We’re getting smarter as a species. I don’t mean in the “unraveling the secrets of the universe” sense. I mean we stopped shitting a known neurotoxin into the atmosphere. Studies suggest all the leaded gasoline knocked a few IQ points off the national average in the US. It started being phased out in the 1970s, the last of it went into use in… 2021. Aren’t we fun?
Atmospheric lead levels have slowly dissipated. But in corners of the world where lead mining was the local industry, this byproduct of radioactive decay eventually became the local tragedy.
Today’s Moment of Science… The Toxic Waste Town of Picher, Oklahoma.
The Quapaw Tribe was uprooted from Arkansas via treaty with the US government in 1818. Successive treaties pushed them westward to northeast Oklahoma. When lead and zinc were discovered in the region in the late 1800s, towns sprung up around the commodities. In 1912, land was leased from several Quapaw citizens for mining purposes. Stick a pin in that.
Picher, Oklahoma was incorporated in 1918, named for O.S. Picher, owner of Picher Lead Company. Which gives me a not at all ominous feeling. It’s estimated that the town hosted 14,000 miners and another 5,000 residents at its peak in the mid-1920s. About half of the lead and zinc used by the US in WWII came from this mining district.
As I’ve told an ex or two though, this toxic bullshit won’t last forever. But it’s not like someone who owned a goddamn lead mine packed up and left after American Jesus told them they’d made enough money to enter the kingdom of heaven, no. They left because the mines were stripped bare after the war. Smaller scale mining operations continued through 1960, with all activity ending in 1970.
Extracting resources out of the Earth for fun and profit almost invariably comes with a side of “fuck this bit of planet in particular.” Mining heavy metals is historically a dirty business just in terms of the sheer volume of waste. Tons of ore may need to be processed to produce mere grams of a precious metal (this varies by metal and location).
I don’t have any great ideas on how to manage millions of tons of contaminated gravel waste. But my first recommendation would have been anything other than what they did: erect small mountains of the shit all over town. Furthermore, all that subsurface mining left the ground with a funny resemblance to Kevin McCarthy: unstable and prone to cave-ins.
Contaminated groundwater surfaced in 1979 just a few miles from the mines in Tar Creek. Ferric hydroxide deposits painted the lifeless creek bottom red, as an ecological disaster decades in the making unfolded.
The area was designated as a Superfund cleanup site in 1983, but that doesn’t mean folks packed up and left town. In 1984, Picher’s high school football team won their first state championship.
It was an impossibly slow slog to ghost town status from there. In 1994, a screening revealed that ⅓ of the children tested in Picher had alarming levels of lead in their blood. A 2006 study conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers showed that 86% of buildings in town- including the school, which remained open until 2009- were in danger of falling apart any goddamn minute. In 2008, a fuck-you huge tornado blew through the city, killing 150 people and sweeping toxic leaded dust into the air.
At which point, the 800 folks remaining in town finally opted to take those government checks they were being offered to live fucking anywhere else.
After a seventeen year court battle, a federal court ordered $137 million to be paid to Quapaw Nation for damages to their land. The settlement is being dispersed equally to their 5,290 citizens.
Despite decades of work, Picher remains uninhabitable.
This has been your Moment of Science, concerned about the number of highly contaminated structurally unsound little mining towns that are still populated.
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