Quotes of the Day
To get a better view of the situation, John Sparkman guns his flame-red truck up a massive pile of gravel. From the summit, a lifeless brown wasteland stretches to the horizon, like a scene from a science-fiction movie. Mountains of mine tailings, some as tall as 13-story buildings, others as wide as four football fields, loom over streets, homes, churches and schools. Dust, laced with lead, cadmium and other poisonous metals, blows off the man-made hills and 800 acres of dry settling ponds. "It gets in your teeth," says Sparkman, head of a local citizens' group. "It cakes in your ears and hair. It's like we've been environmentally raped."
Hyperbole? Drive through the desolate towns around Picher, Okla., and you might think differently. This is eco-assault on an epic scale. The prairie here in the northeast corner of the state is punctured with 480 open mine shafts and 30,000 drill holes. Little League fields have been built over an immense underground cavity that could collapse at any time. Acid mine waste flushes into drinking wells. When the water rises in Tar Creek, which runs through the site, a neon-orange scum oozes onto the roadside. Wild onions, a regional delicacy tossed into scrambled eggs, are saturated with cadmium — which may explain, local doctors say, why three different kidney dialysis centers have opened here to serve a population of only 30,000.
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But the grimmest legacy of a century of intensive lead and zinc mining are the "lead heads," or "chat rats," as the kids who grew up around here are known. As toddlers, they played in sandboxes of chat — the powdery output of mills after ore is extracted from rock. As preteens, they rode their bikes across the gravel mounds and swam in lime-green sinkholes. Their parents used mine tailings to make driveways and foundations, never thinking that contaminated dust might blow through the heating ducts of their ranch houses. In the past decade, studies have shown that up to 38% of local children have had high levels of lead in their blood — an exposure that can cause permanent neurological damage and learning disabilities. "Our kids hit a brick wall," says Kim Pace, principal of the Picher-Cardin Elementary School. "Their eyes skip and jump. It takes them 100 repetitions to learn a sound."
At her kitchen table, Evona Moss helps her son Michael, 10, with his homework. Michael grew up across the street from a chat pile, and at one point the third-grader's lead levels measured 40% above the Centers for Disease Control's danger level. He repeated kindergarten. "I used to think he was lazy," says his mother, "but he tries so hard. One minute he knows the words, and a half-hour later he doesn't. Every night he kneels down and prays to be a better reader."
It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act — commonly known as the Superfund law — one of the boldest environmental statutes in U.S. history. It was a law designed to fit all circumstances. It covered existing plants whose owners could be forced to clean up their dumps. It covered polluted sites long since abandoned by their owners: defunct factories, refineries and mines. Even when companies followed the standard, if dubious, practices of the day — dumping toxic waste in rivers, burying it in leaky drums or just leaving it, as in Oklahoma, to blow in the wind — they would be held accountable. And if they refused to clean up their messes, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would do so for them and charge treble damages for its trouble. In the event that the perpetrators had disappeared or gone out of business, a general tax on polluting industries — a "Superfund"--would pay to fix the damage.
But today Superfund is a program under siege, plagued by partisan politics, industry stonewalling and bureaucratic inertia. The U.S. government has spent $27 billion on the effort and forced individual polluters to spend an additional $21 billion. Love Canal, the deadly dump in New York State that spurred the law's passage, has been capped with a layer of clay, and the EPA proposed last month to take it off the list. So far, 278 sites have been delisted. But there are thousands more out there. According to the General Accounting Office (GAO), 1 out of 4 Americans still lives within four miles of a Superfund site — many of them killing fields saturated with cancer-causing chemicals and other toxins.
The GAO reports that the program's budget fell 35% in inflation-adjusted dollars over the past decade. And environmentalists say that Bush appointees are slowing the pace of cleanups and failing to list potential new sites. According to the EPA's inspector general, 29 projects in 17 states were underfunded last year. The Administration, charges New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, has "allowed — deliberately — these sites to rot where they are."
Tar Creek is a case in point. Two decades after it was targeted on the very first Superfund priority list, the 40-sq.-mi. site is worse off than ever. Early on, the government confined its effort to the polluted creek, without looking at chat piles, soil, air quality or the danger of subsidence. Was it a lack of knowledge of the danger, as EPA claims? Or industry influence, as environmentalists charge? Whatever the reason, federal attorneys settled with mining companies for pennies on the dollar. Now, after fruitless efforts to contain 28 billion gal. of acid mine water, contamination is spreading across a vast watershed. And although the EPA trucked out toxic dirt from about 2,000 homes and schools, Tar Creek's children still show elevated lead levels at six times the national average.
