i'm fine we're just. very bad here but hardly any birds squirrels you know. you know i don't know what's going on. on the marquee. welcome back you're watching r t live from moscow here's a look at the top stories of the week occupy wall street has marked its two month anniversary with an unprecedented protest all over the u.s. hundreds have been arrested pepper sprayed and beaten by the movement looks set on its causes ever. violence sparks off in egypt once again as a cradle of the arab spring seize tear gas and rubber bullets with thousands of protesters all across the country say military rule is a strong the results of the february revolution. you rock or see

a stand in the wave of an elected favorite state power in europe as the blocks much vaunted democracy is seen as being placed on the back burner in the face of a detonating debt crisis. and the syrian president refuses to crack under international pressure while the threat of further sanctions and tough diplomatic tatts still fears are about to see another in style intervention. all we may all like using the latest gadgets but there is always a price to pay and it's not just the retail cost our special report tells a story of a town put on the verge of environmental disaster by the mining industry. will rogers once somebody asking about ram they said well i just don't make much of anymore and we need the lord intends for us to be good stewards of what he gave us and we did a terrible job here we did it for. you

nothing about pitcher roger spent half of the football game picher oklahoma back in one thousand nine hundred four it was dark didn't have the. pitcher offers. so i do nothing really not featured on. it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a higher percentage of kids it more difficult in class from super kids but. they had. we knew we had some problems. with that with the kids out there. kind of hesitates to. delve into. well here's our sound and we want him to be

a normal. person anybody else. he had problems past or you need to come down here and see what what we. blow your mind so they run up here and took a bunch of blood samples from. indian children and man i found the high land camp that's when it started right there when they would never come in here and check the kids and picture the health department went home but then i started checking in and i found a monster. i know why.

and so we actually went door to door in the mining communities and knocked on doors and found out how many people had children six and under and could we do lead testing on those children and we tested a little over one hundred kids and found out that forty three percent of those kids had elevated blood lads so that stand of that was really shocking and the e.p.a. came and did. a risk assessment health risk assessment as well as finally did a record season and they felt like the primary risk from eric pathway was through third and some of the yards tested very high in terms of less toxicity we think about were kids good lare there really to increase risk for us a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs more lead through their gut than our adult does about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity because as what we call developmental issues it's only of importance between zero and six years of age and it affects developing

a logic system mostly but we can certainly software logic science school issues more than medical issues so that's really the difference the trouble is you can't ever make that go away once it occurs as permanent as a place get this bad some old cities are coated with lead paint that you don't hear of levels this high and you tell someone about lead poisoning like this they need an explanation the words don't quite do it and with this much lead waste forty three percent feels like a success they could have been one hundred people don't realize it's our creek was declared a disaster decade before they even discovered the lead poisoning but they checked the kids ten years after the land had been condemned without thinking one might be connected to the other. back then they thought if you fix the soil that would fix the children. but you can't make this lamb or the way sits here you can't leave

kids here while you take several decades to move that. they can. when they took or the rock out of the ground within that rock there are all of the minerals that are really for leds and cadmium and everything else and they would crush it break it smelt it to get the minerals out to get the metals out and then the little chips of rock that are left we call it chapped well it's tail is it's the tail winds from the mines what's left over from the stuff they didn't use their real inviting and you have to admit myself as an adult and when i first saw it i just i just could imagine how it would be the funniest thing in the world to kidnap there and roll down them slide down them four wheel down them anything as a child can just imagine looking at something that looks like

a gigantic sand pile and be told no you can't go up there i can imagine that were used also played on in the wintertime when the snow and ice was on we used to . go to a local salvage yard and get a car hood and you never have a good time to you come off one of these wells were small when i was with the. in a car hood expressway with two or three aboard picher a car that's where most of the risk would be because you have so much metals on the surface still surrounding here. and even if my yard to clean if i'm a little kid you'd be hard pressed to keep me from playing out someone as there is at least you know i'll be off too and so. i mean one time the eagle pitcher mine itself is a quarter mile high so you can see from downtown many miles. you go away and you'd think man there are some really big piles there and you'd

remember the biggest hugest four five six piles right there on pets or but you keep driving around you know from miles and you forget oh yeah there's bases over here where piles used to be oh yeah there's no ponds over here oh yeah there's piles the size of a house that i forget about or the size of an office building that you forget about because you're just to work by the big ones. the volume here is hard to describe people don't realize how mine down and use. the chips that are there. but most of that is going to hold. problem with moving chad in that what's left behind is far more dangerous than what they take what's left behind are the small fine materials which are much more bioavailable which means that they can be absorbed easier by the stomach and secondly they're also much higher in lead content about

