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EPA To Buy Small Town In Kansas
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called 'chat' and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. 'It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way,' said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10 times the threshold for lead poisoning."
In the end it's the tax payers and not the rich owners that end up paying for the clean ups. It's my main opposition to nuclear power not the reactors it's the clean up from both the mines and processing sites. It's true of most mineral based resources that they cut corners on extracting and processing and the people living around the places and tax payers generally suffer. It's long overdue that we end the corporate veil for this kind of abuse and bleed the ones that profited dry to pay for the mess. There's a whole town full of houses we can let them have cheap to live in.
Once the mining companies go belly-up, it's hard to say where the money's gone and who is responsible, because many people were involved. One thing is for certian, we all benefitted from the lower priced minerals, and now we all have to pay to clean up the mess.
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Indeed, and because we still haven't really learned that lesson (that property rights should *really* be treated as rights, and not subject to modification whenever government finds it more convenient), we're going to see this repeated.
It's certainly one of the ongoing battles with Monsanto corp. over some of the toxic waste sites they've left behind over the years. They've been playing all sorts of legal games to dodge paying for some of it though, including filing bankruptcy and spinning things off to a new company, Solutia.
If individual homeowners could file suits any time a corporation generates pollution that falls on their personal property, I bet they'd treat much more carefully. As it stands though, something like that would be a "David vs. Goliath" battle most homeowners can't afford to fight.
Silver is usually a useful byproduct of lead and zinc mining, It was an important side-product of the Cornish tin industry. The tailings of lead mines can contain significant silver.
Nevertheless. there are regions which do no have the traces of the silver you might expect. The price of silver is not that great: it can dip below three times that of copper. If no-one is offering to rake through their tailings then either (a) they are waiting for a better price or (b) there is nothing there to be had. A simple chemical test - flame spectroscopy would probably be best - would settle the issue one way of the other.
Does anyone have the figures?
I'm wondering if the kansas legislature will really do their duty to consider this, one way or the other. I'm a transsexual (see http://transsexual.org/), so I know what it means to want one thing and preach something completely opposite. I hope the legislature will come u pwith a coherent statement for the people... otherwise, many kansas ppl will probably not bother listening *sigh*
So, I think this sounds like a remarkably civilized end to a nasty story, and hope they can get the people out. I've worked with people who had chronic lead and mercury poisoning from old mine contamination and some of them are really seriously screwed up.
(*) There was an old mine called the Yak Tunnel, dug not for minerals but to drain all the other mines, at a much lower level than they were, so it served as the sewage drain for dozens of huge mines. Whenever one of the old abandoned mines would have a collapse, a huge surge of contaminated water would dump out the Yak and right into the upper Arkansas, killing everything downstream for dozens of miles.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I grew up near this area over the state line in neighboring Joplin Missouri.
Back in the 70s and 80s piles of chat hundreds of feet tall could be seen for miles. Chat is the local term for the mining waste -- in this case mostly limestone that's been pulverized and the lead and zinc removed. But there are trace amounts of lead remaining. Most of the chat has since been removed and used as railroad ballast and road base.
As kids we used to play in these chat piles -- you could find all kinds of interesting minerals and occasionally fossils. Occasionally the ground would collapse around the flooded and abandoned mines.
I was just back to this area several months ago and me and some friends spent the day taking pictures around Picher, OK and nearby Route 66. Picher is essentially a ghost town nowadays, but interestingly you can still drive and walk around the area, even though it's an EPA superfund site.
BTW, there's a geek connection to Picher. One of the companies to survive the mining is Eagle-Picher; they were an early innovator in battery technology and became a major supplier of batteries in aerospace, including the batteries for the Apollo missions. In nearby Quapaw, OK that built a boron enrichment plant producing boron 10 isotopes for the nuclear industry, too.
Does your conclusion that "They're killing themselves, just to enrich our few and their few - no one has to emit that level of pollution to manufacture goods." still apply in this case?
lollll....of course. Did I somehow convey the impression that I approve of the massive emissions of pollution anywhere on this planet?
We all only have one planet - and it is a closed system. If anybody piddles in the pool, we'll all be swimming in it - sooner or later.
The reason the U.S. of A. still emits massive amounts of pollution is the same reason that so much of our industry relocated to China so quickly: Our right - our corporations - see controlling pollutants as an expense that will cut into their profits/bonuses/dividends, so they resist stopping emissions here and, if possible and often preferably, they relocate to a nation whose people are unable protect themselves and their children.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Did you just imply that "poor people are dumb enough not to know what 'poisonous' means"?
Has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with education. The factory pours chemicals into the river. River smells horrible. You catch a fish from the river. Fish doesn't look any different than any other fish you've caught. Therefore, you can eat the fish. If you never took a chemistry or biology class, and never followed a news story talking about carcinogens, then how are you supposed to know the fish could poison you?