numbers. Who reviews them, against what limit, and can the public see them?

4. What is between the work and the water?

   The same resident reported silt visibly entering the river below the bridge on June 9. As of June 10 the truss is on the ground near the bank, which ends the over-water blasting but not the question: what is under the work now, and what keeps wind and runoff from carrying the dust the rest of the way?

5. Where is the spent abrasive going?

   Blast media mixed with lead paint routinely fails the TCLP test and must be handled as hazardous waste. Was it tested?

6. Did EPA Region 10 and Idaho DEQ review this work plan?

   The work sits inside an active Superfund site with a legal community involvement obligation.

7. Why did residents learn about this from a dust cloud?

   No notice, no posting, no meeting that anyone in the community can point to.

Better ways to do this

The Silver Valley Community Resource Center is not asking for the project to die. The bridge is leaving either way. The ask is that the last thing it does here is not deposit its paint into the river. Specifically:

• Pause open blasting until the containment actually in place is verified against the spec, and the paint test result is public.
• Do the heavy stripping somewhere else. The truss is being moved regardless. Lift it, transport it, and blast it inside a contained facility at its destination instead of over the river it is leaving behind. Update, June 10: the truss is now off the river, which is the first half of this. The second half is stripping it inside containment rather than in the open a short walk from the water.
• If work continues on site, enclose it. Full enclosure with negative air, or wet abrasive or vacuum-shrouded methods that keep dust at the nozzle.
• Publish the work plan and the air data. If the protocol is real, showing it costs nothing.
• Sample before and after. Wipe samples and soil samples at the staging area, the nearby homes, and the Old Mission grounds, with results made public.

Beyond the bridge

The bridge is one afternoon's example of a pattern this valley knows well: work happens to the community instead of with it, and nobody shows the numbers. If the goal is healthy kids rather than completed paperwork, the fixes are not mysterious.

• Make independent verification a habit. Residents should not have to take "we have a protocol" on faith. SVCRC is arranging independent soil sampling around this site, analyzed off-site, and the results will be posted on this page whatever they show.
• Treat the valley as a dual exposure problem. The Superfund program addresses mine waste in soil. But the housing itself is from the lead paint era, and yard work cannot fix what is on and inside the houses. Screening and prevention have to cover both.

Zip	Place	Housing units	Median year built	Built before 1950
83810	Cataldo	701	1975	5%
83837	Kellogg	1,632	1951	48%
83839	Kingston	666	1973	9%
83849	Osburn	967	1960	30%
83850	Pinehurst	1,032	1973	15%
83867	Silverton	179	1959	8%
83868	Smelterville	452	1948	56%
83873	Wallace	1,204	1938	66%

Housing age by zip code, U.S. Census ACS 2022 five-year estimates and EPA DWINSA 2025, compiled in DetectLead's national screening database. In Wallace, two of every three homes predate 1950, before residential lead paint was restricted. Lead paint was not banned nationally until 1978.

Look up your own address

Enter your address or zip code. We will show the lead-era housing picture for your zip from our national screening database, flag whether you are inside the Coeur d'Alene basin Superfund area, and link you to FEMA's flood map for your exact address.

• Sequence the cleanup around the source. Roughly 72,000 tons of contaminated sediment still move through this river system in a year. Digging up yards in a historic floodplain while the riverbed stays loaded invites recontamination with the next flood. EPA's own expansion of the cleanup into the lower basin recognizes exactly this.
• Measure outcomes, not activity. Publish the basin's childhood blood lead surveillance alongside the remediation counts, every year, in one place the public can read. If the yard program is lowering children's blood lead, the numbers will show it. If it is not, the public deserves to know that too.
• Put the committed community funding back. SVCRC was approved for an EPA Environmental Justice Thriving Communities subgrant to do community lead health work in this basin. That program was frozen and terminated nationally in 2025, a federal court has since found the termination unlawful, and while the litigation drags on, the approved work here sits unfunded. Idaho's congressional delegation, starting with the meeting SVCRC is seeking with Senator Crapo, can ask one simple question: why is money Congress already appropriated for communities like this one not reaching them?