a thousand times higher in light and like content than the gravel people say shape with the word chat and most of the chat you see out there made this course material but then there's others who grew larger concentrations of metals are in the size of the mine waste or so you can you can imagine that this does not come below near as much as this stuff so this these fine particles get blown around and they have the highest concentrations of metals then gets deposited in a residential yard children can ingest it you know it's just a lot more mobile i want time ago residents of petrie's to come out on sunday and have picnics on the beach they were actually have a picnic song use this piece find caylee. i had been doing some research and that lead poisoning me in the my place and. i was looking through

a tiny little publication that combat had found their exposure to lead between ages seven and twenty when lead to be thirteen later and i. and i as a high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and with it have trouble learning how lot of dealings with those kind of can one particular students today out to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw and chatty chat pile on her property her dad had to. build her a sandbox. a new saying he'd taken out that travel but he had taken funding. or no doubt marmar the somebody knew. what lay ahead good part. and they didn't tell me about.

this much chat the kids didn't are they stand a chance. and i wish i could say that all the problems begin and end with chat piles and elevated blood leds that there is only one problem to solve. this chair just a throw away from one of the largest led strikes on the planet. tri-state produced thirty five percent of all metals worldwide for over a decade. every one of these problems was dropped from the walls and even mines. now we didn't need this metal during the wars. so the government get these mines home. remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those rebel start. my grandfather he was swarmed skyward when chief former way back all probably around one opinion for a day was real the water will form the south west corner of cornish. grandpa got

a hold of him and told him get back here that you see somebody. real strong enough about what i can while i am on the future of the old guard story it was very wealthy as strong as it had here they put me on a pattern shot. putter monkeys that's the guys that would sit on my things in the field which i only thought was really a spirit was when i went to a stick of dynamite and made him machine me and the guys that drilled the. machine on which we lay old when they turned them on i mean you could put dynamite emulator that sheen wanted you kind of a little bit you know i started in the summer night kane forty one i was i was sixteen i want service in the. early in forty three

and my ship got hit by a kamikaze and in a hurry in forty four and i was discharged and one i came back from the navy i went to work ground combat overkill dobbs and that's kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of a policy if he could show what door so i want to show over and over there the lay by is over here and they'd bring in seven and strength of empties and he'd get five of those a lot of us get into and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with you. as a tree may make them little ones out of big ones and to sling sailor. fat is a job at times specially when they would go in there and shoot down the roof and they shoot him. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on old missions big scorers things like you know. he grows

on approach and work in the audience the team picture. i like the smale. i mean it's clear it's funny play going to share some farmers you know what i was going to share some small share to cover. everyone else about the trail of tears the cherokee nation. all thirty nine tribes you know call home and have a trail of terror story i caught ours from new york so some of the pop was originally from the mississippi delta the mouth of the arkansas river mississippi river all the way across southern oklahoma was originally and they were discovered there in seventeen sixty seven by the french and at the time of discovery of the system a quote of could feel seven days and more years which per the estimate

in a population of about thirty five thousand will caught all the major village and was so dark and today they call themselves so dark and quiet far it is france perversion of all go up and you know just kind of fell that way so here in seven hundred sixty seven smart parks playing hits the try and begins to wipe them out and you can read it in the record and there is no record i've read it and it serves the choir parser no longer the tribe to be caught and not have the right to occupy whole southern half of our own we need to take that in and give them a reservation more fitting to their size then the army began rounding them up.

eighteen thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining quote was to bring to where they are today in iraq here and eighteen thirty five. and when they arrived to this area there was only one hundred thirty five remain out of thirty five thousand back in eighty thirties they sent us here from arkansas and they drew a line on a man out the only way we could make well up was inside that line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call quotes are coming up in my hands you know it's eighteen and thirty five . and they're dropped off you know this is your land.

so they explore you know basically the east side of the spring river and it's exactly the kind of land there you students ozark up we're looking you know across a river is those high bloods. and. big bluff or out across it's called the devil's problem and. the reason it's called prone anonymous because they got there and they were working on how to get across the rest of the and when you home but the devil was marching praying up and down the top of the blood and everyone he tried to swim across drowned. and so they couldn't cross the river and. cross.

because we're removed from their original lands and place right here on a reservation inside indian territory seventy years before the war was struck oklahoma wasn't even a state back then most of the or was on popular land so the money coming as lease tribal land and allotments to start this operation the story about land is a story about land owners in the stories as much crapola as it is american. story changed forever once the miners something for chef. but here in the huge brain that will move ne through its no card and pitcher that became the pitcher field that was the boot and it was a huge roach you know of people into that area to start leasing.

