back in one thousand nine hundred it was dark. really about picher it all. 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 with the kids out there. we want to be normal. as anybody else's. problem. down here and see what.

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 and picture the health department when. 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 risk or primary pathway was through dirt and some of the yard's tested very high in terms of less toxicity when you think about work kids get lead there really to increase risk for such a couple of reasons one is a child absorbs more lead through their gut than adult does 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. well i thought they could. 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 and when i first saw it 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 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. 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 come off one of these. snow and be. in a car hood expressway with three 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 my 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 picture mine itself is a quarter mile high you can see it from downtown many miles home. you go away and you'd think man there are some really big piles there and you to 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 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 chimp that are the root of 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 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 in lead and lead content than the gravel people say shape 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 metals 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 and then he 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 about lead poisoning in the effects on lead poisoning and i was looking through a tiny little publication that comes that had found that 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 with youth that have trouble learning a lot of dealings with those kind of kids one particular student stood out to me and i knew that she'd grown up in quapaw chatted on her property her dad. built her sandbox and in. taking not that gravel but he'd taken it finds. there are no doubt in my mind that somebody knew what lay ahead could possibly do to your health. and they didn't tell nobody. 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

piles and elevated blood leds and 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 produce 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 world wars. so the government kept these mines humming. wake up and remember that iraq i was talking about. yeah this is where those ripples start. my grandfather he was a war and discovered the laden chief commerce way back old probably around one thousand and four. but they was drilling the water will on the south west port of commerce. grandpa got a hold of him and told him get back here the do you see the the picture feel strong enough about nine hundred twelve am on the pitch or feel god start again 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 machine me and the guys that drilled the hole that would turn it and sheen will. really lay old when they turn it on i mean you get that dynamite emulator that machine want to move 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. early in forty three. and my ship got hit by a kamikaze and. early in 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 knobs and it was kind of funny because he was he was still pretty much of a holiday could he get 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 who i was getting to and i like to kill myself trying to catch up with him. screaming. make and little ones out of big ones with a sledgehammer. and their fat is a job at times specially when they would go in there and shoot down the roof and they shoot down the roof it just brings out a lot of run down boluses biggest correlation things like their chin though. it grows on the person who work in the mines the temperature and the like the smale. with me as kids we played remember share st thomas in the old you 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 their north. 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 vesta made 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 the goblin. is french perversion and. you know it just kind of fell that way so here and seven hundred sixty seven smallpox plague hits the try and diggins to wipe them out and you can read it in the record and congressional record i've read it says that the cloth policies are no longer the tried they used to be cough 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 in eight hundred thirty three they made a treaty with the remaining coffee to bring in to where they are today in a arrived here in 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 line so we can't go anywhere else. so the call cause are coming up and running and you know it's eighteen and thirty. 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's ozarka. lookin you know across the

river is those hard blows. and. big bluff brought across is called the devils it's the reason it's called rome is because they got there and they were working on how to get across see the rest of the and when home and but the devil was marching praying and down top of the. blood and everyone he tried to swim across and drown. him so they couldn't cross the 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 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 quapaw story changed forever once the miner something that far shaft. the. vein that moved northeast through puts no 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 bad mining. district in the world at one time so 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 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 lease. 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 b. i went to congress and had individual tribal members declared incompetent. turns

out. most of the confluence were the ones the mines on their property and were a quarter blood and 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 of the government had a lot to hand in what went on out here. 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. they have thrown him into federal cash you would. 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 dealing with this for a long time yeah the reason they call the super fund is because congress those side barge amount of money plus they taxed oil companies and chemical companies. to put into this fund. 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 the sites and initiate the 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 . you just don't bounce back from the initial part of our focus was on the water quality or the call for a new one that came in and they tried to do some die teen 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 but during the mining they had to pump twenty four seventh's to. get rid of all of the water that was in

the boot offer where the mine for located you had tremendous amounts of water 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 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 most been eighty thousand dollars to redo my yard. yeah 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 not 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 you know should we think about it now damn straight we better think about. yeah the chats 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 closed 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 simeon water out here. ninety seventy nine 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 the creek yad to pump the water out so you can keep the much system dry in so when you stop that fills up over time as they were do you know the market 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 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 let him there and walk this one off and come out somewhere else. this is actual shed a lot more right here. that fell am.

the close up team has been to die new stuff. plays to the most ambitious football club in the world. not all argee 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.

provoking tension the pentagon says that u.s. warships will continue to sail in the arabian gulf despite an iranian warning to stay away while tehran successfully test fires missile. defense talks between israel and palestine to move in sixteen months and no breakthrough that they don't gain infos says there's been a positive atmosphere to meet point to steer in a few moments from all. the winds of change the russian army marches on modernization with the kremlin keen to return to a soviet era military might. worldwide

news live from moscow city center this is artsy with me rule received show welcome to the program the u.s. has responded to a warning from iran to keep its aircraft carriers out of the persian gulf by saying its warships will continue to sail that the american navy has pulled out of an area where iran was holding ten days of naval wargames during which it successfully testified a number of different missiles but russia's the defense ministry for the meantime says that despite the latest military exercise the iranians don't have the technology to make intercontinental ballistic missiles meanwhile is pushing for stricter sanctions saying it's show that turnaround is developing nuclear weapons it's urged the e.u. countries to follow the u.s. in freezing iranian central bank assets and imposing an embargo on oil exports tehran has been threatening to block the strait of hormuz it's one of the world's most important oil routes.