threatens to shut off oil supply. thus the conflict in syria takes a new twist as arab league observers say the regime has pulled its forces back from flashpoint opposition strongholds has demanded the peace plan but league warns there's still the issue of snipers firing on protesters. those are the headlines up next the story of a catastrophic environment disaster now a special report to talk week will rogers once they had somebody asking about ram they said well i just don't make much of anymore and we need the lord intends for us to be good stewards of what he gave us and we did a terrible job here we did a terrible job. knew nothing about pitcher i'd spent half of the football game picher oklahoma back in

one thousand nine hundred four it was dark didn't have the opportunity pre-shared the scenic view that the pitcher offers with a chip pounce 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 no stress we knew we had some problems. with the kids out there. kind of hesitate to you know they'll bend tulka. well here's our sound and we want him to be a normal. person or anybody else's kid. he had problems. and i said well you need to come down here and see what what we

yat us it will blow your mind so they run a pair and took a bunch of blood samples from the indian children and man i found high lead can't 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. don't know why i. always used 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 risk or fiber path or it was through dirt and some of the yards tested very high in terms of lead toxicity when you think about were kids good lead there really to increase risk for such a 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 where 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 the minerals 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 in them the little chips of rock that are left we call it chat well it's tail it's the tailings from the mine is 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 the m 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 up there i can't imagine that were used also play 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 wells with snow and ice with the. in a car hood experience say with two or three aboard pitching car 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 some of those areas at least you know i'd be 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 are 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 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 chant that are. there humongous but most of that is being holed 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 and lead content about a thousand times higher and lead and lead content than the gravel people say shape with the word chav most of the chat piles you see out there may have this course material but then there's others 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 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 my place when i was looking period tiny little publication that combat had found their exposure to lead between one thousand seven hundred 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 camps one particular student stood out to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw and chatted to pile on her property her dad hair down. and built her a sandbox. and in there saying he'd taken out 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 hardly 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

chad 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 dropped from the walls in the mines. now we didn't 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 a war and discovered the lame jake palmer's way back old probably around one thousand and four but they was drilling a waterway or on the south west port of commerce. paul got a hold of him and told him get back here the day you saw the. picture feel strong enough about nineteen twenty zero am on the pitch or feel god started it was very

wealthy a straw 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 deal which 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 would turn and shino on which really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite and then later that machine i want to meet you kind of flinch a little bit you know i started in the summer of 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 i. am 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 door knobs and it was

kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of a policy could he get shelter what 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 well i was getting two 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 hammer. fat is a job at times especially when they would go in there and shoot down the roof when they shoot down. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on the reasons big scores and things like that to know. he grows on a person to work in the mines the temperature and i like the smale. with me is key is we played remember share st thomas in the well you've always gotten your share

since mail 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 and 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 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.

in a 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 says that the coffee houses 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 out. you know in eight hundred thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining quapaw was to bring them into 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 colleagues 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 cross

a river is those high bloods. and. big and bluffs right across this 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 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 and drown and so they couldn't cross a river is the devil and 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 land so the mining companies lease tribal land and allotments to start this operation the story about land is a story about land owners and the stories as much as it is american. the cost or change forever once the mine or something that far shaft. they hit a huge vein that move northeast through puts no card and pitcher 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 kind of thing they 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 one came from nests. so there was a huge incentive to keep the mining going 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 ones the mines on your property and your quarter board and norm and the ones that were deemed competent were the words that were quarter bloater less than 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 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 granite 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 fun is because congress has side barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund and they grew to a pretty 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 you know can be located or are not claiming responsibility so the government has to take over these sites and 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 diking and seven it failed so operable unit one was trying to solve the surface water impacts from the from the contaminated mine water being discharged but how much was . about eight million dollars their theory was water in equals water and doesn't work that way but 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 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 where 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 there's been eight 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 tons of contaminants across the street could they have done things differently in the twenty storm the mining boom could they have had managed the the waste differently. probably they could've done a better job of it but i think about it that time no should we think about it now damn straight we better think about. yeah the chance 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 the.

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 could keep the my system drive in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know in our core for that's why we had to continue pumping and they suggested that if they ever had to stop pumping there within ten years the 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 there's so many so much water coming out here it goes that away stream and goes out that is why there's so much in there but i'd walk this one off and come out somewhere else and grow old or something else this is actual mine work right here. the fellow i am.

the close up team has been to docu stuff birthplace to the most ambitious football club in the world. naldo r g 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 bars creature russia blows up. the mission free accreditation free transport charges free. range minsk free risk free. to tide free.

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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 thorough 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 a school that's forces back from flashpoint opposition strongholds didn't want it in the piece.