When you are looking down the barrel of a gun you suddenly become enlightened as to what is best for your long term survival.
I disagree: You become enlightened as to what is best for your SHORT TERM survival, and all higher culture and longer perspectives cease to be worth anything. J.S.Bach, Immanuel Kant and Kurt Godel really have no value to a person looking down the barrel of a gun, but, as the atheist Sartre obersved, we die only for others (becausxe it is not possible to experience not-experiencing).
Adversity destroys value. It's that simple, even though most people's childrearing screws up their minds so they (Yes, I include "myself" here...) think and feel all sorts of perversities.
Cheers!
\brad mccormick
-----Original Message-----
*From:* Ray Evans Harrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Sent:* Friday, May 30, 2003 12:32 PM
*To:* Cordell, Arthur: ECOM; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Exit ramp for Europe (collateral damage on Tar Creek)
Not a chance. Enlightened is not a term I would use.
REH
----- Original Message ----- *From:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *To:* [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Sent:* Friday, May 30, 2003 11:01 AM *Subject:* RE: [Futurework] Exit ramp for Europe (collateral damage on Tar Creek)
That is why policy should appeal to the rich on the basis of "enlightened self-interest" Redistribution today or be attacked by the "shirtless" mobs tomorrow.
-----Original Message----- *From:* Ray Evans Harrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] *Sent:* Friday, May 30, 2003 9:35 AM *To:* Ed Weick; Cordell, Arthur: ECOM; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> *Subject:* Re: [Futurework] Exit ramp for Europe (collateral damage on Tar Creek)
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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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