Good
morning, Ray. Thanks for sharing this
story, which helps put the problem into context for many who simply didn’t know. Your testimony to the human grief and
suffering on FW by the people affected as been good witness, telling the story
often so that it is not forgotten. To add
more frustration to the deserved fury of man made disasters like this, the EPA
recently was exposed for having inadequate tools to deal with the problem, much
less inadequate will and philosophy to serve the public good. Again,
from the LA Times Environmental Section: EPA System That Checks
Pollution Called Obsolete
From Associated Press, May 27, 2003 @ http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-na-epa27may27,1,6315883.story?coll=la%2Dnews%2Denvironment This of course raises the specter that
there are other Pichers and Tar Creeks out there we still don’t know about,
which should not only increase the public’s concern but also it’s level of
skepticism when the federal gov’t tells us it is addressing pollution in a
timely and responsible manner. I
do not make that charge completely cynically. There are groups and state agencies doing what they can to
identify and protect the public, but the will to make things happen comes from
the top, and we know in Bush2 it is not there, from it’s history with
corporations and Gov. Bush’s legacy in Texas on the environment. Trying to undermine the Superfund
program is just a first example with the Reaganesque philosophy of Bush2. Even today in Florida, where much good
publicity was sought for the cleanup of the Florida Everglades and offshore
reefs, Gov. Jeb Bush is having to concede that the funds are not there to do
the work. By now, most of us
realize that delay and postponement are the second most dangerous factors in environmental
damage after ignorance and capriciousness. But as in Picher, it’s not just plants, fishes, wildlife and
grassland that were affected. The public
has a right to know. We should all
reinforce that principle at the local, state and federal level. If you run into closed doors on the
subject of pollution and the public, you generally can assume avarice and
deception. It may take more tragedy
for most people to become outspoken and adamant about the economic disaster
that is Bush2 policy, but on poisoning people, land and wildlife, it crosses
all philosophies and the public does pay attention. The public realizes it affects all of us in the long
run. Each of us
on FW has other interests and networks. Tar Creek and Picher should be stories we repeat, maximizing
the power of knowledge to overcome the inertia of ignorance, dubiousness and
complacency that Lawry mentions.
We are all a piece of the human puzzle. Or as is attributed to John Muir, “When one tugs on a single
thing in Nature, one finds it attached to the rest of the world.” With anger
- KWC THE TAR
CREEK TIME BOMB Water
boiled out of a red wound in the pasture and spilled across the grass. It
flecked the ragweed with rusty foam. George Mayer knew in an instant what it
was. "The
damn mines," he said to himself. "The mines are full, and the water’s
finally coming out." It
washed around the ankles of his purebred Arabian horses, stained the ends of
their tails and splashed against their roan-and-tan bellies when they ran.
Their hides turned orange. The hair burned off their legs. They developed open
sores, like bracelets, above their hooves. Not far
away, water gurgled out of another hole in the ground. Then it surged from
another. And another. It belched from a mine shaft and gushed out of an old
cave-in. It splashed down ditches and gullies and into a meandering stream
called Tar Creek. It turned the stream blood red, and it killed the fish.
Slowly,
the mines became a 10-billion-gallon vat of subterranean poison. The U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency says the vat has become one of the worst
hazardous waste sites in the nation. The EPS calls the site Tar Creek, after
the ravaged stream that bears the brunt of the acid flow. Critics
who want Tar Creek cleaned up say that the EPS is dragging its heels. Some say
the agency is delaying to protect the corporations that might be responsible.
