this is the weekly here on top stories now in the southeast for people to be reportedly killed in egypt as security forces launch a major assault on protesters in chorus topping the square who've been demonstrating since friday against military rule has come just a week before parliamentary elections the first off the overthrow of hosni mubarak . not the stories that shaped this week's clouds talking over the syrian government as the deadline separate the arab league to end violence explore its presence on the farms in the face of growing international pressure. two months of protests in

america and more the thousand strong marches all over the u.s. and hundreds of arrests and a heavy handed police response. plus creates an italian given unfriending will continue on a mix of leaders and the fears and trouble state solution sovereignty because of caution economic measures dictated by brussels. to bring us up to date for the moment more news for you and less than half an hour with my colleague unishe up in the meantime the story of the worst environmental disaster you've never heard of in a place that was once one of the largest mines on the planet you can find out why in a special report coming next. will rogers once somebody asking about my and they said well i just don't make my term anymore and we need. for us to be good stir he gave us we did a terrible job here we better tell. you

nothing about future i'd spent half a football game feature oklahoma back in one thousand nine hundred four it was dark . have to appreciate that it was seen that the pitcher offers. so i do nothing really about pitcher at all it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a hard percentage of kids it more difficult in the classroom super kids but. i had. we knew we had some problems. with the kids out there. kind of hesitates to. build and. well here's our sound and we want him to be normal as.

anybody else's. problem has said oh you need to come down here and see what what we. said will blow your mind so when they run up here and took a bunch of blood samples from. indian children and man they found high land camps that's when it started right there when let's say they would never come in here and check the kids in the picture to help the part i would. check in and i found a monster. i don't like. government. 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 leds so the extent of that was really shocking when you create came and did. a risk assessment your health risk assessment as well as finally did a record season and they felt like the primary risk for a very pathway was through dirt and some of the yours tested very high in terms of lead toxicity we think about were kids good lead there really to increase risk for some a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs more lead through their gut than our adult does about fifty percent or more but with pediatric lead toxicity because what we call developmental issues it's only importance between zero and six years of age and it affects developing neurologic system mostly what we consider the softer logic signs school issues or

the 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 covered with lead paint that you don't hear of levels this high when you tell someone of my lead poisoning like this and i need an explanation or it's not quite do it with this much lead waste forty three percent feels like a success it could have been one hundred people don't realize the tar creek was declared a disaster a 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 fix this land all the way since here. you can't leave kids here while you take several decades to move all of it. when they

took or the rock out of the ground within that rock there are all of the minerals that are really for blades and cadmium everything else and they would crush it break it smelt it to get the minerals out to get the metals out in them the little chips of rock that are left we call it checked well it's tailings it's the tailings from 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 that chap piles are just so i just couldn't imagine how it wouldn't be the finest thing in the world take it up there and roll down the slide down them four wheeled down them anything as a child can you just imagine looking at something that looks like a gigantic sand pile and be told no you can't go out there i can't imagine that

we used also quite on in the wintertime when the snow and ice is 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 was with snow and ice where the. in a car hood expense they would two or three aboard picture a car and that's where most of their risk would be because you have so much metals on the surface still surrounding here. and even if my yard clean if i'm a little kid you'd be hard pressed to keep me from playing out some of those areas at least you know i'd be off doing something. i mean one time the eagle pitcher minus self-support or miles. she could see from downtown the mile. you'd go away and you'd think man there are some really big piles there and you'd remember the biggest q. just four five six piles right there in picher but you keep driving around you know

from the aisles and you forget oh yeah there's a chap maces over here where piles used to be oh yeah there's no ponds on here oh yeah there's piles the size of a house that i forget about or the size of an office building you forget about because you're just dwarfed by the big ones. the volume here is hard to describe people don't realize how to use. the chip leader who. has. to they really are. the 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 late content about ten thousand times higher in life and lead content than the gravel people say shape with the word chair and

