It flowed on into a larger river which carried it toward the
largest lake in northeastern Oklahoma. Worse, it coursed straight down
through abandoned wells and through cracks in the rocks. Bit by bit, it
began contaminating the underground water supply for cities and towns
and tens of thousands of people.
The water, which started flowing in 1978, will not stop. It
comes from the tunnels of interconnected lead and zinc mines that reach
like the tentacles of an octopus across 40 square miles underneath
Oklahoma and Kansas. When work in the mines ended more than a dozen
years ago, the miners shut off the pumps. The tunnels filled with water.
The water turned to acid.
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?
If it does, can the government require the mining industry of
replenish the fund?
The story of Tar Creek begins with the upheavals
of genesis. A thousand feet below the surface of North America at
mid-continent, creation deposited a layer of sand. It bore water of
remarkable quality. The sand came to be called the Roubidioux Formation.
Above the Roubidoux was deposited a layer of limestone 370 feet thick
and laden with rich zones of lead and zinc. It was called the Boone
Formation.
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.
Early mining did not amount to
much.
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.
Processing the ore required a mill, and the mills needed
good water. But the water in the ore-laden Boone Formationw as too
metallic. So the miners drilled 1,000 feed down through the Boone
Formation and into the Roubidiox Formation. They cased their wells and
pumped Roubidoux water up to the surface.
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.
Eventually, what the miners called the Picher Field extended over
40 square miles. It undermined Ottawa county in northeastern Oklahoma
and Cherokee County in southeastern Kansas. And the Picher Field was
only part of the undertaking. The miners formed the Tri-State Mining
District, which extended over 700 square miles and reached into the
counties of Jasper, Newton and McDonald in Missouri.
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.
Mining hit its peak
during the Second World War. Between 1907 and 1947, the Tri-State Mining
District produced 21.7 million tons of zinc and 18.7 million tons of
lead, with a value of more than $1 billion. But after the war,
production declined, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s the big
companies started pulling their men out.
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.
In Oklahoma, the miners left
behind 1,064 shafts, 500 of them open hazards. In Kansas, they abandoned
3,500 shafts, 600 of them open hazards. In Missouri, they left as many
as 4,000 shafts, 300 of them gaping open. They left an uncounted number
of bore holes, 100,000 in the Picher Field alone. They left 25 wells per
square mile that reached down into the Roubidioux aquifer.
They left
gravel waste piled across hundreds of acres. The miners called it "chat"
- because when someone picked up a handful and threw it hard against a
boulder, it went "chat".
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.
In the empty mine tunnels and on the floors of the silent
chambers, the miners had left piles of waste they had not bothered to
hoist to the surface. Most of it was what they called "mundic" -
worthless iron pyrite, or fool's gold. It oxidized. The chamber ceilings
exposed more pyrite. It too oxidized.
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.
And the mines turned into a cistern of acid.
The volume of acid grew, like an
underground monster out of control.
In 1978, the U.S. Geological
Survey reported that the mines contained 100,000 acre-feet of water. Of
that total, the Geological Survey said, 33,000 acre-feet was acidic.
That totaled 10,753,097,000 gallons of acid water.
The Geological
Survey said the mines would overflow.
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.
The beaver fled
and the acid killed the fish.
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."
From Tar Creek, the acid water spilled into
the Neosho River. At their confluence, fishermen found particularly high
concentrations of lead, zinc and cadmium in carp and red ear
sunfish.
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.
Below was the Roubidoux aquifer. Acid water had
eaten holes through the casings of some of the old deep wells that
reached down into the Roubidoux sand. Now the acid water was flowing
through the holes and into the wells. It plunged straight down - at 10
gallons per minute in one well and 200 gallons per minute in
another.
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.
Mark
Coleman, Oklahoma's deputy health commissioner, warned that the water,
if drunk, could burn residents' intestinal membranes and poison them
with cadmium and lead.
Picher's contaminated wells were re-cased,
but it was clear that the water supply for northeastern Oklahoma
ultimately could be tainted.
Some people said total contamination
could affect 10,000. Some feared the total might be as many as 140,000 -
including residents of Cherokee County in Kansas and Jasper County in
Missouri.
"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.
It was easier to measure the danger in the
water. John Mott was hired by the Oklahoma Water Resources Board to
chart the water's changing acidity and its metallic conductivity. Low pH
means high acidity. Sever is normal. Mott measured a pH level as low as
1.7. High conductivity means high metallic content. Drinkable water can
have conductivity levels of 445 to 450. Mott measured Tar Creek in the
thousands.
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.
To help pay for the cleanup, Oklahoma
asked the EPA to put Tar Creek on its lift of hazardous waste sites and
make it eligible for money from a special federal fund, called
Superfund.
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.
Tar
Creek made the Superfund list.
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.
The sheer volume and uncontrolled nature of its poison gave Tar
Creek the highest Mitre score of any hazardous waste site in the
nation.
The EPS awarded Oklahoma $435,368 in Superfund money. But
that was more than $16.5 million shy of Hittman's lowest
estimate.
And none of the EPA money was for cleanup.
It was for more studies.
Oklahoma, Jarman found, was encountering
opposition from the chemical industry. Chemical companies were against
using any Superfund money for an actual cleanup at Tar Creek. The
chemical industry wanted none of its taxes used to clean up mining
industry wastes.
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.
Meanwhile, George Mayer has a
horse pasture full of acid water. And Oklahoma has a major pollution
problem on its hands.
"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."