as in tehran threatens to shut off a key oil supplier. and so he sends up a new eye in the sky a satellite which could give the world close up images of security conscious israel for the very first time the country has been protected from close up pictures and. now i can access the story of a home was abandoned communities are still fighting with just as almost thirty years after an environmental disaster ruined the lives you're watching out. will rogers once they had somebody asking about why and they said well i just don't make much of anymore and we need the lord intends for us to be good sturtz what he gave us and we did a terrible job here we did a terrible job. knew

nothing about picher i'd spent half of the football game picher oklahoma back in one thousand nine hundred four it was dark didn't have the up to the scenic view that the pitcher offers with the pounds so i do nothing really about pitcher at all it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a higher percentage of kids it more difficult in the classroom super kids but. they had. we knew we had some problems. with that with the kids out there the kind of hesitate to you know they'll bend. well here is our sound and we want them to be as normal. as anybody else's kids. good problem. and i said oh you

need to come down here and see what what we yeah i said it'll blow your mind so they run appear and took a bunch of blood samples from. indian children and man i found high lead can that's when it started right there when mclean they would never come in here and check the kids and picture the health department would call home but then i started checking in and i found a monster. oh i. know why i'm. going to. this so we actually went door to door in the mining communities and knocked on doors and found out how many people had children six in the 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 that stand 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 risks are from very pathway was through dirt and some of the yard's tested very high in terms of lead toxicity when you think about were kids good lead there really to increase risk for some couple of reasons one is a child absorbed for lead through the gut then an adult does about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity that causes what we call developmental issues it's only importance between zero and six years of age and it affects the developing neurologic system mostly what we consider the soft neurologic signs 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 per minute. how does 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 about a 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 while the waste sits here. and you can't leave kids here while you take several decades to move all of it. well i thought they could. when they took or the rock out of the ground within that rock there are all of the

minerals are really for lids 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 chat well it's tail it's the tailings from mars what's left over from the stuff they didn't use. their real inviting you don't have to admit myself as an adult when i first saw the chap piles i just said i just couldn't imagine how it wouldn't be the funniest thing in the world ticket up there and roll down the slide down them four wheeled 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't imagine that were used also play in the wintertime when the snow and ice was on we used. go

to a local salvage yard and get a car hood and you never had a good time to you come off one of these was with snow and ice with the. in a car hood expects to be with two or three aboard pitching car and that's where most of their risk would be because you have so much metals on the surface still surrounding the area. and even if my 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 she could see from downtown maine miles from home. you 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 on pitcher but you keep driving around you know for miles and you forget oh yeah there's chet maces 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 champ there are there is this but most of that is being home away. no 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 ten thousand times higher in lead and lead content than the gravel people say shape with the word chance most of the chat piles you see out there may have this course material but then there's

others. 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 gets 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 a picnic song to use this piece find tailings. i had been doing some research and data lead poisoning when they fixed the lead poisoning i was looking period tiny little publication that combat had found their exposure to lead between eighty seven and twenty one led to extreme obesity in later life. and i as

a high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and or with youth it have trouble learning how lot of dealings with those kind of can one particular students today are to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw and chatted to pile on her property her dad had to. build her a sandbox. and in there saying he'd take it not that gravel. but he had taken funding. 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 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. but 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 struck from the walls in the mines. now we did need this metal during the wars. so the government kept these mines home and . wake up in the morning remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was swarmed discovered laden changed commerce way back old probably around one thousand and four but they was drilling a waterway or on the south west port of commerce. grandpa got a hold of him and told him to get back here the day you saw the. picture feel strong enough about nineteen twelve am on the pitch or field got started it was

very wealthiest strong that they had had yeah 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 me and machine me and the guys that drilled the hole would turn and sheen on which really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite and then later that machine know what i mean you kind of flinch a little bit you know i started in the summer night teen forty one i was i was sixteen i went to service and. early in forty three and my ship got hit by a kamikaze and hurley in forty four and i was discharged and one hundred 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 horse he could he could shell that dirt 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'd get five of those while i was getting to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him i was a screen. making little ones out of big ones who'd his legs hammered. fat is a job at times specially when they would go in there and shoot down the roof when they shoot. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on the reserves big scores and things like that to know. he grows on a person to work in the mines the temperature and i like to smale. when we as kids we played remember share st thomas in the well you can always go in your

shapes and smell or share that here come in that. everyone knows about the trail of tears the cherokee nation. all thirty nine tribes in oklahoma have a trail of tears 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 system made that the quapaw 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 they've gotten caught is france perversion and. in a just kind of fell that way so here in seven hundred sixty seven smallpox playing 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 says that the cost of us are no longer the tribe they used to be cop 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 in 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 big 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 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 they're used to it so it was arc up close. look and

you know across the river is those high bloods. and the big bluffs right across is called the devil's problem and. the reason it's called. is because they got there and they were working on how to get across see the rest of their inland home and but the devil was marching prating up and down the top of the blood and everyone he tried to swim across drowned and so they couldn't cross the river because the double. cross. the quapaw is were 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 pawpaw 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 lost a minor something that for shaft. they hit a huge vein that moved northeast 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 quapaw tribe to create the town of picher but for the roads

and for the town itself and school that kind of thing took they just took the land and this was the largest mining. district in the world at one time so while the munitions for war i wanted a lot of most time for war two on the american side were came from nests. 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 their 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 release to the mining companies the i went to congress and had individual tribal

members declared incompetent it turns out the most of the confluence were the world mines on their property and were a quarter blood a norm and the ones that were deemed competent were the wounds that were quarter bloater less then didn't have mining leases 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 after the creek that runs through. its forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned into permanent waste land. their time into federal cash talkradio you would know it it's like news all every action has an equal and opposite reaction. you

punch a wall the wall gets a hole where 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 doing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call it super fund is because congress set aside barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund they created to earn a large amount of money that they called the super fund that was established in the early eighty's to deal with these environmentally contaminated sites where the responsible parties can't be located or are not claiming responsibility so the government has to take over these sites and initiate cleanup 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 a 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 water quality or what they call operating you know one that came in and they tried to do some guy kenan s.f. 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 how much i don't know 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 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 in 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 it at levels they moved 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 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. the

all around ma for law always advantage. 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 kind of 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 storm 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 know should we think about it now damn straight we better think about. yeah the chats bad the grounds bad but boy things are 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 up from the underground mine to the creek yad to pump the water out so you could keep the my system drive in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know that norco for that's why they had to continue pumping and they suggested that if there had to stop pumping there within ten 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 there's so many so much water coming out here it goes that away. and goes out that is why there's so much in here but that walk this one off and come out somewhere else will grow older something else this is actual shed mine were right here. the fell and.

the close up team has been to die and you stuck birthplace to the most ambitious football club in the world. knowledge argee 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. well come to the bars creature russia close up on our key.

in america enforces a law to detain suspects without charge trial all the right. or wrong. during naval drills in the persian gulf is prepared to hit back by anyone. in the sky. to give the world close security. for the very first time.