most of the fat you see out there made this course material and then this other stuff group larger concentrations of metals are in the size of the mine waste or so you can you can imagine that this stuff 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 in them gets deposited in a residential yard children can ingest it you know it's just a lot more mobile a long time ago residents of picher used to come out on sunday and have picnics on the beach they were actually haven't. used this thanks mine tailings. i had been getting three three champ that lead poisoning me in the back from the lead poisoning i was looking through my tiny little publication that comes that had

found their exposure to lead between eighty three seventy and twenty when they had to be thirteen later and i. and i as a high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and with youth it have trouble learning how lot of dealings with those kind of camps one particular students today are to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quartal and chatty tapped out on her property her dad hair down built her sandbox. in the rain he'd taken out that gravel bed he had taken fucking. her know down on hard that somebody knew. what the lead could possibly do. made until now about.

this much chat the kids didn't hardly stand a chance. and i wish i could say that all the problems begin and end with chat piles and elevated blood leds and that there is only one problem as of. this chair just a throw away from one of the largest led strikes on the planet. trust a produce thirty five percent of all metals worldwide for over a decade. every one of these problems was struck from the walls in the mines. now we didn't need this metal during the wars. so the government kept these mines home and. remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those rebels start . my grandfather he was a war and discovered later changed former. way back all probably around one thousand and four but they was really more water away or on the shelf where support of commerce. grandpa got a hold of him and told get back here that you see. the picture feel strong enough

about what i can while am on the pitch or feel god started it was very wealthy a strong. year they put me on a pattern show up. to powder monkeys that's a geyser in the woods and i might into the real but. only time i was really spirit was when i would hit that stupid. i mean machine me and the guy's a drill the hole that would turn it in the scene along with a really good lay old let me turn to normal i mean you could put one of my emulator on that machine will want to move you kind of live with it you know i started. summer night bein 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. early in forty four when i was discharged and one hundred came back from the navy i went to work ground with my dad over jill dobson was kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much a house he could he get shelter what dirt so i want to show them the hole there to lay by as over here and they had to bring in seven and strength of empties and he'd get five of those while i was getting two and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him it was a scream. i make and the little ones are big ones with a sledgehammer. and there is a job at times specially when they would go in with him shoot down the roof and they shoot him. just brings on water from down below missions big corporations things like their personal. a girl or a person who work in the mines the temperature. i like the smell. women are

scarce we played them to share some of our mission will always want to share some smell or share their cover. everyone knows about the trail of tears out of the cherokee nation. all thirty nine tribes in oklahoma have a trail of terror story and some new york stuff from the club was originally from the mississippi delta the mouth of the arkansas river mississippi river all the way across southern oklahoma was originally hails they were discovered there in seventeen sixty seven by the french and at the time of discovery of the estimated the quapaw could feel seven day and more years which put the estimate in a population of about thirty five thousand quapaw

a major village so garp and today they call themselves of god. is french perversion of all go up and you know just kind of feel that way so here and seven hundred sixty seven smart parks plague hits the try and begins to wipe them out and you can read it in the record in the congressional record i've read it is says that the cost of us are no longer the tried the us the be caught was the not have the right to occupy the whole southern half of arkansas our own and we need to take that and give them a reservation more fitting to their size then the army began rounding them up. you know when he came thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining quapaw was to bring them to where they are today in

iraq here and you know you can follow them and when they arrive to this area there was only one hundred thirty five call policy making. out of thirty five thousand back in eighty thirty's they sent us here from arkansas and they drew a line on a map and the only way we could be quote was inside that line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call follows are coming up in my bag and you know it's eighteen thirty five . and they're dropped 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 they're used to it's. lookin you know cross a river because those high bloods. and. big bluff rather curl was called the devil's. the reason it's called the old is because they got there and they were working on how to get across the rest of the i'm going home. but the devil was marching praying and down the top of the blood and everyone who tried to swim across to drown them so they couldn't cross a river is a double. 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 top of the land so the mining companies lease tribal land and allotments to start this operation the story about land is a story about land owners in the stories as much as it is american. the cost or change forever just a minor something for chef. but here you just brain that move ne through with snow card and pitcher became the pitcher field that was the boot and it was a huge rush you know a lot of people into that area to start leasing cause. and you could buy the security of the cherry would allow forty acre lease since. they stole land from the

