Oklahoma town is in the middle of one of the nation's worst environmental nightmares.

Undercut with mine shafts and buried under bleak, gray mountains of lead waste, this Oklahoma town is in the middle of one of the nation's worst environmental nightmares. Cave-ins and sinkholes have swallowed up homes and children. The creek runs a ghastly orange with acidic mine water. And the air and soil are polluted with lead dust.

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Picher is the center of the Tar Creek Superfund site, a 40-square-mile area that also takes in portions of Missouri and Kansas and was one of the world's most productive regions for lead and zinc. It provided raw material for bullets in both world wars.

For decades, miners, including Mickey Mantle's father, hollowed out miles of tunnels underneath this town and neighboring communities of Cardin, Quapaw, Commerce and North Miami. The mines closed around 1970.

Tar Creek has since become one of the oldest and largest Superfund cleanup sites in the country. Dust from mountains of lead-contaminated chat, or mine waste, blows through town. The chat piles, some 100 feet high, look like gray sand dunes. Before the dangers of lead were understood, locals used to hold parties on the piles, and kids used them as sledding hills.

......chat pile.......



High lead levels have been found in the blood of local children. Lead can lead to low IQs and behavioral problems. But no studies have been done on the effects of the lead on the youngsters around here. Last year, a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study found more than 100 homes in Picher were in danger of collapsing into old mines. A mine collapse in 1967 took in nine homes, said John Sparkman, a Picher native and executive director of the town's housing authority.

Sinkholes are so common that Picher's city park, one of the last green, open spaces here, was fenced off to the public for fear the ground would cave in, and the main highway leading into town has been closed to heavy trucks.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/02/27/financial/f111939S88.DTL

......baseball field......





......here is a link to more Photographs of the Picher Mining District/Tar Creek Superfund Site ...

http://ok.water.usgs.gov/tarcreek/

What a mess. I've kayaked a river or two with that nasty orange stain on the rocks from old upstream mines.

disaster in the first place.

But it doesn't take an oracle to predict that's an uphill battle.

It's just tragic what's happened there.

at real estate in the early 90s. Glad she didn't buy a house there. Thanks for posting this.

We went to see him once (from southeastern Missouri) and I was appalled then at the brown and gray ugliness of the place. I remember thinking that I had never seen such a dismal, downtrodden town. Of course, it could only get worse over time, I guess, which it obviously has.

If anyone has any helpful links for solutions to this mess please contact me.