Re: [Futurework] Exit ramp for Europe (collateral damage on Tar Creek)

[Ray Evans Harrell]

Some things just have too low a flashpoint for capitalism to work before irreparable damage is done.     If the law cannot truly dispense with justice there will eventually be a return to vendetta.    Vendetta means that those hurt will aim at the group rather than the individual since the individual who hurt them is too well protected by the unjust laws.   That is when people take to wearing dynamite belts.    Do any of you remember a movie with George C. Scott where he was a sheep rancher in an area where the government was testing CBR weapons.    They killed first his sheep and then his son.     After that he blew up the place.   That's vendetta law and is as old as Hammarabi.    See article below about my home reservation:    REH     ----- Original Message ----- From: Ed Weick To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, May 30, 2003 8:58 AM Subject: Re: [Futurework] Exit ramp for Europe Maybe, Ed, you are part of the problem. That may be so.  Part of me, the cussed part, tells me that I shoud let things deteriorate to some flashpoint.  Another part, the compassionate, says yeah but what about the poor mothers and the older guys from the Ottawa Valley?  And yet another part, the guilty, gnaws at me because I'm retired and have a decent income.  God life is hell when you're comfortable! Ed Weick THE TAR CREEK TIME BOMB Richard E. Meyer, Picher, Okla. from the Los Angeles Times   Acid water from abandoned mines creates peril for thousands in four southern states.   Water boiled out of a red wound in the pasture and spilled across the grass. It flecked the ragweed with rusty foam. George Mayer knew in an instant what it was.   "The damn mines," he said to himself. "The mines are full, and the water�s finally coming out."   It washed around the ankles of his purebred Arabian horses, stained the ends of their tails and splashed against their roan-and-tan bellies when they ran. Their hides turned orange. The hair burned off their legs. They developed open sores, like bracelets, above their hooves.   Not far away, water gurgled out of another hole in the ground. Then it surged from another. And another. It belched from a mine shaft and gushed out of an old cave-in. It splashed down ditches and gullies and into a meandering stream called Tar Creek. It turned the stream blood red, and it killed the fish. It flowed on into a larger river which carried it toward the largest lake in northeastern Oklahoma. Worse, it coursed straight down through abandoned wells and through cracks in the rocks. Bit by bit, it began contaminating the underground water supply for cities and towns and tens of thousands of people. The water, which started flowing in 1978, will not stop. It comes from the tunnels of interconnected lead and zinc mines that reach like the tentacles of an octopus across 40 square miles underneath Oklahoma and Kansas. When work in the mines ended more than a dozen years ago, the miners shut off the pumps. The tunnels filled with water. The water turned to acid.   Slowly, the mines became a 10-billion-gallon vat of subterranean poison. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the vat has become one of the worst hazardous waste sites in the nation. The EPS calls the site Tar Creek, after the ravaged stream that bears the brunt of the acid flow.   Critics who want Tar Creek cleaned up say that the EPS is dragging its heels. Some say the agency is delaying to protect the corporations that might be responsible. The EPS denies stalling. But internal EPS memos show that the agency is being deliberately cautious because Tar Creek raises issues that affect mining sites across the country:   Can the government use its cleanup fund, bankrolled by a special tax on the chemical industry, to clean up mining waste? If it does, can the government require the mining industry of replenish the fund? The story of Tar Creek begins with the upheavals of genesis. A thousand feet below the surface of North America at mid-continent, creation deposited a layer of sand. It bore water of remarkable quality. The sand came to be called the Roubidioux Formation. Above the Roubidoux was deposited a layer of limestone 370 feet thick and laden with rich zones of lead and zinc. It was called the Boone Formation.   Across the surface of the land, like the veins on the back of a hand, flowed a succession of creeks and rivers. Among the smaller streams was Tar Creek, named for the black ooze that seeped from two springs at its source. Tar Creek flowed south for 18 miles before spilling into the Neosho River, which swept it into the sapphire depths of a lake so magnificent that it came ot be called Grand Lake.   