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a price to pay and it's not just the retail cost are especially poor tells the story of a town put on the verge of environmental disaster by the mining industry. we're right at the eight hundred foot elevation level right here and a lot of the mind is sure you're going to. write a book. and you can feel that when the red water mixes with the clear water that's the difference. although this looks weird to go through a lot of metals with it because it's just starting out. sides of the mine has the minerals that are submerged beneath the water and it's isolated from oxygen oxygen it became. there back when they first filling up there was a lot of oxygen available in the mines and that was causing oxidation of metals

which in turn creates place kristoffer so if you're casting you have to hurry which starts up in kansas runs through the mining bill becomes contaminated at delta that which is just south of picher it then rooms on the east side of commerce runs through the center of miami only into new show river. county into green light let's just say it's been doing essentially nothing but orange yucky smelly container. but this watershed has been clocking five million gallons a day since there have been clocks and if water rolls into the mines or slides off a chap pilot flows out from the underground it's real bad news. i think newton says the reaction to the mining is a lifetime polluted water. and it's my system's well as any ground water hole and

then coughs up one's blood. and a look at these problems and say this has been here for a long time. it's not just twenty five years and superfund it's it's it's money. and we all benefited from that money either directly or indirectly. it was a good thing for the united states but this is the legacy we have kind of an obligation to fix. if you drive through picher right now drive down doubtful road nothing's changed nothing is really shapes that is. they put us on the m.p.l. list it's a disgrace and it's sad but no one has done anything about the water the. little machine right now the arm of the protection agency the bureau of indian affairs the form of the interior because they've spent

all this time talking to us telling you this you know what they think we want to hear but if you drive through picher it drive down down the road it looks the same as it would turn off the pope's it won't work no one cares about the people that live there this is not a safe place to live it's a good place there's good people here and it's not fit they have been whispers about buying this place out since it was named the superfund and eighty three i mean horrible water all of this mine waste direct danger to children and they couldn't get the help they need it should have been easier to put a buyout together whether it's a dioxin scare they want to build a lake or highway somewhere buyouts happen all the time and human health dangers here seem to qualify plus starkey graydon said an ace in the hole oklahoma senior

senator jim inhofe is chair of the environmental and public works committee in the senate this committee oversees and directs the e.p.a. and off oversaw the committee as far as environmental buyout money goes in half was the faucet when you have a place like this in your home state your chairing the kind of committee that can actually help people and you refuse well i could also know he was critical the problem was that in office a soldier industry back is in-house brother even used to work for the insurance agency owned by the mining companies inhofe is in deep with polluters so he can't just order a buyout because that would prove this land is not fit for people and it's not fit and someone's got to pay for what got done and that can get expensive so they just pay in hard to make this buyout talk disappear and the citizens that stay. but to prove that he was working for auto walk county folks he put together an eighteen million dollar cleanup plan to stand in for a buyout made everyone wait three years while they pulled it together he was going

to move all the check they were in the math on the planet same day it was released if you are in fifty trucks a day all day you would take forty years just to move the check forty years moving the chair will cost two hundred twenty five million not eighteen. complete by i was estimated at fifty million and everyone knows inhofe not much of a science there could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the american people probably even his but it turned out he was no math guy either i think a news that not even enough can span if you got away from mining. and didn't even know movies are. there was always a problem and it's a settlement and i'm surprised that picture isn't just

a wall filling and they looked at water and i looked at les and all the trouble is they forgot to look at subsidence risk which is of course the undermining it goes along with hard rock mining you know it turns out that the areas significant undermined which really shouldn't be a surprise to anybody since they took out i don't know two hundred fifty million tons of or maybe more you know this underground mining was done sometimes clear up the war late so what they saw a tree roots when you have a several hundred foot mine room that's going almost to the surface guess what it's going to collapse on these days and that land that you're seeing out there it's all undermined in pitcher and garden or paper eleven they could wake up one day in the house complete collapse into a monster. they didn't care what they did and the city pitcher was just segment builders and i

think they took pictures. oh medium sized ok then now this is mania. this is on fire and was the biggest haven in the area there feel right here it was probably i was a no one hundred fifty foot deeper than what the water is right now. but i think there is a public policy issue here. if you can account for all the risk and environmental side should be in charge while i'm going around these my whole life and i'm still scared i mean if. we're just no forgiveness if anything happens around it. if you start going down that is your history. it sounds crazy but those holes are actually

a blessing and state can afford to move everyone out and often already pounded his gavel that the current problems weren't bad enough so things had to get worse to get things done. several areas collapse that summer in off finally agreed to a study to prove the extent of the undermining. not that need to be proven another study felt exhausting you know it felt tired to have to prove that the land was actually undermined and more holes were coming but it was a material chance to get a buyout so nobody feeds this to me and no study and you can't ignore the dead or what the data shows in regards to subverting of the underground mining it was done up here you cannot dispute it and way as we were able to get political support to evaluate that risk when it became obvious that people shouldn't get there it's best for in the