quapaw tribe to create the town of picher but for the roads and for the town sort of 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 want to a lot of the most time for war through on the american side were came from the u.s. . so there was a huge incentive to keep the mining go even though one time the government subsidized the mining they keep because there was a strategic mineral the catch him along was that if the secretary of interior found any of the indians to be incompetent then the secretary of interior would manage to release. so that the b.s.a. was under a lot of pressure to have these tribal member sign mining lease. if you didn't sort

of mining companies would be i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent and it turns out. most of the counter loony tunes were the ones the mines on the property and cord wood and norm and in the ones that were the competent were the wounds that were a quarter blood or less and didn't have mining since with rare exception the government had a lot to hand in and what's going on out here. tar creek is not a county or town or neighborhood it's the country's worst environmental disaster then after the creek that runs through its forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned into permanent waste land. their time into federal cash talk pretty

good you would know it it's like newton's law every action has an equal and opposite reaction you punch a wall have all the hole where you hang it broken. is beat the hell out of this ground here and she came back swinging. and then of course we were declared a superfund site back in ninety three so we've been with this for a long time now the reason they call it super fine is because congress knows side barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund big group with only a 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 either can't be located or are not claiming responsibility so the government has to take over the sites and. clean up that i remember hearing

about it being a war superfund site in the country 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. he just didn't bounce back from the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or the cooperating one that came in and they tried to do some guy clean because i kind of failed so we 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 motor equals water and not

doesn't work that way back here in the mine and they had to pump twenty four seventh's to get rid of all of the water that was in the building up or where the mine for located you had tremendous amounts of water that you could deal with it just wasn't surface water causing this problem that ninety's the folks came. let this use of children and it was kind of a national trend for the e.p.a. if they saw a little thing with dirt that's what they did we had an unusual situation here that caused a new effort out here and that's when e.p.a. designated the surface oils operable unit to hard corps of engineers is the prime contractor to come in and do your 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 hot or it's above the cleanup standard if you have some below that in that spot you take the next six inches it cetera like a man and i spent eighty thousand dollars to redo my yard.

about three feet. deep all around. always advantage of. the best estimate i've gotten from e.p.a. is a little over one hundred thirty million dollars the average cost to remediate your by the e.p.a. was seventy thousand dollars per house in not believe it was ninety five i had some e.p.a. officials kind of my office and they told me what they wanted to do i said come go with me so we all got an optic and i drove up on a chair and i said you folks think you're going to be able to fix this and one e.p.a. official made the statement to me on top of that ship all 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 turns 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 i could've done a better job of it but i think about it that time you know should we think about it now yeah st we better think about. yeah the chance bad the grounds bad lead poisoning is high but the reason the e.p.a. came here on day one called this their worst was the water. since the mines close they filled up with water so bad nothing can live in it. and water the pours out of mines is no better back in their day to clump us die trying to cross the river to get to their new home is some mean water out here.

ninety seven i was actually from what i can remember about the first time he. started sniffing around here so to speak that's when the contaminated water stored coming up from the underground mine the creek you had to pump the water out so you can keep the my system dry here so when you start that fills up over time they were do you know nor care for that's why we have to continue pumping and may see just how good a failure of the stock. there within two years mine water would surface and kill all the fish and turkey that was ignored. when the water is running is where most of the water comes out is right here where so many know so much water coming out here it goes that away. and goes out that a white person the game here but i want this will often come out somewhere else and grow older. this is the actual shed mine were right here the

smell i am.

journey the length of life. for the best of things. one man who returns home after years of alienation. right path.