Toxic Tar Creek, Oklahoma And The Collapse Of The Superfund - Time

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To get a better view of the situation, John Sparkman guns his flame-red truck up a massive pile of gravel. From the summit, a lifeless brown wasteland stretches to the horizon, like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Mountains of mine tailings, some as tall as 13-story buildings, others as wide as four football fields, loom over streets, homes, churches and schools. Dust, laced with lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals, blows off the man-made hills and 800 acres of dry settling ponds. "It gets in your teeth," says Sparkman, head of a local citizens' group. "It cakes in your ears and hair. It's like we've been environmentally raped."

Hyperbole? Drive through the desolate towns around Picher, Okla., and you might think differently. This is eco-assault on an epic scale. The prairie here in the northeast corner of the state is punctured with 480 open mine shafts and 30,000 drill holes. Little League fields have been built over an immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium — which may explain, local doctors say, why three different kidney dialysis centers have opened here to serve a population of only 30,000.

But the grimmest legacy of a century of intensive lead and zinc mining are the "lead heads," or "chat rats," as the kids who grew up around here are known. As toddlers, they played in sandboxes of chat — the powdery output of mills after ore is extracted from rock. As preteens, they rode their bikes across the gravel mounds and swam in lime-green sinkholes. Their parents used mine tailings to make driveways and foundations, never thinking that contaminated dust might blow through the heating ducts of their ranch houses. In the past decade, studies have shown that up to 38% of local children have had high levels of lead in their blood — an exposure that can cause permanent neurological damage and learning disabilities. "Our kids hit a brick wall," says Kim Pace, principal of the Picher-Cardin Elementary School. "Their eyes skip and jump. It takes them 100 repetitions to learn a sound."

At her kitchen table, Evona Moss helps her son Michael, 10, with his homework. Michael grew up across the street from a chat pile, and at one point the third-grader's lead levels measured 40% above the Centers for Disease Control's danger level. He repeated kindergarten. "I used to think he was lazy," says his mother, "but he tries so hard. One minute he knows the words, and a half-hour later he doesn't. Every night he kneels down and prays to be a better reader."

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[RoyGBiv]

1. Pictures - Link

LINK

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2. Good God - like Tennessee in the 1930s in the copper-smelting belt

Same damn thing - permanent poisoning of the soil, permanent damage to watersheds and aquifers.

The only difference is that this time, it's 2004 and this shit is still going on.

[woofless]

3. This is so true.

I have been there and have friends living there now. It is one of the ugliest places on the face of the earth. Huge areas of SW MO and NE OK are one big superfund site. In the 90's EPA routinely carried out remediation projects, scraping off the top 6" of topsoil in yards and replacing it with new soil, then hydro-seeding. They did that to my place in Carterville, MO. We lived on land reclaimed from lead mining. They spent millions testing school children for lead/cadmium levels. I suspect but do not know that all that is stopped now. It is a job that needs to be continued. My grandkids are there now.

Woof