Tar Creek Superfund Site

Northeast Oklahoma's Ottawa County is one of the most beautiful and one of the most poisoned landscapes in the United States. The region around the towns of Picher and Commerce sits at the heart of the Tri-State Mining District, where the industrious extraction of lead and zinc ore between nineteen hundred and the nineteen seventies created a public health catastrophe that still has not been fully resolved.

The Quapaw Nation and other Indigenous peoples were displaced to this corner of Indian Territory beginning in eighteen thirty-four. The discovery of commercially valuable lead and zinc ore in the late nineteenth century attracted outside mining companies who held leases on tribal lands. At its peak in the early twentieth century, the district was the largest lead and zinc producing region in the world, critical to the manufacture of ammunition in both world wars.

When mining ceased in the nineteen seventies, the companies left. What stayed behind was staggering in scale: more than seventy-five million tons of mining waste, called chat, piled across the landscape. Underground tunnels riddled the landscape, leaving sinkholes that could open without warning. Acid mine drainage carrying heavy concentrations of lead, zinc, and cadmium began seeping into Tar Creek and into the groundwater. In the late nineteen seventies, contaminated water started flowing to the surface through old mine shafts. By the time the Environmental Protection Agency added Tar Creek to its Superfund list in nineteen eighty-three, it was already one of the most contaminated sites in the country.

The human cost fell hardest on those who had least. Before cleanup programs began reaching residential properties, forty-three percent of young children living in the five-city mining area had blood lead levels above safe limits. Picher, Oklahoma, was ultimately evacuated and demolished. Treece, Kansas, just north of the state line, was bought out by the EPA in two thousand nine. The Quapaw Nation, which never consented to the mining that poisoned their lands, has become a central force in the ongoing cleanup.