Administration officials say they are cleaning up the nation's 1,240 highest-priority sites as fast as they can. But that will be harder, since the multibillion-dollar industry-paid trust fund, set aside for abandoned sites such as Tar Creek, ran dry in October. The fund was supplied by taxes on the purchase of toxic chemicals and petroleum and on corporate profits above $2 million. But the Republican-led Congress allowed the fees to expire in 1995. Bush is the first President to oppose the levies, and last month Lautenberg and other Senate Democrats lost a narrow vote to reinstate them. In protest, the Sierra Club aired "Make Polluters Pay" TV ads in Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan — all swing states. And on April 15, tax day, activists in 25 states picketed post offices to object. "We went from polluters paying to citizens paying," says Oklahoma environmentalist Earl Hatley. "Now EPA doesn't have the money for megasites like Tar Creek."
Meanwhile, Superfund defenders in Washington are bracing for a new battle: a Bush-appointed advisory committee, which they claim is heavily stacked with corporate members, issued a report last week that pushes for administrative changes. "It is a wonky thing," says Julie Wolk of the Public Interest Research Group. "But it could dramatically weaken the program." Companies want to limit liability and shift responsibility to the states, where rules are more flexible. Federal standards are "rigid and extreme," says Michael Steinberg of the Superfund Settlements Project, an industry group that includes General Electric, DuPont and IBM. "Groundwater must meet standards for tap water, even though at many of these sites no one drinks it. Soil at many sites must be clean enough so people could play in it. The costs exceed the benefits."
With the EPA's clout slackening, private attorneys are moving in. At Tar Creek, lawyers are suing seven mining companies on behalf of scores of lead-exposed children. A separate suit demanding a cleanup was filed by the Quapaw Indians, whose land was leased for the mines. And environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined a class action to force companies to relocate the population of two polluted towns, Picher and Cardin. Court papers suggest that mining executives knew as early as the 1930s that the contaminated dust was dangerous but sought to, in their words, "dissuade" the government from intervening. A mining-company lawyer says the charge is based on "out-of-context reading" of historical documents.
Just how dangerous that dust might be is still a matter of dispute. Doctors at the Harvard School of Public Health have begun extensive studies in Tar Creek, not just of lead exposure but also of the cocktail mix of lead, manganese, cadmium and other metals that interact in unknown ways. "We're looking at four generations of poisoning," says Rebecca Jim of the L.E.A.D. agency, a local group. Meanwhile, parents like Evona Moss wonder what else the toxic brew might have done. Did it cause her obesity and bad teeth? Is it responsible for the malformation of her daughter's shins? Does her baby's asthma come from the chat? Her nephew's cancer? No one knows because no one has done careful, long-term studies.
Tar Creek is an extreme case. But like Tolstoy's unhappy families, every Superfund site is tragic and contentious in its own way. In Libby, Mont., a massive mine blanketed the town with asbestos dust, killing at least 215 people and sickening 1,100 more with cancer and lung disease — yet cleanup funds have been cut so sharply that it could take 10 to 15 years to finish the job. In Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, miners dumped 60 million tons of toxic metals into waterways, but state officials are fighting a Superfund cleanup, fearing a stigma that might hurt tourism. In New York, General Electric, which contaminated 40 miles of the Hudson River with cancer-causing PCBs, has hired high-profile attorney Laurence Tribe to convince federal courts that the Superfund law is unconstitutional. And in New Jersey, where the rabbits frolicking around the Chemical Insecticide Corp. plant once grew green-tinged fur, cleanup funds were restored only after locals sent green plush bunnies to members of Congress.
At Tar Creek, many residents have given up hope. Even the EPA, which has spent $107 million at the site, isn't sure if it can ever be repaired. "We don't have an off-the-shelf remedy," says EPA Superfund official Randy Deitz. "What do you do with the enormous chat piles? When does cleanup become impracticable? We have limited resources." In a show of no-confidence, the Oklahoma legislature last week passed a $5 million buyout for all families with children under 6. John Sparkman, who heads the Tar Creek Steering Committee, a group of buyout supporters, veers between cynicism and despair. "They think we're poor white trash," he says bitterly, driving past Picher's boarded-up storefronts. "The votes here don't affect any federal election — so why bother? We've agitated till we can't agitate anymore." Meanwhile, at Tar Creek, the toxic dust keeps blowing in the wind.
- Margot Roosevelt/Picher, Okla.