really. quickly to me that you know we had. more difficulty. but. we knew we had some problems. with the kids out there. we want to be normal. as. you. say what. took a bunch of. children.

that's when it started right there when. the kids. but then. 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 and the e.p.a.

came in did. a risk assessment human health risk assessment as well as finally did a record decision and they felt like the primary risk of primary pathway was through dirt and some of the yard's tested very high in terms of less toxicity when you think about work kids get lead there really to increase risk for such a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs for lead through the gut then adult is about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity that causes what we call developmental issues it's only of importance between zero and six years of age and it affects a developing neurologic system mostly what we consider the soft neurologic 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 coated with lead paint that you don't hear of levels this high when you tell someone about lead poisoning like this they need

an explanation but words don't quite do it and 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 where the way sits here. and you can't leave kids here while you take several decades to move all of it. well i thought they can. when they took or the rock out of the ground within that rock there are all of the minerals there really for leds and cadmium 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 chat. it's tailings it's the tailings from the mines what's left over from the stuff they didn't use. real invite you have to admit myself as an adult and when i first saw a chap i just saw i just couldn't imagine how it wouldn't be the funniest thing in the world to could have here and roll down the 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 after here i can't imagine that. in the wintertime when the snow and ice is on we used to. go to a local salvage yard and get a car hood. or have a good time to you come off one of these. snow and be. in

a car hood expressway with three a border patrol car that's where most of the risk would be because you have so much metals on the surface still surrounding the area. and even if you aren't clean if i'm a little kid you'd be hard pressed to keep me from playing out in some of those areas at least you know i'd be off doing something. i mean one time the eagle pitcher mine itself is a quarter mile high if you can see it from downtown many miles from home. you go away and you'd think man there's some really big piles there member the biggest hugest four five six piles right there around picher but you keep driving around for miles and you forget oh yeah there's chet bases over here where piles used to be oh yeah there's a mill pond 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 dwarfed by the big ones. the volume here is hard to describe.

people don't realize that it is. the chant that are there. but most of that is behold one. 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 and lead content about a thousand times higher in lead and lead content than the gravel people say shape with the word chat most of the chat piles you see out there may have this course material but then this other stuff group larger concentrations the medals are in the size of the mine waste of course 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 home long time ago residents in picher used to come out on sunday and have picnics on the beach they were actually have been picnics to use this feast fine tailings. i had been doing some research about lead poisoning in the effects on lead poisoning and i was looking through a tiny little publication that comes that had found that exposure to lead between ages seven and twenty one led to extreme obesity in later life. and now high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and with youth

that have trouble learning a lot of dealings with those kind of kids one particular student stood out to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw and she had a chat pile on her property her dad. built her sandbox and in it saying he'd take it not that gravel but he'd taken it finds. there are no doubt in my mind that somebody knew what lay ahead could possibly do to your health. and i didn't tell nobody. but 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 chad piles and elevated blood leds and that there is only one problem to solve. but this chad just a throw away from one of the largest lead strikes on the planet. tri state produced 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 did need this metal during the world wars. so the government kept these mines humming. wake up and remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was a war and discovered the laden chief commerce way back oh probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilling the water will on the south west part of commerce. rand paul got a hold of him and told him get back here the day you shall be the pitcher feel strong enough about nineteen toil and when the pitcher feel god start again it was the wealthiest straw that they had had yet they put me on a pattern job. to powder monkeys that's

a guys that loads of dynamite into the drill holes. the only time i was really scared was when i would hit that stick of dynamite in the machine me and the guys that drilled the hole in the wood turn it into sheen on and it was really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite emulator and that machine a lot to me you kind of flinch a little bit you know i started in the summer of night forty one i was i was sixteen i went to service. early in forty three. and my ship got hit by a kamikaze and. forty four and i was discharged and one i came back from the navy i went to work on the ground with my dad over till dobson was kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of a holler sake if he could shovel at dark so i went to shovel in

a hole there to lay by as over here and they had to bring in seven canned strang of empties and he had get five of those while i was getting to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him i was a scream a. make and little ones out of big ones who sledge hammer. and there is a job at times specially when they would go in there and shoot down the roof and they shoot. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on boulders as big as corridors and things like they actually know. it grows on a person who worked in the mines the temperature the i don't like the smale with me as kids we played remember share some homers in the home you always go and you share some smell or share that you're coming out with.

everyone knows about the trail of tears the cherokee nation. all thirty nine tribes in oklahoma have a trail tear story because there are no exception of the club was originally from the mississippi delta the mouth of the arkansas river mississippi river all the way across southern oklahoma was originally as they were discovered there in seventeen sixty seven by the french and at the time of discovery of his estimate the us could feel seven to eight thousand more years which put the estimate in a population of about thirty five thousand kuapa the major village was so gop and today they call themselves the gop and. is french perversion and. you know just kind of fell that way so here and seven hundred sixty

seven a smallpox 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 it says that the costs are no longer the tribe they used to be was do not have the right to occupy the whole southern half of arkansas 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 in eight hundred thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining quapaw was to bring them to where they are today in a arrived here in eight hundred thirty five. and when they arrived to this area there was only one hundred and thirty five remaining out of thirty five thousand

back in eighty thirties they sent us here from arkansas and they drew a line on a map and the only way we could be quapaw was inside that line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call clothes are coming up and running and you know it's eighteen 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 used to it's those are. lookin you know across the river is those hard blows. in the big bluff brought across is called the devil's. the reason it's called.