and you could buy the secretary of interior forty acre lee since. they stole land from the tribe to create the town of picher but for the roads and for the town itself and school kind of thing. they just took the land this was the largest mining. district in the world at one time so all the munitions for war i wanted a lot of most them for war two on the american side one came from this area. so there was a huge incentive to keep the mining even at one time the government subsidized the mining to keep because it was a strategic mineral the catch in. law was that if the secretary of interior found any of the indians to be incompetent when the secretary of interior would manage their release. so that yeah i was under

a lot of pressure to have these tribal member sign mining leases if you didn't lease to the mining companies the i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent and it turns out the most of the confluence were the ones the mines and property and the quarter board and norm and the ones that were the complement were the ones that were quarter bloater less and didn't have mining leases with rare exception of the government had a lot of hand in hand what went on out here. tar creek is not a county or town or neighborhood it's the country's worst environmental disaster named after the creek that runs through its forty seven square miles of virgin

prairie turned into permanent waste land. if they were meant to federal cash talk radio you would know what it's like news is wrong every action has an equal and opposite reaction you punch a wall the wall gets a hole or you hang it broken. he's beat the hell out of this grand here and she came back swinging. and of course river to clear the superfund site mentioned that in a story show we've been dealing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call it superfund is because congress those. large amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this pond a big group only large amount of money that they called the super fund it was established in the early eighty's to deal with these environmentally contaminated sites where the responsible parties you know can be located or are not claiming

responsibility so the government has to take over these sites and initiate the cleanup and i remember hearing about it being the worst superfund site in the country and that was based on e.p.a. has a model they call the hazard braking system model h.r.s. model and they changed it over the years but at the time the way that model was set up this site scored very high. and i'm the original four hundred eleven or some odd sites that were added to the national priorities list this was the top scoring site and once we were declared superfund site that was the beginning of the end because . you just don't bounce back from the initial primary focus was on the water quality or the cooperating one that came in and they tried to do some guy team a car stuff and a failed so i'll probably get one was trying to solve the surface water impacts from the from the contaminated mine water being discharged but how much is. about

eight million dollars there's theory was water equals water and doesn't work that way back during the mining they had twenty four seventh's to get rid of all the water that was in there for the mine for ok you had tremendous amounts of water that you had to deal with it just wasn't surface water causing this problem. is the focus became less children and it was kind of a national trend for the e.p.a. if they saw it that. that's what they did we had an unusual situation here that caused a new effort here and that's when e.p.a. designated the surface soils operable unit too hard to corps of engineers is their prime contractor to come in and do yard clean ups it's pretty simple you go out you dig up some dirt out of the yard you bring in new clean dirt take the top six inches where it's where it's above the cleanup standard if you have some below that

in that spot you take the next expenses etc i came in and they spent eighty thousand dollars to redo my yard. about three feet. be all around my forearms all the damage. but the best estimate i've gotten from the e.p.a. has a little over one hundred thirty million dollars the average cost to remediate you ordered by the e.p.a. was seventy thousand dollars per house and not believe it was ninety five i had some e.p.a. officials come to my office and i told them what they want to do i said come go with me so we all got my pick up and i drove up on a chair pile and i said you folks think you're going to be able to fix this and one

e.p.a. official made a statement to me on top of that chapel right over there i'll be able to retire here that's their attitude it's not about what's best for these people how can you justify digging up a yard when you have three million tons of contaminants across the street could they have done things differently in the twenty storm the mining boom could they have have managed the the waste differently. probably they could've done a better job of it when i think about at that time you know should we think about it now they are straight we are think about. yeah that's as bad the grounds that lead poisoning is the reason the e.p.a. came here and they were told this their worst was the water. since the mines closed they've filled up with water so bad nothing can live in. the water the pours out

the mines as you know but. back in their day the quapaw tried to cross the river to get to their new home. is some mean water out here. nine hundred seventy nine was actually from what i can remember about the first time he started sniffing around here showed streak that's when the contaminated water store coming out now from the underground mine the creek yeah to pump the water out so you keep my system dry then so when you stop that fills up over time so they were do you know nor care for that's why we had to continue pumping and nascent just a bit of food here or you know the stock pumping there within ten years the mine water would surface and kill all the fish and tucker that was ignored. when the water is running is where most of the water comes out is right here at home a lot of so much water coming out here it goes that away stream and goes out that

a wider snuck in here but then walk this one off and come out somewhere else and drop holders on them or else this is the actual shed mine were right here that fell and.