long run because i don't worry about any more kids being raised in this environment . you know we've got to put him you know up what we are doing is we are going in finding comparables outside the project area. and he didn't keep in mind superfund site is a bigger area and the project or the project area is that area that i told you about a forty square mile area that was in that subsidence teen study they're finding properties outside that area and then giving them comparable value for their property the trust has tried to make some provisions to make sure that everybody gets a minimal decent level of housing so in other words if you live in a substandard housing we don't want to give you just enough money to go live in some senior housing and i am are somewhere else people get an appraisal and i don't care if you live in a five hundred thousand dollar house in appraisal and you know i really thought my house was worth more than you know and so what i keep telling people is be

realistic in reality if you took that house in the condition that it's in take it and stick it in my oklahoma one sign on the front yard how much do you really think you're going to get for that house kind of interest and then so busy trying to do the appraisal issue those kind of things to get people help what are very for value something that's art and. like with any appraisal that everybody's happy with their phrase. it's that's it's a chance for these people that they really would never have otherwise and i'm not experienced for my life fast here because had i feel like i got maybe a year or two years you know maybe not even i had said to god but your time got it . right i hate to move and you know you stuff all send pictures so i still. have to get rid of.

different things and that's a lot of it would be nice to have a nice ounce you know a very i'm not able to take care of her and i didn't know you know so. yeah they much but it's all. and it's got to be hard leaving home going to be made to leave this places are just on their health and their children so it's one of the property values but it's still home and once the bio reaches critical mass there won't be any more fire department any more polies any more electricity or water or stores it'll just be paved country lined with rusted street signs and when you go through all that and are told the one place you can't live is home you deserve a by a process that is dignified and clean so the trust was appointed to represent the citizens during the buyout process here they carry out orders from the federal government and all appraisal issues and cut checks for the homes and i'm just

making a little short statement i was offered eighteen dollars by square foot for my business and there's no way that you can deal i mean the stories i know it's not gigantic it's just forty buildings and maybe it is nice i'm not there alone let it go look at it we're staying in from our health and for the banks bank huge the gunshot the house the land three lots eighty thousand dollars and there's no way you'd go to mom and replace this for eighty thousand dollars is impossible. hundred thousand be fair yes and i don't think i can actually go in i'm in replies of one hundred two. and i went through all of trying to find out why they said well that's just what we have heard today that appraiser have been in business for twenty five years they should know what they're doing all of their lives they know the appraisal company sooner or services out of toll is doing shoddy work and

the trust is painted one point eight million dollars to do shoddy work they're rude to the people they have consistency and the trust will not hold them accountable. to listen only second i i listened to what you guys was. we hear people want to say this is not like the first by well we did the same things we put something out for period we hired a contractor we have gone and and gotten their appraisals and we've had them review i mean and in all honesty the values are higher in this buyout than they were in the first and what you see in the news record here's today's news record trust the fans buy out approach the trust is circling the wagons and you know the truth is supposed to take care of these people and they're not

doing how they're going to be people who feel like they were do more yes what i can do assure you is that there's been no conspiracy on the part of anyone could get higher values for certain people now let me finish. what there is is a lot of innuendo and accusation and yet there is no proof. ok we're coming up on jenelle's brother this is again a hard. gray have this flap sliding hundred fifteen thousand that house although long has been a very powerful. probably thirty years. ok this house on the left along to messy and sammy bates and i've been offered seventy thousand cinnabar said there is something wrong with the b. appraisal so as you use a trance why did you not tell me we did it we asked you you're probably being

greedy we think you didn't raise that as it means we get you just because we did worse about race there's something wrong with the beach appraisal so let's leave it the same and. i don't want that manger we got three new cops for your property if it is significant that you rob. market like you mean tell me you didn't find anything. thank you. the appraisers probably have a tough with this town there are some poor people here there are some bad looking homes and i'm sure those create some challenges but you know missing sammy's house is the same size as the heart's missing sami's is much newer and even if you're blind and a little crazy and think these homes are in similar condition and they can bedroom isn't a bedroom if it's not close to a bathroom there's still

a forty five thousand dollars difference in a town where the average home is fifty eight grand that's almost the cost of a whole other house this is the kind of appraisal work the trust has bought it and they said mrs home on her couch and say maybe we gave the horse too much i mean we made a mistake and become a woman and in the same breath on anything missing in sammy got a good run down dollar if here is not a hollywood story and where does this leave those who've already worked a lifetime and of course said ok i'll pay back a chapter eleven and i need two years old. and i said i did then it. was shaky bridge c but she called me the other day she was so worried about hoover she was that one she got not neighbors right across the street so she's god and she don't know about her house since they offered two hundred thousand not me as i think she said tell me so i don't know russians going there.