is because they got there and they were working on how to get across see the rest of the and when home and the devil was marching praying with him down top with blood. and everyone he tried to swim across and drown. him so they couldn't cross a river is double. cross. the quapaw is were moved 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 paul land so the mining companies lease tribal land and allotments to start this operation. story about land is

a story about land owners. in the stories as much as it is american. the cost or change forever lost a minor something that for shaft. the. huge vein that move northeast through puts no card and pitcher that became the pitcher field that was the boom and there was a huge rush you know of people into that area to start leasing call. and you could buy the secretary of interior would allow forty acre leases. they stole land from the quapaw tribe to create the town of picher but for the roads and for the town itself the school kind of thing took they just took the land and this was the largest bad mining. district in the world at one time

so all the munitions for war i wanted a lot of most time for war two on the american side one came from vests. so there was a huge incentive to keep the mining go on even at one time the government subsidized the mining to keep because it was a strategic mineral the catch in the law was that if the secretary of interior found any of the indians to be incompetent then the secretary of interior would manage the release. so that the b.s.a. was under a lot of pressure to have these tribal member sign mining leases if you didn't lease to the mining companies b i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent it turns out. most of the company indians were the ones that had mines on their property and were

a quarter blood or norm and the ones that were deemed competent were the ones that were quarter bloater less in didn't have mining leases with rare exception the government had a lot to hand in and what went on out here. tar creek is not a county or town or neighborhood it's the country's worst environmental disaster after the creek that runs through. it's forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned in a permanent wasteland. if they're meant to federal cash tar creek you would know what. it's like newton's law every action has an equal and opposite reaction. you punch a wall the wall gets home or you hang it's broken. he's beat the hell out of this grand here. and she came back swinging. and then of course we were declared

a superfund site back in one thousand nine hundred three so we've been dealing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call the super fund is because congress so side barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund. grew to a pretty 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 can be located or are not claiming responsibility so the government has to take over these sites and they should clean up 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 has a great king system model h r s model and they've changed 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 part of our focus was on the water quality or the call for a new one that came in and they tried to do some. stuff and it failed so operable unit one was trying to solve the surface water impacts from the from the contaminated mine water being discharged. about eight million dollars. their theory was water in equals water and it doesn't work that way back during the mining they had to pump twenty four seventh's to get rid of all of the water that was in the boot off or were in the mine for located you had tremendous amounts of water that you had to deal with it just wasn't surface water causing this problem mid ninety's

the focus became less issues of children and it was kind of a national trend for the e.p.a. if they saw a way lead levels they moved 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 soils operable unit to e.p.a. hired the corps of engineers is their prime contractor to come in and do yard clean ups it's pretty simple you go out and 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 gayman and i spent eighty thousand dollars to redo my yard. about three feet. deep all around ma for law all of the damage was. the best estimate i've gotten from e.p.a. has a little over one hundred thirty million dollars the

average cost to remediate a yard 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 mouth us and they told me what they wanted to do i said come go with me so we all got my pick and i drove them up on a chip 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 tonnes of contaminants across the street could

they have done things differently in the twenty store in the mining boom could they have had managed to the waste differently. probably they could've done a better job of it but i think about at that time you know should we think about it now damn straight we better think about. yeah the chance bad the ground 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 closed they filled up with water so bad nothing can live in. and water the pours out of mines as you know but. back in their day the quapaw trying to cross the river to get to their new home is simeon water out here. nine hundred seventy nine was actually from what i can remember about the first time that he. started sniffing around here so to speak that's when the contaminated water started coming out from the underground mines the creek yet to pump the water

out so you can keep the mud system dry in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know the market for that's why we had to continue pumping and they suggested that if there had to stop pumping there within two new years 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 the. water coming out here it goes that away. and goes out that why there's so much in there. this will often come out somewhere else. well this is the actual shed line or rather. the fellow i am.

quite sure is that so much of a lot of people at my area will stand a little worse to tell the difference would just be your tree house and twelve fold for the world would be is trivial and it's been here before who will set the trends who will stay in power and. the close up team has been to die new stuff first place to the most ambitious football club in the world. knowledge argee goes to the far east where the timber industry attracts the legendary siberian tigers where the ancient native community loses its way in the modern world. and where the country's mental wealth starts its way across the ocean . while coming to the club bars creature russia blows up on archie.

president obama put his signature under a bill that could see terror suspects held indefinitely without trial despite saying he was unsure of some aspects it entails. a not so happy new year for the euro zone recession alarm bells and leaders gloomy predictions mark the start of two thousand and twelve ten years after a common currency made its way into people's wallets. and israel secrets are put under the turkish lance with anger is a new satellite in the works israel's concerned the i in the sky i can break and zoom in than. if any i'm in the russian capital you're watching r t with me arena joshie president barack obama has signed

a con of virtual to fans bill that basically allows the indefinite detention of terrorist suspects the us president said he had serious reservations on some provisions regarding the treatment of detainees but as maureen of ordinary forts during his time in office obama shown he is not always good to his ward. long before he became u.s. president or a nobel peace prize winner barack obama was a constitutional law professor we have never been more energized a night it was. a civil liberties champion turned charismatic candidate who vowed to reverse the abuses and policies of his predecessor george w. bush four years later many civil rights advocates who once cheered yes we can are finding themselves saying no you can't not only has the obama administration blocked torture accountability and refused to investigate and prosecute. he's he's basically maintained.