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."
