Take Me To Post Comment Form Saturday night Mom called to talk and thank us for the Mothers Day flowers. She said they had spent a half hour or so earlier in the evening sitting in the hall because of tornado warnings. They don’t have a hidey hole to get underground when storms pass through.
It’s no big deal. Lots of storms pass through that area where Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri meet.
She mentioned that Picher, OK, about 12 miles south of her on the Kansas-Oklahoma line, had been hit and reports were that there was lots of damage. My first thought was “how could they tell. Mom said my sister joked the same thing when she was talking about the storm.
It later came to light that six people had died in Picher when the storm hit. I regretted the joke. But only because it’s been a few years since I spent any time in Picher and am not sure I qualify to share in its population’s black-humor survival techniques.
You see Picher is the very definition of a hard luck story. Lead and zinc was discovered in the area in the late 1800s and mining started about 1900. Some say that not every bullet fired by U.S. troops in World War I and World War II came from mines in a triangle from Picher to Cardin to Commerce, OK, but most of them did.
Picher’s population in 1920 was more than 20,000 people. That was its peak. Automation, the ore take tapering off, the then-ill defined problems of living in the mining waste and the lifestyle of a mining town on its way out cut into the population. The towns around Picher experienced the same problems. The mines held on, barely, into the 1970s. Picher’s population in the 2000 Census was just over 1,600.
Huge piles of gravel, called “chat in the area because of the noise it makes shooting out of a mine’s auger as rock is crushed and piled, sit for miles mostly to the southwest of the town. At one point in the 1950s-‘60s the area was known as the Oklahoma Alps and the chat was sold to road departments as paving material for hundreds of miles around. That ended when officials realized they were spreading lead and other heavy metal pollutants across the region.
In the 1970s Picher was put on the federal Superfund List and slated for pollution abatement. Old houses were replaced, yards were stripped of dirt, the acid water from the mines diverted away from natural waterways, pipes dug up and replaced. Millions were spent, but nothing seemed to help. The scope of the problem was just too big.
Another problem was sinkholes. Lead is mined underground and tunnels crisscross the area. Sinkholes had been shaking the area since the 1950s. I remember driving down in the early 1960s to look at a three-block section that had fallen about 75 feet one night. It was weird. All the utilities and roads were cut off at ground level. But down in the hole, there were the houses, cars and other things you’d expect in the neighborhood still looking pretty normal. I don’t remember any reports of deaths, though I’m sure there were injuries.
The last story I wrote to get my degree from college was about Picher residents’ attitudes toward the sinkholes. They didn’t like them, but said they weren’t afraid of them and seemed to take pride in the fact they survived with them.
With all those problems, state and federal officials started talking about buyouts to convince residents to move to a safer, less polluted place. But, true to the nature of Picher, it was discovered many residents didn’t actually have deeds to their property. Picher had been thrown up as a boom town and many of the homes were on mining company or Native American land. Remember Oklahoma had been “Indian Territory until the land rushes of the 1880s-1890s.
At least one buyout has been authorized. A couple years ago, Oklahoma itself authorized the spending to help move families with children younger than 6 to get them away from the lead. I’ve never gotten a clear picture of how many people have actually been able to use the program.
Now, the category 4 tornado has swept through and mostly leveled about 20 square blocks of the town. You would think those people had been through enough.