Of course, it's not mold, but it would definitely try to kill you if you got too close.

Those white spots are arguably our nation's most polluted town—Picher, Oklahoma.

No, Picher.

Picher.

Don't put a T in it.

Thank you.

Okay, enough.

We're doing a circle.

Picher is a small town on the border with Kansas—or rather, it was a small town on the border with Kansas.

Now it's a bunch of sinkholes, piles of toxic waste, shells of former buildings, leaden breezes, and one gorilla statue.

So how exactly do you go from boomtown to biohazard in just a few decades?

And once you do, how do you get all the people out, and who deals with the poisoned paradise they leave behind?

The first chapter of this story should come as no surprise—after all, when a town rises and falls faster than a child star with an inadequate support system, you can pretty safely assume mining was involved.

Picher sits atop a former gold mine of zinc and lead—or rather, a former zinc and lead mine of zinc and lead—and while the good people of Picher didn't invent getting rich off metal ores and falling to shambles, they did a spectacular job of it.

The town was incorporated in 1918, and was the most productive mining field in the whole tri-state lead and zinc district that spanned Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri.

At the peak of the mid-20s, they had a population of 14,000 permanent residents—that's bigger than Nauru!

And around that time, they were sifting around 10 million pounds of ore a day.

Over the course of its life, the Picher mining field cranked out 1.7 million tons of lead and 8.8 million tons of zinc, and processed 181 million tons of ore to do it.

And all that metal went to work—a lot of it became bullets.

To be specific, 75% of all the bullets and bombshells the US used in both World War I and II.

It also became many of the materials that built up America's small towns post-war—pipes, delicious lead paint, roofing.

Yep, Picher was indirectly responsible for three of the 20th century's greatest human travesties—World War I, World War II, and the suburbs—but at least they made money.

The metal from Picher sold for a total of $202 million over the course of the mines' lives.

Here's the thing about mining lead and zinc—it's not like you just dig down until you reach the big lead ball that you pull out and sell.

The lead and zinc are sort of laced into layers and layers of less valuable rock, and to get it out, they had to take out all the rock, smash it up, sort it out, smelt it down, and ta-da!

That's the lead.

Everything that got sifted out is called chat—crushed limestone, dolomite, and other rock that just doesn't sell like zinc or lead does.

The valuable metals only made up about 12% of the rock they took out of the ground.

The rest was chat, and it had to go… somewhere.

Now the government had previously forced the Quapaw Nation to move to the land that became Picher because they wanted the land they were living on in Arkansas,

but when they found out there were some tasty metals in northeast Oklahoma, they displaced the Quapaw again so they could mine it.

For whatever reason, in the process of the mining companies taking the land, the thoughtfully named Bureau of Indian Affairs made a rule that the companies had to dump the chat within the town instead of dumping it elsewhere, which was a cheaper process for the big business boys to pull off, and kept the mines and their consequences contained to one single place.

So all the chat had to go somewhere, and thanks to that rule, in Picher, somewhere was everywhere.

Yep, all around town, they had piles and piles and piles of chat—up to 300 feet tall by some reports, and with a 7,000-acre ridgeline—enough space to house and poison 70 Winnie-the-Poohs and friends.

Chatoons that were such a big part of life that they had names—Sooner, Saint Joe, and Goldenrod 8.

Kids would play in them after school like they were sandboxes, or ride up and down them on bikes—which is super fun, except that it slowly gave them lead poisoning.

Boo.

Chat is a fine dust that contains, among other things, remnants of the lead that came out of it, so anytime the wind blows in Picher, lead and caddium emanate out of their many, many chat piles and into the air.

And chat's not even the only pollutant hanging around—there was so much heavy metal, as in lead, zinc, cadmium, arsenic, iron, manganese, Metallica, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, that kind of thing, running into the Tar Creek River that it turned visibly orange and notably acidic.

They might have been better off with a literal Tar Creek, which, now that I say it, is just a road.

And if poison-arid rivers weren't enough, the kids also swam and played in poison ponds full of industrial waste.

Unsurprisingly, health issues abounded in Picher—hypertension, respiratory disease, lead poisoning, test scores so bad you can blame them on the air and water instead of writing the kids off as dingbats.

In 2004, decades after the mines closed in 1970, the rate of this long-named lung disease in the area was 2,000% higher than the national average—it was bad, bad.

And if the disease didn't get ya, there were still plenty of ways Picher might try to kill you.

Between 1982 and 2006, 35 buildings caved in because they'd been literally undermined.

An Army Corps of Engineering study found 159 more buildings—nearly 90% of those still standing—could collapse at any moment.

And if you managed to survive poison air, poison water, and the ever-increasing chance that the building you stood in would crumble around you, in 2008, a tornado came through town, flattening 20 blocks, killing 8 people, and injuring over 100 more.

After the Army Corps study, the government pulled together a $60 million buyout program to pay off any family in Picher that would politely GTFO.

Yes, at a rate of around $55 per square foot of your home, you could cash a great American check and move to, I don't know, Miami?

No, Miami.

In the two years that followed, 800 or so families applied for buyouts, 300 offers were made, and 272 families accepted them and moved out.

With the buyouts done and the population down below 800 in 2009, Picher officially called it.

They disbanded the police and dissolved the government.

Picher Carden High School graduated their last class of students—there were only 11 of them.

By the 2010 census, there were just 10 people left in town, and in 2013, they dissolved the town charter, and Picher was officially no more.

Post-charter, few people suck it out, the town became something of a playground for ATV riders and scavengers, and a man named Gary kept a pharmacy running in town and was quoted in 2014 saying he expected a Picher resurgence, quote, "in time," but he proceeded to die the next year, so I'm not sure about that.

So what now?

Well, head down Route 69, and you can still see the Picher water tower, and the town gorilla statue, and many piles of chat.

The matter of cleaning it all up is a bit more complicated—the EPA has been doing their darnedest for decades, taking soil off the top of people's yards hoping the poison dust and water would come with it, carting chat off inches at a time,

and the Quapaw Nation, who are stuck owning a lot of this poison land because for some reason the government buying the houses and demolishing them meant the land went back to the Guapaw, has worked to restore the land back to a semblance of what it was before the mining companies moved in.

In 2005, the government agreed to allow the Quapaw to sell the chat to asphalt companies because it stops being poison when it starts being road, but the government changed their mind about that in 2009.

In 2010, the Quapaw mentioned damming and flooding the land to return it into a wetlandQuapaw

Doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I've asked my editors to do a rendering.

Lovely.

Today, across the Tar Creek site, they've gotten rid of over 7 million tons of chat and sold about 1.25 million tons, they've plugged a bunch of abandoned wells to keep the poison out of the drinking water, and they've completed a bunch of other remediation efforts.

And it's still going!

The EPA, state government, Quapaw Nation, the University of Oklahoma, and others continue to work together to figure out just how toxic the land, air, and water in Picher is, and what exactly they can do to clean it up.

So no, they're not just leaving this place to fester, but will it ever be a wetland?

Or even just an unpoisoned ghost town?

Who's to say?

But I hear the gorilla statue's in pretty good shape, so there's something.

In short, it takes a lot of work and a lot of science to keep a place like Picher from being totally uninhabitable to being, well, anything else.

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