really about. it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a percentage of kids it more difficult to. super kids but. we knew we had some problems. with with the kids out there. we want to be normal. as anybody else's. problem.

you're mine so i. 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 risks 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 us out a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs for lead through that then adult is about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity because what we call developmental issues it's only 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 could. 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. 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 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 them 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. through 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 you could see it from downtown many miles home. you'd go away and you'd think man there's some really big piles there need to remember 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 how money out it is. the chant also there are there is this but most of that is beholden to a. problem with moving chad in that what's left behind is far more dangerous than what they take what's left behind or 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 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 are mantles or in

the size of the mine waste more so 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 tailings. i had been doing some research and data lead poisoning in the effects and lead poisoning and i was looking through tiny little publication that comes that head found their exposure to lead between ages 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 that have trouble learning how lot of dealings with those kind of camps and 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 had. built her a sandbox. and in it saying he'd taken out the gravel but he had taken funding. there are no doubt marmar into somebody. what lead could possibly do. have made until now. with 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 produces 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. remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start . my grandfather he was swarmed discovered late and changed. way back oh probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilling the water wheel on the south west part of commerce. grandpa got a hold of him and told him get back here that he saw the. picture feel strong enough about nine hundred twelve am on the pitch or feel god started it was the wealthiest straw that they had had yet they put me on

a pattern job. to powder monkeys that's a guys it 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 this would turn it and sheen on and 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 of nineteen 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 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 had get five of those get him to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him it was a scream. making little ones out of big ones who sledgehammer. is a job at times specially when they would go in there. and they shoot. it just brings a lot of wrong doing on boulders as big scorers things were there to know. the person who worked in the mines the temperature. on like the smale we kids we played remember shares an omission the will always share some small share their criminal matter.

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 cop 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 system a 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 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 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 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 big was inside that line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call quotes 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. 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 up and down the top of the. blood. and everyone he tried to swim across dream on. and so they couldn't cross a river is the. 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. in the stories as much as it is american. the cost or change forever once the miner sunk that far shaft. hit 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. 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 the school kind of thing took they just took the land

and this was the largest mining. district in the world at one time so of 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 there 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 bureau was under a lot of pressure to have a straddle member sign mining leases if you didn't release to the mining companies b i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent it turns out. most of the confluence were the ones the mines and

their property and were a quarter blood a norm and the ones that were deemed competent were the ones that were quarter bloater less and didn't have mining leases with rare exception the government had a lot of hand in hand what went on out here. is not a county or town or neighborhood it's the country's worst environmental disaster then after the creek that runs through the. it's forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned in a permanent wasteland. and it's on i'm into federal cash 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 doing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call it super fun is because congress so side. 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 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 the 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. the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or what they call offering you know they came in and they tried to do some. car 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 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 boone 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 mid ninety's the focus became let 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. hard 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 and that spot you take the next expenses etc a gay man may spend eighty thousand dollars to redo my yard. about three feet. deep all around ma for law all of the damage all.

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 my office 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 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 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 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 some mean water out here. ninety seven nine 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 out 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 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 but it was ignored. when the water is running is where most of the water comes out is right here there's 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 the actual line work right here. that fell and.

it's.

critics cry foul there's a band that signs a bill into law giving the military more store to detain people indefinitely without charge or trial it classed as terror suspects. born into the west as iran successfully testifies long range missiles during naval exercises in the persian gulf is not republic says it's prepared to hit back if the time. of the conflict in syria takes a new twist of arab league observers say the regime has poured its causes back from flashpoint opposition strongholds and has demanded in the. international news live from moscow this is all see with me thanks for joining us

first civil rights groups have criticized president obama over a controversial defense bill giving powers and president didn't peacetime to in turn people without trial has given the military powers to indefinitely detain u.s. citizens as well as foreigners on american soil if they are classed as terror suspects obama said he had serious concerns about possible the north and has pledged it won't be applied in full time arkan's but human rights advocates are describing the bill as a blight on. legacy it comes as the notorious going to have a prison remains open despite the president's pre-election to shut it down by the beginning of two thousand and ten thousand flounders from the international action center says the new bill violates basic democratic rights the u.s. claims to fight for around the world. there is a throw out mass detention without trial without charges are being held by the u.s. military who previously couldn't.