In the beginning, the land was owned by the Indians, who leased it to white men. In 1901, O.W. Youse from Kansas drilled a water well for A.W. Abrams not far from what is now the town of Picher. His drill bored through the Boone Formation. At about 250 feet, it hit the lead and zinc. Early mining did not amount to much.   Two men and a mule would sink a shaft where the men thought good ore might be. If they hit it, they tunnelled out laterally underground and followed the ore until it played out. If they did not hit it, they simply moved on and dug another shaft.   As their techniques improved, the miners began drilling bore holes before they dug shafts. They drilled every hundred feet or so until they found ore. Then they tunnelled to it from existing shafts. If they wanted to use the bore holes for ventilation, they cased them with steel pipe to keep their walls from crumbling. Processing the ore required a mill, and the mills needed good water. But the water in the ore-laden Boone Formationw as too metallic. So the miners drilled 1,000 feed down through the Boone Formation and into the Roubidiox Formation. They cased their wells and pumped Roubidoux water up to the surface.   In 1926, a centralized mill took over processing. Larger companies bought out the small operators. And production increased dramatically.   Miners connected their tunnels. They hollowed out huge chambers. The mines grew into massive, tri-level honeycombs � with one operation at 200 feet, say, another at 300 feet, and still another at 400 feet.   The mines grew so large that the men lowered disassembled trucks into their depths, reassembled the trucks, outfitted them with exhaust cleaners and drove them, underground, from Oklahoma to Kansas. Along the labyrinth of tunnels and drifts, they hollowed out chambers the size of Little League baseball parks. At strategic places, the miners left pillars of stone to hold the ceilings up. Eventually, what the miners called the Picher Field extended over 40 square miles. It undermined Ottawa county in northeastern Oklahoma and Cherokee County in southeastern Kansas. And the Picher Field was only part of the undertaking. The miners formed the Tri-State Mining District, which extended over 700 square miles and reached into the counties of Jasper, Newton and McDonald in Missouri.   As the mines expanded, they drew more and more mineral water from the surrounding Boone Formation. If the water stayed in the mines long, it grew acidic and ate the nails out of the miners� boots.   They pumped the water out � with wooden machinery at first, because the water would eat the working parts of an iron pump in little more than a shift. Eventually, they replaced the wooden pumps with improved large-capacity metal machines that pumped 23 million gallons a day.   They dumped the water into Tar Creek.   Fish died, and muskrat and beaver fled. The water left the creek bottom a dirty orange. Mining hit its peak during the Second World War. Between 1907 and 1947, the Tri-State Mining District produced 21.7 million tons of zinc and 18.7 million tons of lead, with a value of more than $1 billion. But after the war, production declined, and by the late 1950s and early 1960s the big companies started pulling their men out.   The Tri-State Mining District warned: If the pumps are turned off, the mines will flood.   Small operators stayed and finished removing the last of the ore. Some were so-called "gougers" who took everything � including many of the pillars that held the underground ceilings in place.   Some mines caved in. Miners called the cave-ins "subsidencies." At the Sunflower mine, a chunk of ground the size of four football fields fell straight down and left cottonwood trees standing in mid-crater. The town of Picher abandoned four blocks of businesses on both sides of Main Street after a cave-in behind Picher High School.   By the mid-1960s, most of the mining had ceased. But the land was devastated. In Oklahoma, the miners left behind 1,064 shafts, 500 of them open hazards. In Kansas, they abandoned 3,500 shafts, 600 of them open hazards. In Missouri, they left as many as 4,000 shafts, 300 of them gaping open. They left an uncounted number of bore holes, 100,000 in the Picher Field alone. They left 25 wells per square mile that reached down into the Roubidioux aquifer. They left gravel waste piled across hundreds of acres. The miners called it "chat" � because when someone picked up a handful and threw it hard against a boulder, it went "chat".   And the miners turned off the pumps.   The flow of acidic mine water into Tar Creek slowed to a trickle then stopped. Little by little, the creek came back to life. Bass, perch and catfish returned. Even a beaver or two came back to build dams.   