chip piles so i do nothing really about picher at all it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a hard percentage of kids it i'm sure had more difficulty in the classroom. super kids but. they had no stress we knew we had some problems. with the with the kids out there. counted as dates to. build and talk at much about. well he is our son knew what we wanted him to be normal was. as anybody else's kid. problems and i said well you need to come down here and see what what we got says or blow your mind so they ran a parent took a bunch of blood samples from the squad boss indian children and man they found

high layered can't sets when it started grad there went but say they would never come in here and check the kids and picture the health department would help a home but then they started check in and they found a monster. 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 absorbed for lead through the an adult is about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity because 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. 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 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 well it's tailings it's the tailings from mars what's left over from the stuff they didn't use their real invitee you have to admit myself as an adult and 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 them slide down them four wheel 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 up there i can imagine that for years. in the wintertime when the snow and ice was on we used. local salvage yard get a car hood and you never have a good time to you come off one of these. snow and ice with the. in

a car hood expressway with two or three aboard pitching carden 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 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 you could see from downtown many miles from home. you go away and you'd think man there's some really big piles there and you'd remember the biggest hugest four five six piles right there around picher but you keep driving around you know for miles and you forget oh yeah there's chat 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 champ there are there are there humongous. but most of that is being home with 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 in lead content about a thousand times higher and lead and lead content than the gravel people associate 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 of picher used to come out on sunday and have picnics on the beach they were actually have been picnics to use this feast fine paling. 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 their exposure to lead between ages seven and twenty one led to extreme obesity in later life. and the high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and or with youth

that have trouble learning how lot of dealings with those kind of camped in one particular student stood out to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw and chatted chat pile on her property her dad had. built her a sandbox. and in there saying he'd take it not that gravel but he had taken fucking. there were no doubt marmar and somebody knew. what lay ahead could possibly do. have made it until now. 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 chat piled 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. remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was swarmed discovered late in chief. way back old probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilled in the water wheel on the south west port of commerce rand paul got a hold of him and told him get back here that he saw the. picture feel strong up about nineteen twelve am on the pitch or field got started 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 wood turn it in the scene alone in the it was really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite and then they turned that and sheena want to meet you kind of flinch a little bit you know i started in the summer night team forty one. i was i was sixteen i went to service in the. 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 and they had over and was kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of a holiday could. 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 get him to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him. screaming. make him little ones out of big ones who do sledgehammer. is a job at times specially when they would go in there. and they shoot them. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on bonuses big scorers things like they actually know. the person who work in the mines the temperature. on like the smale when we use kids we played remember shares an omission will always go when 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 of terror 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 estimated that the quapaw could fill seven days a 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 cloth all is french perversion and. in a just kind of fell that way so here in 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 says that the coffeehouse are no longer the tribe they used to be. as the 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 dig was inside that line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call causer coming up and running and you know it's eighteen and thirty five . in there 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's. lookin you know across the river is those high bloods. and. big bluff broad across is called the devil's. in reason it's called.

this because they got there and they were working on how to get across see the rest of there and when home and but the devil was marching praying and down the top of the. blood. and everyone he tried to swim across and drown. and so they couldn't cross a river is the 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 the story about land is

a story about land owners. in the stories as much as it is american. and the quapaw story changed forever once the miners sunk that far shaft. hit a huge vein that moved northeast through that 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 the school kind of thing took they just took the land this was the largest mining. district in the world at one time

so all the munitions for war i wanted a lot of the 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 subsidize 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 to the mining companies b i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent it turns out the most of the news were the war. zone their property. quarter board and norm.

the ones that were deemed competent were the. quarter bloater less who didn't have mining leases with rare exception the government had a lot to hand in what went on the. 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 in a permanent wasteland. if they're meant to federal cash you would know it. it's like new every action has an equal and opposite reaction. you punch a wall its hole gets broken. he's beat the hell out of this grad here.

and she came back. 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 fun is because congress so side barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this pond. crude to earn 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 can't be located or are not claiming responsibility so the government has to take over the sites and initiate the cleanup 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 . you just don't bounce back from the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or what they call operating you know they came in and they tried to do some guy team stuff and it failed so operable you know 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 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 crew of 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 but none of these the folks came. let

issues of children and it was kind of a national trend for the e.p.a. if they saw a way let levels they move 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 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 my four law over the dam is. 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 not 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 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 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 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 quote boss died 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 the e.p.a. . started sniffing around here so to speak that's when the contaminated water started coming up from the underground mine the creek yad to pump the water out so you can

keep the my system drive 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 may suggest that a failure of the stopped pumping there within ten years mine water would surface and kill all the fish in turkey that 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 then walk this one off and come out somewhere else and grow older. this is actual lawn work right here. the fella.

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warning to the west as iran successfully test fires long range missiles during a naval exercises in the persian gulf islamic republic says it's prepared to hit back if attacked. critics cry foul as a bomber signs a bill into law giving the military more thora to detain people indefinitely without charge or trial if classed as terrorist suspects. plus the conflict in syria takes a new twist as arab league observers say the regime is pulled its forces back from flashpoint opposition strongholds demanded in the piece.

costing lives twenty four hours a day this is r.t. a very warm welcome to. iran has successfully test fired several long range missiles on the last day of major naval exercises in international waters of the persian gulf it comes amid mounting western pressure on the country and its nuclear ambitions but iran says it's ready to counter any attack on countries like israel or the united states and has reacted angrily to new u.s. sanctions targeting its central bank and financial sector iran has been threatening to close the news what's most important all export. to the indian nation meanwhile the e.u. is mulling on him drago on the purchase of a radiant oil with a decision on that expected before the end of the month sire that mohammad marandi from the university of time. of war with iran would engulf the whole region. it is really the americans that are being provocative they are trying.