Pollution brings end to Oklahoma mining town

updated 3:29 a.m. ET May 12, 2008

PICHER, Okla. - They could pass for mourners at a funeral.

They line up along the main drag in front of empty cafes and shops and rusted mining equipment fenced off with barbed wire. Passing time, some from this blue-jean crowd press hands and foreheads against windows of stores. Businesses that died so many years ago it's hard to remember what they sold.

Two fellows with graybeards stand near a telephone pole. They watch for any sign of action in front of Susie's Thrift and Gift.

"I hate this," the older one laments. "I hate to see Picher go."

"Yeah," the other mumbles, looking down at his shoelaces.

"All those memories."

"Been mined out pretty bad, though."

A town's last stand
When the lead and zinc mines all around here closed down, many folks told themselves and promised their kids that Picher could go on and even be the same. There would always be church, high school football and the Dairy Queen.

But that was nearly 40 years ago, and all the praying and wishful thinking can't undo what's happened here.

People are leaving, escaping the reality of life in one of the worst environmental nightmares in the country. A voluntary federal buyout is hastening the exodus.

This is a town's last stand.

"Ol' Picher is just like the rest of us, she's 90 years old and on her last legs," says Orval "Hoppy" Ray, who worked the mines in the 1940s and runs a drafty pool hall in town.

Ray reveals the stubbornness that comes with 82 years of living: He and dozens of other holdouts will not leave, even when there is no city water or police department. No matter how much he's offered for his property, his place will remain open until he's dead.

"I don't think the lights will ever go out," Ray says, but there's something in his voice that leaves room for doubt.

His birthplace is the center of the Tar Creek Superfund site, a 40-square-mile area that also takes in portions of Missouri and Kansas.

Honeycombed with mines
For decades, before Picher became a town, miners carved miles of tunnels under its land, and the bounty of lead ore they recovered made bullets for both world wars. Neighboring communities were also undercut.

During its boom, Picher's population peaked at 20,000. Saloons and movie parlors lined the streets.

It was a rough-and-tumble way of life: fistfights just for the heck of it, plenty of bravado and wasted paychecks and the understanding that if you were old enough to work a shift in a mine, you were old enough to down a shot of whiskey.

Picher's mines closed around 1970; the wounds they inflicted on the people and land never healed.

Acid waters, land of sinkholes
Today, Tar Creek runs orange with acidic water that flooded the mines. Cave-ins and sinkholes threaten; a mine collapse in 1967 took nine homes.

Bleak, gray mountains of lead-contaminated chat, or mine tailings, loom around town. Some rise 100 feet and look like sand dunes. They have names like Sooner, St. Joe and Golden Rod 8.

For years, before most knew better, the gravel-coated piles doubled as sledding hills for kids, a Lover's Lane for teenagers and a makeshift proving grounds for dirt bikes and the high school's track team.

It will take at least 15 more years to haul the stuff off, for use in highway construction projects, but that's not soon enough.

The polluted dust that blows through every nook of this place has already affected a generation.

Charlie Riedel / AP A warning sign in Picher, Okla.

In the 1990s, a study found elevated blood lead levels in Tar Creek-area children, and teachers began noticing years ago that students were learning more slowly and couldn't focus.

"Don't Put Lead in Your Head," says a sign still hanging next to City Hall, showing a drawing of a smiling child.

Adults suffered, too. Natives like John Sparkman began having high blood pressure in their 20s. He lost his sister to Lou Gehrig's disease when she was 41, and would lay odds pollution caused it.

"I would've liked to have seen the town located somewhere else, but no one wanted to see it happen," says Sparkman, who works for the town housing authority. "It should've ended in the 1960s."

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