The EPS denies stalling. But internal EPS memos show that the agency is being
deliberately cautious because Tar Creek raises issues that affect mining sites
across the country: Can the
government use its cleanup fund, bankrolled by a special tax on the chemical
industry, to clean up mining waste? Across
the surface of the land, like the veins on the back of a hand, flowed a succession
of creeks and rivers. Among the smaller streams was Tar Creek, named for the
black ooze that seeped from two springs at its source. Tar Creek flowed south
for 18 miles before spilling into the Neosho River, which swept it into the
sapphire depths of a lake so magnificent that it came ot be called Grand Lake. In the
beginning, the land was owned by the Indians, who leased it to white men. In
1901, O.W. Youse from Kansas drilled a water well for A.W. Abrams not far from
what is now the town of Picher. His drill bored through the Boone Formation. At
about 250 feet, it hit the lead and zinc. Two men
and a mule would sink a shaft where the men thought good ore might be. If they
hit it, they tunnelled out laterally underground and followed the ore until it
played out. If they did not hit it, they simply moved on and dug another shaft. As
their techniques improved, the miners began drilling bore holes before they dug
shafts. They drilled every hundred feet or so until they found ore. Then they
tunnelled to it from existing shafts. If they wanted to use the bore holes for
ventilation, they cased them with steel pipe to keep their walls from crumbling. In
1926, a centralized mill took over processing. Larger companies bought out the
small operators. And production increased dramatically. Miners
connected their tunnels. They hollowed out huge chambers. The mines grew into
massive, tri-level honeycombs – with one operation at 200 feet, say, another at
300 feet, and still another at 400 feet. The
mines grew so large that the men lowered disassembled trucks into their depths,
reassembled the trucks, outfitted them with exhaust cleaners and drove them,
underground, from Oklahoma to Kansas. Along the labyrinth of tunnels and
drifts, they hollowed out chambers the size of Little League baseball parks. At
strategic places, the miners left pillars of stone to hold the ceilings up. As the
mines expanded, they drew more and more mineral water from the surrounding
Boone Formation. If the water stayed in the mines long, it grew acidic and ate
the nails out of the miners’ boots. They
pumped the water out – with wooden machinery at first, because the water would
eat the working parts of an iron pump in little more than a shift. Eventually,
they replaced the wooden pumps with improved large-capacity metal machines that
pumped 23 million gallons a day. They
dumped the water into Tar Creek. Fish
died, and muskrat and beaver fled. The water left the creek bottom a dirty
orange. The
Tri-State Mining District warned: If the pumps are turned off, the mines will
flood. Small
operators stayed and finished removing the last of the ore. Some were so-called
"gougers" who took everything – including many of the pillars that
held the underground ceilings in place. Some
mines caved in. Miners called the cave-ins "subsidencies." At the
Sunflower mine, a chunk of ground the size of four football fields fell straight
down and left cottonwood trees standing in mid-crater. The town of Picher
abandoned four blocks of businesses on both sides of Main Street after a
cave-in behind Picher High School. By the
mid-1960s, most of the mining had ceased. But the land was devastated. And the
miners turned off the pumps. The
flow of acidic mine water into Tar Creek slowed to a trickle then stopped.
Little by little, the creek came back to life. Bass, perch and catfish
returned. Even a beaver or two came back to build dams. But
below ground, a time bomb was ticking. Slowly
the mines filled with water. It covered the oxidized pyrite in the tunnels and
on the floors of the chambers. It touched the oxidized pyrite on the chamber
ceilings. The
water and the pyrite reacted chemically. The
volume of acid grew, like an underground monster out of control. And
before the year was out, the did – into the middle of George Mayer’s horse
pasture. To
Mayer, a World War II pilot who had turned a building stone business into a
sizable northeastern Oklahoma enterprise, the water looked like it was bubbling
out of a red fissure in the earth. A few
miles away, more acid water began boiling out the another drill hole, this one
near a dirt road. It flowed only intermittently, but it belched out an average
660,000 gallons a day. Still another bore hole spewed acid water out of casing
four feet tall. After a hard rain, the casing gushed an acid geyser three feet
into the air. Yet another bore hole sprayed acid through a cracked casing cap
like champagne from a party fountain. Millions
of gallons of discharge found their way down crevices and ravines to Tar Creek.
The creek turned red again. Pumpkin-coloured sludge sank to the bottom. John
Mott watched them die. A disabled retired tiremaker who had worked at B.F.