But below ground, a time bomb was ticking. In the empty mine tunnels and on the floors of the silent chambers, the miners had left piles of waste they had not bothered to hoist to the surface. Most of it was what they called "mundic" � worthless iron pyrite, or fool�s gold. It oxidized. The chamber ceilings exposed more pyrite. It too oxidized.   Slowly the mines filled with water. It covered the oxidized pyrite in the tunnels and on the floors of the chambers. It touched the oxidized pyrite on the chamber ceilings.   The water and the pyrite reacted chemically. And the mines turned into a cistern of acid.   The volume of acid grew, like an underground monster out of control. In 1978, the U.S. Geological Survey reported that the mines contained 100,000 acre-feet of water. Of that total, the Geological Survey said, 33,000 acre-feet was acidic. That totaled 10,753,097,000 gallons of acid water. The Geological Survey said the mines would overflow.   And before the year was out, the did � into the middle of George Mayer�s horse pasture.   To Mayer, a World War II pilot who had turned a building stone business into a sizable northeastern Oklahoma enterprise, the water looked like it was bubbling out of a red fissure in the earth.   A few miles away, more acid water began boiling out the another drill hole, this one near a dirt road. It flowed only intermittently, but it belched out an average 660,000 gallons a day. Still another bore hole spewed acid water out of casing four feet tall. After a hard rain, the casing gushed an acid geyser three feet into the air. Yet another bore hole sprayed acid through a cracked casing cap like champagne from a party fountain.   Millions of gallons of discharge found their way down crevices and ravines to Tar Creek. The creek turned red again. Pumpkin-coloured sludge sank to the bottom. The beaver fled and the acid killed the fish.   John Mott watched them die. A disabled retired tiremaker who had worked at B.F. Goodrich plant in nearby Miami, Okla., Mott, 55, is a bow hunter and fisherman.   "We had quite a bit of rain, and water was running down this road right adjacent to Tar Creek, and there were fish in the ruts in the road trying to get away," Mott said. "The perch and small bass and sunfish and bluegill were already dead. But the bullhead catfish, they�re pretty tough. They had open sores, like somebody took a knife and cut a chunk out of them. But they were still alive. They had acid in their gills, and it wouldn�t let their gills get oxygen. They were gasping for air." From Tar Creek, the acid water spilled into the Neosho River. At their confluence, fishermen found particularly high concentrations of lead, zinc and cadmium in carp and red ear sunfish.   The Neosho neutralized the Tar Creek acid. A hundred years downstream from the confluence, most of the metals in the Tar Creek water had precipitated out, and the Neosho ran clear.   But Mott worried. "If we get too much rainfall, you are going to have four or five million gallons a day running out of the ground and into Tar Creek," he said. "In some places right now, the sludge is three feet deep. It lays there in Tar Creek and in the Neosho, and come spring and we get a big flood it�ll wash all that at once time right down into Grand Lake.   Indeed, where the Neosho feeds into Grand Lake, fishermen already had started finding high concentrations of cadmium in carp and lead in smallmouth buffalo fish.   At the same time, the acid water was leaking downward. Below was the Roubidoux aquifer. Acid water had eaten holes through the casings of some of the old deep wells that reached down into the Roubidoux sand. Now the acid water was flowing through the holes and into the wells. It plunged straight down � at 10 gallons per minute in one well and 200 gallons per minute in another.   Slowly, it was ruining the Roubidoux. As early as the mid-1970s, the town of Commerce discovered contamination in one of its wells that drew water from the Roubidoux. A Roubidoux well that supplied a boron plant near Quapaw went bad last year. The town of Picher had two of its wells go bad. Acid water ate its way through the well casings.   People complained that Picher water smelled metallic, tasted like rust, stained their bedsheets and turned their sinks and toilet bowls red. Because of its colour and taste, however, few people drank the contaminated water, so few people got sick. Mark Coleman, Oklahoma�s deputy health commissioner, warned that the water, if drunk, could burn residents� intestinal membranes and poison them with cadmium and lead.   