really about. it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a. more difficult. super kids but. we knew we had some problems. with the kids out there. we wanted him to be normal. as anybody else's. problem. and say what. you're mine so they run up here and took

a bunch of. children. that's when it started right there when they would never come in here and check the kids picture. 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 stand of that was really shocking and the e.p.a.

came and did. a risk assessment human health risk assessment as well as finally did a record decision and they felt like the primary risk are five very pathway was through dirt and some of the yards tested very high in terms of less toxicity when you think about work kids get lead there really to increase risk for some a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs for lead through their 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 that are really for lead zinc 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. they're real and vital you don't have to admit myself as an adult when i first saw the chap i just said 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 and you're never had a good time to you come off one of these. snow and be. in

a car expressway with two or three aboard the train 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 main mile home. you go away and you'd think man there are some really big piles there member the biggest q. just four five six piles right there around pitcher but you keep driving around for miles and you forget oh yeah there's a chap 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 how minute it is. the chant that are there is this but most of that is being home to a. 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 chap most of the chat piles you see out there may have this course material but then this other stuff group larger concentrations the metals 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 think it's deposited in a residential yard children can ingest it you know it's just a lot more mobile home long time ago residents of picher used to come out on sunday and have picnics on the beach they were actually have been picnics to use this these 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 they had found their exposure to lead between ages seven and twenty one led to extreme obesity in later life. and 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 chatted on her property her dad. built her sandbox and in that same 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 they didn't tell me 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 to solve. but this chad just a throw away from one of the largest lead strikes on the planet. tri state produce

thirty five percent of all metals worldwide for over a decade. every one of these problems was dropped 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 rock i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was the one that discovered the laden jake commerce way back old probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilled in the water wheel on the south west part of commerce. grandpa got a hold of him and told him get back here the do you see the. picture feel strong up about nine hundred twelve am on the pitch or feel god start again it was the wealthiest straw that they had had here 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 m. machine me and the guys that drilled the hole in the who turned it and sheen on and it was really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite emulator that machine or want to move you kind of flinch a little bit you know i started. summer 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 when i came back from the navy i went to work on the ground with my dad over dobson it was kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of

a holler sake if he could shovel at dirt so i went to shovel and over there the lay by was over here and they had to bring in seven canned strang of empties and he'd get five of those while i was getting to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him it was a scream. making little ones out of big ones with his sledgehammer. 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 bonuses big scorers things like they actually know. it grows on a person who worked in the mines the temperature. on like the smale when we use kids we played remember shares in commerce in the home you always go and you share some small 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 the discovery of was estimated that the quapaw could fill seven to eight thousand more years which put the estimate in a population of about thirty five thousand kuapa the major village was so gaap and today they call themselves so gop and. is french perversion and.

you know it just kind of fell that way so here in seven hundred sixty seven 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 is says that the coffee house are no longer the tribe they used to be cause 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. in eighteen thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining quapaw was to bring noone to where they are today in a arrived here you know 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 colleagues are coming up and writing and 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 used to it's ozarka. look and you know across the river is those high bloods. and the big

bluff broad across is called the devil's. in reason it's called the old roman of this because they got there and they were working on how to get across see the rest of there and when you home and but the devil was marching praying and down top of the. blood. and everyone he tried to swim across drown. in so they couldn't cross a river is the devil's. 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 the story about land is a story about land owners. in the stories as much as it is american. and the cost or change forever lost a minor something that far scheft. the. huge vein that moved ne through with snow 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 tribe to create the town of picher but for the roads and for the town itself and school kind of thing took they just took the land

and this was the largest mining. district in the world at one time so all the munitions for war i wanted a lot of most em 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 subsidize the mining. they came 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 their lease. 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 the i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent. turns out. most of the competent use were the ones the mines on their property and were

a quarter blood or norm and the ones that were competent 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 with a creek that runs through. its forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned into permanent waste land. it's on i'm into federal cash you would know what. it's like. every action has an equal and opposite reaction. you punch a wall the wall gets home or yank 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 doing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call it superfund is because congress so side. of money plus the taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund. the only large amount of money that they called the super fund 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. 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 . the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or the. call offering one that came in and they tried to do some diking stuff and it failed so operable yet 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 their theory was water in equals water and 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 offer where the mine for located you had tremendous amounts of water of the 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 if they saw it 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 cleanup this is 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. eight thousand dollars to redo my yard. about three feet deep all around my four law over the damage was. the best estimate i've gotten from e.p.a.

is 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 ny believe it was ninety five i had some e.p.a. officials come to mafia 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 paul 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 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 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's bad lead poisoning 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. the water the pours out the mines is no better. back in their day the quapaw died trying to cross the river to get to their new home is simeon water out here. ninety seven i 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 mine to create yet to pump the water out so you keep the my system drive in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know nor care for that's why they had to continue pumping and they suggested that if there had to stop pumping in there within two years mine water would surface and kill all the fish in turkey but it was ignored. when the water is running is where most of the water comes out is right here. so much water coming out here it goes that away. and goes out that why there's so much in there but that walk this one off and come out somewhere else and. this is actual chat line work right here. that fell and.

the close up team has been to stop birthplace to the most ambitious football club in the world. now argy goes to the far east where the timber industry affects the legendary siberian tigers where the ancient native community loses its way in the modern world. and where the country's mental well starts its way across the ocean. and well come to the from our screecher russia blows up.

without. all the right. iran test fires a long range missile. drills in the persian gulf. by anyone. in the. security israel for the very first time. if you are just joining us a very warm welcome. civil rights groups have

president obama over a controversial bill he's authorized the military to indefinitely detain suspects without charge or trial which is unprecedented in u.s. history obama said he had some serious concerns about parts of the law and its pledge to be applied in full to americans but rights advocates are calling the bill a blight on obama's legacy they expect the white house to break its promises especially. despite obama's election. by the beginning of two thousand. 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. thank a civil liberties champion turned charismatic candidate who vowed to reverse the.