A Toxic Tour Through Picher

A couple days ago I drove through Picher, Oklahoma as members of L.E.A.D. Agency gave a toxic tour. During this tour, we discussed the history of all the sites we had visited, their current states, and ways in which these sites are being remediated. There were quite a few sites that stood out to me during this tour.

One of our first stops was by a large field of Tallgrass. I pulled off the side of the road into a small parking lot. I asked what we were stopping for. My first thought was that we were looking at the looming chat pile to our left. However, the actual focus was the field of grass, which once used to be a residential neighborhood. All of the homes had been destroyed. Much of the destruction can be attributed to the 2010 tornado which blew through Picher, tearing down homes and sandblasting the ones that remained standing with chat. One of the only remaining pieces of evidence that homes used to be there was the three space parking lot.

Our next stop was by the Picher repository. From a distance, the repository looked like a gigantic, flat chat pile. However, it was actually made up of the chat and mining waste that could not be repurposed. The waste found here has extremely fine particle size and a darker color then most chat. When we stepped out of the truck, I noticed a trail of this waste running down the side of the hill. L.E.A.D. Agency informed me that this waste measures around 13,000 ppm of lead. This is far above the upper safe threshold of 400 ppm.

The most shocking sight of the entire tour was the “Anti-Fountain of Youth”. After exiting the car a last time, I heard the noise of running water. At first, I thought it was the flowing noises from Tar Creek, but when I looked over the bridge, the water was relatively calm. After walking farther down the road, I saw the source of the noise. Slightly covered by the Tallgrass and cattail stems, there was an actual fountain spewing out orange-tinted water. This fountain was an old bore hole. The liquid being pumped out was acidic mine drainage (AMD), and it was flowing straight into Tar Creek. When I heard that the AMD was seeping out of the mines into the surrounding environment, I imagined a slow flow of water. The amount of pressure with which the AMD was being pumped out at, to the point at which it was going up in the air a couple feet was mind blowing.

On a final note, I would like to say that we saw a beaver dam and a family of ducks in Tar Creek. This highlights how there is still life present in this creek, giving us even more reason why we must work our hardest to remediate it, and prevent events like this from occurring again in the future.