Picher�s contaminated wells were re-cased, but it was clear that the water supply for northeastern Oklahoma ultimately could be tainted. Some people said total contamination could affect 10,000. Some feared the total might be as many as 140,000 � including residents of Cherokee County in Kansas and Jasper County in Missouri.   "More studies are necessary," Rep. Mike Synar, D-Okla., told a congressional hearing last fall, "to determine whether the main aquifer has been contaminated to where it would literally affect the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Arkansas.   Concern was compounded by a study that showed higher-than-normal cancer rates near the mines in Cherokee and Jasper counties.   The study, by Dr. John S. Neuberger, an assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, showed that the incidence of lung cancer among men during the mid-1970s in Cherokee County was 54 percent higher than the national average and that lung cancer among men during the same time in Jasper County, Mo., was 42 percent higher.   Neuberger suspected that radon gas from the chat piles was responsible for the increased cancer rates. But he said more studies were needed. It was easier to measure the danger in the water. John Mott was hired by the Oklahoma Water Resources Board to chart the water�s changing acidity and its metallic conductivity. Low pH means high acidity. Sever is normal. Mott measured a pH level as low as 1.7. High conductivity means high metallic content. Drinkable water can have conductivity levels of 445 to 450. Mott measured Tar Creek in the thousands.   Ron Jarman, chief of the board�s water quality division, sent the results to the governor.   "And we said, �Help!�" Harman said.   Gov. George Nigh created a Tar Creek Task Force of 23 local, state and federal agencies. It hired Hittman Associates Inc., a firm of consulting engineers from Colorado, to figure out what could be done.   Hittman said Oklahoma should catch the mine discharge, pump additional acid water out of the ground, purify it at a treatment plant and use it for farms and factories. Even with the best technology, Hittman said, it would take up to 23 years to ease the threat.   And it would cost $20.6 million.   That was more money than Oklahoma had � and more than a town like Picher, which paid for its only police car with a bingo game, could imagine. To help pay for the cleanup, Oklahoma asked the EPA to put Tar Creek on its lift of hazardous waste sites and make it eligible for money from a special federal fund, called Superfund.   Totalling $1.6 billion, Superfund was established during the last days of the Carter administration to clean up the nation�s worst accumulations of hazardous waste. Most of the money � 87 percent � comes from a special tax to be paid by chemical companies until 1985. The rest comes from the U.S. Treasury. Tar Creek made the Superfund list.   Because its immediate threat to public health was not as severe as that at, say, Love Canal, the EPA was reluctant to call Tar Creek the worst on the list. But when EPA investigators ranked waste sites, using a formula designed for the agency by systems engineers at the Mitre Corp., Tar Creek came out No. 1. The sheer volume and uncontrolled nature of its poison gave Tar Creek the highest Mitre score of any hazardous waste site in the nation. The EPS awarded Oklahoma $435,368 in Superfund money. But that was more than $16.5 million shy of Hittman�s lowest estimate.   And none of the EPA money was for cleanup. It was for more studies. Oklahoma, Jarman found, was encountering opposition from the chemical industry. Chemical companies were against using any Superfund money for an actual cleanup at Tar Creek. The chemical industry wanted none of its taxes used to clean up mining industry wastes.   In its pronouncements on the issue, the Chemical Manufacturers Association has stopped just short of saying it will go to court to keep Tar Creek from getting more money from Superfund.   The EPA has little doubt that it has the authority to use Superfund money to clean up mining wastes � regardless of the chemical industry opposition. But it is less certain that it can recover the cleanup costs from the mining companies to replenish the Superfund afterward.   Keeping the Superfund replenished is important to future cleanup activities. Meanwhile, George Mayer has a horse pasture full of acid water. And Oklahoma has a major pollution problem on its hands.   "What�s going to happen ultimately, I don�t know," Mayer said, eyeing his acid-burned grass and frowning.   "There�s nothing I can do to stop the flow of the water. There isn�t anything I can do to remove it. I�ll just have to accept it until somebody does something to remove it or eliminate it or dilute it."   "Or something."