they offered eighty four years young jagger's the twenty two thousand dollars for her home it doesn't matter what her home was like work any move on that. she says gentleman the purpose of this letter is to explain why i do not have a bill of sale when i was twenty one i bought my home in picher oklahoma in the fall of one thousand forty three from three fields for three hundred seventy five dollars i've lived here for almost sixty three years i'm now almost eighty four years old and have lived in the neighborhood seventy seven years longer as far as i know than anyone now living or dead it is with much regret that i will have to leave my home at this late time in my life but i cannot stay without police protection sewer service utilities and safe neighbors please let me be home on the last.

how do you expect an eighty year old woman who has lived in that house for sixty years who's on a fixed stand. how do you expect her to move out of the superfund site twenty thousand dollars an hour you know it's easy for outsiders to come and look at nasa oh my gosh your house and worth five thousand dollars that's right but that's at ladies' home that's all she has and now you're going to take it away from her and now you've got to make her get into it to get out here and the funny thing is we come in here and spend seventy thousand dollars to dig up her yard and we can't give her enough money to move out of town. he was only thinking that. this is what environmental problems look like. they look like people problems

environmental problems are people problems as long as gravity still holds us here. they aren't separate except if you're over here. and these folks have been stolen from their land raped the names drug through the mud but they are tough as hell break everything else you can grab but these people ain't breaking on your science on your say so on your legislation of the month. hell yes they get red headed mouthy when things seem counterfeit what else do you have and there ain't much. just your word or so and you're back. one hundred years later they're still here still fighting for their health and their own spot of their. whether it's fair weather and they are gone this will not be home anymore. and a hundred years after the first pickaxe struck oklahoma go they're handing this place back to cooperate appreciate your here's the worst superfund site in the

country. tell group who has even started. we don't just because the buyouts go on doesn't need to go over the news this is all they can buy these people out which is that what they're going to do but the tribes going to be here forever because the government's not going to give them any more land you can see that with all this mind why it's covering landscape it's really not news in the sixty's eagle pitcher was pressing for to get out of their lease unless you want to move in they also offered to put it back in the arms and the department of interior denied that stating that they're quite all lands were no longer really good for anything they were rooting for agriculture or you know their purpose that the only economic

derivative left of their lands was the gravel on the surface and that they could sell their gravel when they start realizing that cat had heavy metals and was was an environmentally hazardous part of interior realized that that's a liability. since they managed the asset for the try and fail allow that to be sold and they would incur liability because if this chat were sold and put somewhere else that place not be conversant with on site they're lucky there's so little left today there's no telling what the epidemic would look like if there were five times as much lead poaching their young polluting creeks are making ground channel but eighty years later there's that seventy five million times eighty years of kids passing through struggling in school. here gone this chad didn't just sort of the kids who tested i. was here in mountains before anyone's

running test. so not only is the cat left on the indian lease where the tribal member can use the land then they found out they couldn't sell it either so their land became useless result was cats and just sitting here for eighty nine hundred years you know were being restricted for more sales but the money indians were not this check causes lead poisoning that's not an opinion it ruins this very land that was given to the quapaw to replace what they gave up in the b. i made sure this chat stayed right here the da said these are the people who are going to bleed because of this waste and what is now so clear about this function is that damaging the land is not a separate act from them aegina culture. the whole reason the

government cable tribe just one hand was to replace the land where they came from you know that the quartal try occupied most of what is now arkansas. you know and i feel bad for the people that are living over pitcher. i feel bad that they don't have to move i feel bad that they are going to have to be relocated but you know what i hope those didn't want to leave work. so. it's giving bad out here. but not saying hardly any birds squirrels you know. ducks geese you know i don't know what's going on here this this is like rachel carson's nightmare today you know we're having a silent throwaway you know where are the birds were the wildlife. just don't see

this is really unusual i've never been on this river and seen it you can even hear a bird chirping you know. i think the worst story would have to be. so we're story which is typically the kids we let slip through the critics the.

kids that. they're getting help early on. because if you look back if you look back in school history if you talk to families. those problems are here and they get scared. and we didn't know that. hundreds of towns and cities have diminished and even died when industry pulls up stakes but these towns in oklahoma began to die because industry arrived way back when it would have been impossible to know the dimension of destruction they'd be left with or who would be hurt by it back then jobs trumped everything maybe they still do back then they had no concept of the future and now we are the

heirs of our grandparents a mess. and here we are about to shoot the porch light out on this town i mean more times can we strike lead or uranium oil before there's no more country .

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