COMMERCE, Okla. – Baseball legend Mickey Mantle’s hometown became part of the world’s first Superfund site after abandoned lead mines polluted nearby Tar Creek and ruined many homes in Ottawa County.
“We were the first and worst Superfund site,” said Rebecca Jim, Cherokee, a resident of nearby Miami, Okla.
“We are a microcosm of what can go wrong, where they mined and wallow in what was all around them,” she told the Native Sun News.
Jim is also the founder and executive director of Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency, Inc. (L.E.A.D. Agency), a non-profit organized in 1997 with goals to educate the community on environmental concerns and take action to counter the environmental hazards in and around the Superfund site.
After the Indian Health Service discovered lead poisoning in 35 percent of Native American children living in the checkerboard of tribal, state and federal jurisdiction here, the Quapaw Tribe, whose lands were most affected by the contamination, signed on to the first contract ever for a tribe to manage Superfund work.
“We want it to look good and be clear,” Jim said of Tar Creek. Most of it is a red-orange color due to iron oxide, among other metals in the water.
Jim started working on cleanup in 1979, when she was a counselor at the local Miami public schools. She encountered youngsters who couldn’t learn and didn’t know what had happened to them.
The lead poisoning “changes their life and it impacts our lives,” she said. “It only takes one person to make a difference.”
Lead exposure can affect nearly every system in the body. It often occurs with no obvious symptoms, and hurts children more than adults, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Through a group called the Cherokee Volunteer Society, Jim began helping raise awareness about Tar Creek.
At the time, each 10th grade student in her school did a research project about the site. In 1983, it gained National Priority Status, making it eligible for Superfund money.
Today she and other activists continue to muster support for cleanup by hosting events such as the catchy Tar Creek Fish Tournament, a poetry and art event.
Referring to the maxim, “You’ve got a hook, you’ve got a hope,” Jim noted that the tournament didn’t need to be held at the creek because no fish live in it.
Personally, she hopes the inspiration from such activities will lead to funding so that the cleanup can be achieved in “sooner than 30 years.” Otherwise shortfalls in the Superfund budget imply it will be at least that long.
A tax to contribute to Superfund cleanup expired in 1995 and efforts to reinstate it have failed. Other moneys appropriated have been declining annually for the 1,300 designated sites across the United States.
Most citizens have long since moved out of the Tar Creek area to protect their health, according to Bob Nairn, who is the director of the Center for Restoration of Ecosystems and Watersheds at the University of Oklahoma.
The state of Oklahoma conducted the first of two homeowner buyouts, as ground cave-ins threatened residences. Then the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used funding from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for more buyouts and relocations of people from the towns of Picher, Cardin and Hockerville, Okla., as well as Treece, Kansas.
“Buyouts are traumatic,” said Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality Executive Director Scott Thompson. For example, the mining boomtown atmosphere in Picher (population 50,000) included sports, parades, rodeos, and scholastics, as well as 60 bars and 30 brothels.
However, the alternative of continuing to live in the 40-square-mile (12,600-acre) Superfund site was a worse alternative for most. Now only 1,900 people live in Picher.
Nairn says animals and plants, including frogs and puzzle grass (also called snake grass or horsetail), are moving into the area after millions of tons of rubble have been removed and water has been improved.
He oversees a passive treatment plant for the 250 gallons per minute of water that flows up from the mines to the surface, where it joins above-ground waterways. Support for the facility comes from Oklahoma state government.
However, complete land and water restoration is unlikely, he said, due to an estimated $10-million per acre price tag.
Concerns remain over eating beef or wild game grazing in the area, as well as recreational use of the chat piles by off-road-vehicle enthusiasts.
“It’s a little dangerous to walk around in this area,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot of potential for cave-ins,” he said, pointing to a recent one that swallowed half a pickup truck parked in a residential yard.
The EPA has determined that current human exposure is not under control because contamination remains at an unsafe level. Authorities are uncertain whether the migration of contaminated ground water is stabilized, according to an agency status report.
The rate of the waste stream flow from the Tar Creek Superfund site every three days is equivalent to that of the environmental disaster caused by the abandoned Gold King Mine spill into a tributary of Colorado’s Animas River on Aug. 5.
“That was one mine. There are 1,003 here,” said Bill Andrews, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Oklahoma Water Science Center.
What’s more, said Nairn, “It was a single event. This event has been going on for 30 years. It’s a chronic problem.”
Back in the mid-20th Century, the mines supplied the World War I and World War II efforts, providing lead for gasoline, solder, batteries, and paint.
Tar Creek is part of the Tri-State Mining District covering parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. The mining area is so large that Houston Astro Dome would fit inside its underground realm, former miners say.
Mules, originally used to haul the ore, could travel from one state to another below the surface without seeing the surface.
The mine waste is called chat and the material was sold for use as driveways, in yards, sandboxes, playgrounds and schools. The ball field in Picher was completely surrounded by chat piles until it was fenced off and a new one built.
The water from the shallow aquifer fills up the abandoned holes and carries the chat’s heavy metals into Tar Creek. From there it flows into two major rivers, the Neosho and the Spring, emptying into the Grand Lake of the Cherokees, Oklahoma’s largest water body.
A $7-million attempt to divert the acid mine drainage did not achieve its desired effect.
The long cleanup period has given scientists the opportunity to conduct some revealing tests.
Harvard School of Public Health found that wild cattails, used in cooking and to make duck hunting decoy whistles, would be dangerous to health because of their heavy metal uptake.
Migratory bird die-offs and zinc poisoning in water fowl have been detected. The study of tree rings shows that more metal is being taken up now than in the 1970s. Mussels have high concentrations of zinc.
The long reclamation period also has given rise to carelessness. Danger signs intended to be permanent have vanished. In 2014, somebody baled hay for animal feed on one of the remediation sites, at which the grasses take up heavy metals.
Jim is campaigning for the EPA, BIA, Quapaw Tribe and State of Oklahoma to keep forging ahead with the cleanup.
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Talli Nauman is the Health & Environment Editor for the Native Sun News, based in Rapid City, S.D. You may contact her at:
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