Slashdot Mirror
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."
Where it will become a nature reserve.
FHA is doing the financing.
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.
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
It was not a free market system. A faulty accounting system allowed the mines to extract profits without being responsible for the damages.
Now the tax paying public is cleaning up. So the "free market" now has tax payers paying while the company exits with its profits.
A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
So what happened here was a broken market system where the costs of the mines was not properly applied.
Well, in all seriousness, it is worth noting that Pat Roberts is a Republican pushing for government intervention in an environmental problem. It's not so controversial when it's something an tangible as lead-poisoned children.
Don't forget that the majority of the mining was done to supply that war (WWII) effort. The US military used munitions in the *billions* of rounds, not to mention supplying the allies.
Just Google "treece, kansasa war effort"
And the government required they poison the locals?
Was that to show those damn japs we meant business?
The reality is these folks chose to do it that way so they could sell more product at lower prices thereby increasing their profit. We cannot go after them for breaking rules that did not exist, but we could require companies going out of business to restore land to salable levels. If they fail to do that, pierce the veil and take the owners money to do it.
Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725
A shame, I was looking forward to the commercials...
Tom Hanks: [voiceover in TV ad] Are you tired of the same old Grand Canyon?
TV Dad: [bored] Here we are kids. The Grand Canyon.
TV Daughter: Oh, it's so old and boring! I want a new one, *now!*
Tom Hanks: [appears from behind bush] Hello. I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine.
TV Son: Tussle my hair, Mr. Hanks!
Tom Hanks: Sure thing, son.
[laughs as he does so. Stars come out of the boy's hair. He then smiles in wonder]
Tom Hanks: Now, I'm pleased to tell you about the new Grand Canyon.
[shot changes to that of a smouldering crater]
Tom Hanks: Coming this weekend! It's east of Shelbyville and south of Capital City.
Marge Simpson: [watching ad] That's where Springfield is!
Tom Hanks: It's nowhere near where anything is or ever was. This is Tom Hanks saying, if you're gonna pick a government to trust, why not this one?
Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit
to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow
by the government.
If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along,
then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest.
If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty
catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the
fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and
such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities
can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible
methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic,
being a listing of two oxymorons.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
During the 80s and 90s, a small consortium of businessmen, built cyanide leach ponds in the Nevada dessert. The purpose of these man-made lakes of poison, was to dump lowgrade gold ore into them, to leach out the gold.
The minute they used up the pits, and extracted as much gold as they were able to, they pumped the money out of the companies, declared bankruptcy, abandoned to toxic disasters they created. In fact, looking at the many millions of dollars it will cost to remove the poison waste, clean up the landscape, and remediate the poisoned water table, it will cost tax payers many times what the mining company was able to extract from their business.
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.) Add to that, the horrific environmental damage, and gross lack of conscience of those involved, and our current mining laws (virtually unchanged from the 1800s) are the perfect vehicle for destroying vast tracts of Federal Land (that should read as public lands, all our land.)
Though most mining does produce resources vital to our society, we need to include the cost of safe and sane mining practices, and proper land reclamation in the bottom line of that business. Not to do so, is to invite more environmental disasters, and growing human cost.
Just as an aside, recent analysis shows that the largest source of fresh water in the southwest (the Colorado River), is becoming increasingly polluted by toxic heavy metals from abandoned mines in the Rockies. The impact of this pollution will impact tens of millions of people, and could cost the U.S. and Mexico hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity, heath cost, and cleanup.
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.
From my point view, this was nothing more than an elaborate scam to convert our tax dollars into their personal assets (and a grossly inefficient method at that.)
Not to worry: nowadays we have much more efficient methods to convert tax dollars into personal assets: no-bid military contracts, bank bailouts, tax breaks nestled into unrelated bills, and bridges to nowhere, to name a few.
I am officially gone from