Another Snow Day

Another Snow Day in Spokane. This ia a picture from Browne's Addition looking East along Pacific Avenue toward downtown. The tower you see is one of two towers, the other is just hidden on the other side of the one you see. These were the smoke stacks of a steam plant which for years was run by Washington Water Power (Avista today) and which provided steam for heating in the buildings of the city in the central core.

For years a heavy oil used to power the plant leaked from storage tanks into the ground. The oil was "Bunker C" - a tar like substance. The oil has been "cleaned up." Really, some of it was cleaned up, the rest has been contained. There are monitoring wells in and about the site especially on the side of the site between the old tanks and the Spokane River.

Sometimes I think America lives on top of a hazardous waste site. I think of the Silver Valley to the East in Idaho. The contaminated Spokane River. The contaminated Lake Roosevelt which is a part of the Columbia River upstream for Coulee Dam, the contaminated areas of Lake Coeur d'Alene, to name only a few.

In fact much of the area in and about downtown Spokane which has been rebuilt on old railroad yards is contaminated, but we will not say anything about that.