really about. it became obvious fairly quickly to me that you know we had a percentage of kids it more difficult. but. we knew we had some problems. with the kids out there. we want them to be normal. as anybody else are you. problem. down here and see what. you're mine so they run up here and took

a bunch of. children. that's when it started right there but they would never come in here and check the kids and picture the health department. 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 extent 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 where you think about were kids good lead there really to increase risk for such a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs for lead through that then adult was about fifty percent more but with pediatric lead toxicity because as 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 there 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 when i first saw the chap i just saw 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 were used also. in the wintertime when the snow and ice was on we used to. go to a local salvage yard and get a car hood. you're never had

a good time to you come off one of these. snow and be. in a car hood expressway with 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 my yard claim 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 could see it from downtown many miles home. you'd go away and you'd think man there's some really big piles there member the biggest q. just four five six piles right there around picher 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 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 say shape with the word chav most of the chat piles you see out there may have this course material but then this other stuff grew larger concentrations the medals are 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 through research and data lead poisoning in the effects and lead poisoning and i was looking through a tiny little publication that can say i had found their exposure to lead between ages seven and twenty one led to extreme obesity in later life. and now as a high school counselor dealing with young people with eating disorders and or with

youth that have troubled learning hell 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 there saying he'd take it not that gravel. but he had taken funding. there are no doubt marmar into somebody. what lead could possibly do. i've 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 dropped from the walls and the mines. now we did need this metal during the wars. so the government kept these mines harmon. remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was a warm discovered late in chief. way back old probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilling the water way up 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 picture people got 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 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 that would turn it in the seen on in the it was really lay out when they turned it on i mean you hit that dynamite and then they turned that and shino want to meet you kind of flea it's a little bit you know i started in the summer night team forty one. i was i was sixteen i went to service in. early in forty three. and. my ship got hit by a kamikaze and. forty four and i was discharged and came back from the navy i went to work on the ground with my dad over. it 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. as a screen. making little ones out of big ones with his legs hammer. 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 as coordination going from one. person to work in the mines the temperature. on like the smale we ski is we played remember shares an omission the whole you always go in and 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 they're nor 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 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 and 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 cost of us are no longer the tribe they used to be 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 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 wind so we can't go anywhere else. so the call cause 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 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 you home but the devil was marching praying up and down the top of the. blood. and everyone he tried to swim across and drown. and so they couldn't cross the earth easily double. cross. the quapaw as 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 call 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 miner sunk that far shaft. hit that 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 and school kind of thing. 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 them for war two on the american side one came from vests. so there was a huge incentive to keep the mining bill and 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 the 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 their property and were a quarter blood

a norm and the ones that would be competent were the ones that were quarter bloater less and didn't have mining leases with rare exception the government had a lot to hand in and what went 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. it's forty seven square miles of virgin prairie turned in a permanent wasteland. and it's on i'm into federal cash tar creek you would know it. it's like news long 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 dealing with this for a long time you know 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 fund they grew to a pretty 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 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 superfund site that was the beginning of the end because . we just don't bounce back from the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or what they call offering you know one that 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 just. 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 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 e.p.a. if they saw a way that 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 e.p.a. hard 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 and i spent 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 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 him 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 have managed the the waste differently. probably they could've done a better job of it but i think about it. no 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 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 up from the underground mine to create yet to pump the water out so you can keep the mud system dr in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know nor care for that's why we have to continue pumping and they suggested that if there had to stop pumping there within two years mine water would surface and kill all the fish and. that 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 is why there's so much in there. this will often come out somewhere else and. this is. right there.

download the official placation two i phone oh i pod touch from the store. life on the go. video on demand on t.v.'s mine costs and o.s.'s feeds now in the palm of your. question on the dot com. the close up team has been to. birthplace to the most ambitious football club in the world. if. not all of our g.d.p. goes to the far east where the timber industry attracts the legendary siberian tigers where the ancient native community loses its weight 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.

temporally warns washington it will take action if a u.s. warship or turns to the gulf where around has recently test fired missiles. egyptians are casting their votes in the country's third round of parliamentary elections but with recent raids on foreign n.g.o.s it's feared the military's grip on power could remain as strong as ever. and arab league observers say syrian leaders have pulled heavy weapons out of the cities and release prisoners but the group is still looking for ways to end the ongoing violence. hello and thank you for joining us i'm karen tara it's two o'clock here in moscow and with your headlines now around the house

a war in the united states it will take action if an american warship returns to its base in the gulf it left the area when iran stated its ten day naval war games during which they successfully test fired a selection of different missiles iran also held an exercise that simulated shutting down the strait of hormuz though it said that no immediate intention of actually doing so earlier to block the world's most important oil route if the west stepped up sanctions against the country's nuclear program friends says it's sure iran is developing nuclear weapons and is pushing for stricter sanctions on saturday u.s. president barack obama signed a bill targeting iran's oil and financial sectors cited mohammad marandi from the university of technology says america is stoking up tensions with iran. it is really the americans that are being provocative they are trying to make ordinary iranians suffer at the same time you see senior american officials and politicians constantly calling for the assassination of iranian.