Former mining town, thoroughly polluted, also at risk of cave-in; entire town offered federal buyout

In January,  BLDG Blog   (“Building Blog”) reported on Matthew C. Wright’s Washington Post coverage of the situation in Picher, Oklahoma. Picher had lead and zinc mines operated until the 1970’s, and it’s been on the Superfund List – part of the Tar Creek SuperFund Site.

picherlocmap.jpg

Map via United States Geological Survey.

The Harvard Center for Children’s Environmental Health and Disease Prevention Research has an explanation of the Tar Creek site here .

Picher is located in the northeastern part of the state, near the Kansas border and not too far from Oklahoma’s border with Missouri. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, before it became a mining town, Picher was known as the “Hay Capital of the World.”

From Wright’s piece:

The piles are loaded with heavy metals that have contaminated the air and the groundwater and placed the northeastern Oklahoma town in the middle of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, the largest and one of the most polluted in the country. To add to Picher’s misery, a federal study released in January determined that the abandoned mines beneath the city could cause cave-ins without warning. (emphasis supplied)

– snip –

“It’s like watching somebody that you love very much suffer a long, slow, painful death,” said Kim Pace, a lifelong resident and principal of Picher-Cardin Elementary School. Even though “it’s the right thing to do, and it needs to happen, you’re not ready to give them up.”

The culprits of Picher’s demise are the same lead and zinc mines that brought the town its prosperity and boosted its population to a high of 16,000 before World War II. But the mines were shut down in the 1970s, and all that is left in and around Picher are about 1,000 people and giant gray piles of mining waste, known locally as “chat,” some hundreds of feet tall and acres wide, that loom over abandoned storefronts and empty lots.

The piles are loaded with heavy metals that have contaminated the air and the groundwater and placed the northeastern Oklahoma town in the middle of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, the largest and one of the most polluted in the country. To add to Picher’s misery, a federal study released in January determined that the abandoned mines beneath the city could cause cave-ins without warning.

The study sealed Picher’s fate, persuading Sen. James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the former chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and now its ranking Republican, to drop his opposition to a federal buyout of the town. Before that, he supported funds for a cleanup.

“It saddens me that it took actually the threat of cave-ins . . . to get people to move,” Pace said. She blames the high rate of children with elevated blood-lead levels for the disproportionate number of students who struggle with reading and math. Although a definitive link between lead exposure and the disabilities cannot be proved, she thinks that research in the 1990s revealed enough evidence of danger to warrant a buyout.

State officials in Oklahoma, including Gov. Brad Henry (D), eventually arrived at the same conclusion. In 2005, the state offered a limited buyout to families in the Picher area with the most vulnerable children, those younger than 6. Almost all of the eligible families accepted the offer, and the state buyout became the model for the current federal effort.

Vickey Phillips, who still works at the pharmacy in Picher, is raising one of her grandchildren and qualified for the state program.

“I accepted. There was no alternative,” she said. “All we had to leave our kids was our house. And if we didn’t go now, we wouldn’t get anything out of our house.” The economic squeeze of a disappearing town will drive even those who opposed the buyout to accept the government’s offer, Phillips said. She moved her family to nearby Joplin, Mo., where they had only enough to start over. “They don’t give you as much as it takes to replace what you had,” she said.

Three observations

Maintaining and inspecting underground infrastructure

Our current research into the risks associated with underground pipelines suggests that any untended underground infrastructure carries with it the risk of eventual structural failure: mines, sewers, storm drains, water mains, transportation tunnels. And when there’s no profit associated with good maintenance – it’s easy to imagine how these risks might be ignored for decades.

 What’s fair in a buyout?

Wright doesn’t explore this aspect in depth, but if Picher’s Vicky Philips is correct – that the buyout doesn’t support the cost of replacing equivalent housing elsewhere – this seems fundamentally unfair. All the more so since, further down the American economic ladder, “wealth” is likely to be held – to the extent it’s held at all – in the form of houses. Why not a buyout at the appraised value of houses and property in Picher without the pollution? The value of an equivalent property elsewhere in the state, while the mines were in operation, at its current appreciated value?

My understanding of the SuperFund system is that it’s only for locations where the former businesses – responsible for the pollution – are no longer in existence. If they existed, and were solvent – wouldn’t most American juries award the families at least the replacement cost of their property?

Which doesn’t address, of course, the question of the lasting health effects.

 Senator Inhofe

The League of Conservation Voters gives Inhofe a “zero” rating.  Senator Inhofe:  doesn’t believe global warming is happening; recently helped to stop an environmental fund-raising concert – Live Earth – from being held on the Capitol Grounds; has said, about the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq, “It’s a huge success story over there. I just don’t understand why the media don’t get it“; and his feelings about the global warming “hoax” are so strong that he was upbraided by Senator Barbara Boxer for being rude to Al Gore (himself a former Senator) during Gore’s recent testimony in the Senate. Shakespeare’s Sister has an account of those events here.

So if Imhofe voted for a buyout in Picher – seems like a sign that the situation is serious.