Goodrich plant in nearby Miami, Okla., Mott, 55, is a bow hunter and fisherman. "We
had quite a bit of rain, and water was running down this road right adjacent to
Tar Creek, and there were fish in the ruts in the road trying to get
away," Mott said. "The perch and small bass and sunfish and bluegill
were already dead. But the bullhead catfish, they’re pretty tough. They had
open sores, like somebody took a knife and cut a chunk out of them. But they
were still alive. They had acid in their gills, and it wouldn’t let their gills
get oxygen. They were gasping for air." The
Neosho neutralized the Tar Creek acid. A hundred years downstream from the
confluence, most of the metals in the Tar Creek water had precipitated out, and
the Neosho ran clear. But
Mott worried. "If we get too much rainfall, you are going to have four or
five million gallons a day running out of the ground and into Tar Creek,"
he said. "In some places right now, the sludge is three feet deep. It lays
there in Tar Creek and in the Neosho, and come spring and we get a big flood
it’ll wash all that at once time right down into Grand Lake. Indeed,
where the Neosho feeds into Grand Lake, fishermen already had started finding
high concentrations of cadmium in carp and lead in smallmouth buffalo fish. At the
same time, the acid water was leaking downward. Slowly,
it was ruining the Roubidoux. As early as the mid-1970s, the town of Commerce
discovered contamination in one of its wells that drew water from the
Roubidoux. A Roubidoux well that supplied a boron plant near Quapaw went bad
last year. The town of Picher had two of its wells go bad. Acid water ate its
way through the well casings. People
complained that Picher water smelled metallic, tasted like rust, stained their
bedsheets and turned their sinks and toilet bowls red. Because of its colour
and taste, however, few people drank the contaminated water, so few people got
sick. Picher’s
contaminated wells were re-cased, but it was clear that the water supply for
northeastern Oklahoma ultimately could be tainted. "More
studies are necessary," Rep. Mike Synar, D-Okla., told a congressional
hearing last fall, "to determine whether the main aquifer has been
contaminated to where it would literally affect the water supply for hundreds
of thousands of people in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas. Concern
was compounded by a study that showed higher-than-normal cancer rates near the
mines in Cherokee and Jasper counties. The
study, by Dr. John S. Neuberger, an assistant professor at the University of
Kansas School of Medicine, showed that the incidence of lung cancer among men
during the mid-1970s in Cherokee County was 54 percent higher than the national
average and that lung cancer among men during the same time in Jasper County,
Mo., was 42 percent higher. Neuberger
suspected that radon gas from the chat piles was responsible for the increased
cancer rates. But he said more studies were needed. Ron
Jarman, chief of the board’s water quality division, sent the results to the
governor. "And
we said, ‘Help!’" Harman said. Gov.
George Nigh created a Tar Creek Task Force of 23 local, state and federal
agencies. It hired Hittman Associates Inc., a firm of consulting engineers from
Colorado, to figure out what could be done. Hittman
said Oklahoma should catch the mine discharge, pump additional acid water out
of the ground, purify it at a treatment plant and use it for farms and
factories. Even with the best technology, Hittman said, it would take up to 23
years to ease the threat. And it
would cost $20.6 million. That
was more money than Oklahoma had – and more than a town like Picher, which paid
for its only police car with a bingo game, could imagine. Totalling
$1.6 billion, Superfund was established during the last days of the Carter
administration to clean up the nation’s worst accumulations of hazardous waste.
Most of the money – 87 percent – comes from a special tax to be paid by
chemical companies until 1985. The rest comes from the U.S. Treasury. Because
its immediate threat to public health was not as severe as that at, say, Love
Canal, the EPA was reluctant to call Tar Creek the worst on the list. But when
EPA investigators ranked waste sites, using a formula designed for the agency
by systems engineers at the Mitre Corp., Tar Creek came out No. 1. And
none of the EPA money was for cleanup. It was for more studies. In its
pronouncements on the issue, the Chemical Manufacturers Association has stopped
just short of saying it will go to court to keep Tar Creek from getting more
money from Superfund. The EPA
has little doubt that it has the authority to use Superfund money to clean up
mining wastes – regardless of the chemical industry opposition. But it is less
certain that it can recover the cleanup costs from the mining companies to
replenish the Superfund afterward. Keeping
the Superfund replenished is important to future cleanup activities. "What’s
going to happen ultimately, I don’t know," Mayer said, eyeing his
acid-burned grass and frowning. "There’s
nothing I can do to stop the flow of the water. There isn’t anything I can do
to remove it. I’ll just have to accept it until somebody does something to
remove it or eliminate it or dilute it." "Or
something." |
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