Legacy of Lead From Tons of Mining Waste Still Poses Threat to Children

The shadows of mining’s gravel mountains darken most everything here:

* The Little League field that sits abandoned because children could swallow lead-laden dirt sliding home.

* The house where 3-year-old Joey Herd’s mother dusts with a wet rag to catch metals that can cause brain damage.

* The schools where teachers wondered why children were slow to learn.

Piles of mine waste taller than 10-story buildings have left a legacy of lead that threatens children where they play. But nobody knows how far the shadows reach.

Tons of the gravel-like waste, called chat, sit unfenced or are sold and trucked away, with no tracking to ensure that other children are not put at risk.

The government is spending $30 million cleaning up lead-contaminated soil in northeast Oklahoma, but an exemption in federal law keeps it from regulating the source of the trouble.

“No doubt some of this material is still continuing to fall through the cracks and is getting used inappropriately,” said Noel Bennett, who manages the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund cleanup here.

Rolling prairie gives way to a stark moonscape between Picher and nearby Commerce, the town where baseball legend Mickey Mantle grew up. His father worked in the lead and zinc mines.

As much as 50 million tons of the mine waste tower beside roads and jut from neighborhoods for miles in the corner where Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri meet.

The mining industry abandoned the area nearly 30 years ago, but sales from the great gray heaps still keep men working and trucks streaming in and around Picher.

The chat poses no harm when it’s mixed with asphalt for roads or used as a base under layers of concrete, the EPA says.

The danger comes when it lands where young children play. Ingestion of lead-heavy dust can damage their developing nervous systems, resulting in lower IQs, attention deficit disorder and learning disabilities.

Developing fetuses also can be affected if the mother ingests lead.

Chat dealers wash the waste, reducing lead dust, and say they sell only to reputable firms. Even the Ottawa Reclamation Authority, a state trust that turns mine land into homesteads, sells the grit at 35 cents a ton to neighboring Cherokee County, Kan., for road cover.

But no one tracks chat to its final destination.

In 1995, the owner of a Benton County, Ark., rock quarry began selling it as “commercial grit,” without alerting buyers that it was mine waste from his land just over the state line in Kansas.

“I looked around and they were hauling it out by the thousands of tons by the week,” R.E.B. Enterprises owner Richard Berry said.

The Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology tested Berry’s stockpile and found it had a toxicity level of 9.2 for lead. A reading of 5 or higher is considered hazardous.

More than 60,000 tons of the waste already had been sold to more than 100 R.E.B. customers by the time the agency issued an advisory about it in May 1997.

The owner of Basic Construction said his firm used the grit as filler around deeply buried water and sewer lines in subdivisions throughout northwest Arkansas, unaware that the EPA warns against all residential uses.

“It was an acceptable agent,” said Gary Combs. “A lot cheaper than sand. A little cheaper than crushed grit. I don’t know where it comes from.”

Combs said no state or federal agencies contacted him to find out how he used the nearly 7,000 tons he purchased.

Berry stopped selling the material but he considers the hazards overstated, citing its widespread use in northeast Oklahoma.

Chat filled sandboxes, cushioned playgrounds and covered driveways for decades in this place where mining reigned for 80 years.

James Graves grew up playing soldier in the piles in the summer and sliding down snow-covered slopes on an old car hood in the winter.

“You’ve got to realize some old-timers like me, we just accepted them for what they were,” said Graves, an Ottawa County commissioner who operates a mining museum in Picher. “We’ve never seen no one die from exposure to a chat pile.”

The EPA first came here in 1979 when acid mine drainage began flowing into a local creek. It later determined that the bright orange water did not threaten health, but the lead hidden in the yards of 1,600 homes did.

A local Indian Health Service clinic found in 1994 that more than one-third of the children that it tested had dangerously high levels of lead.

Children with lead poisoning often don’t look sick, but the signs of trouble may have been evident here for years.

Teachers long worried openly why many students struggled with their schoolwork. Five years ago, the state chastised a local school for chronically low standardized test scores.

“We never could put our finger on it,” said Graves, who served 17 years on the school board.

A survey in 1996 found 10 of 16 children tested in nearby Cardin had lead levels exceeding what the Centers for Disease Control considers a health risk. Excessive lead levels also were found in 31 of 81 children tested in Picher and nine of 67 in neighboring Quapaw. Chat--in the places where they played--was targeted as the culprit.

Joey Herd was among those who tested high.

“He played back there all the time,” said his mother, Kathy, pointing to a driveway that was once covered in the mine waste. “The swing set was back there, the toys.”

In 1995, the EPA began removing contaminated soil from yards, a project still two years from completion. Workers scraped away playgrounds. A new sports complex replaced the contaminated Little League field.

On a recent afternoon, Joey swaggered in cowboy boots and toted a plastic gun in his frontyard. The level of lead in his blood has dropped by nearly half since the EPA began its work, his mother said.

Clean gravel covers the driveway now, and the lawn is planted in fresh sod. Several large piles of chat sit untouched, however, just behind the house.

Much of the chat here has the characteristics of hazardous waste, but it falls under a 1980 amendment that exempts certain mining wastes from hazardous waste regulations, according to EPA manager Bennett.

In a report 12 years ago, the EPA noted that some exempt wastes threaten humans and the environment. It concluded, however, that imposing hazardous waste regulations likely would be “environmentally unnecessary, technically infeasible or economically impractical.”

Under Superfund laws, those responsible for contamination can be forced to pay for cleanup. But the agency has no resources to track “what basically is an unregulated activity”--contamination that results from chat sales, Bennett said.

Local governments are reluctant to impose restrictions on an important economic resource. And Oklahoma’s laws, like other states, mimic the federal exemption.

The state Department of Environmental Quality plans to examine whether more stringent laws should be proposed, said Monty Elder, the agency’s risk communication supervisor.

But “the real rationale,” she said, “is if you can keep it out of yards, driveways, parks and playgrounds, it’s not going to cause a health problem.”

The EPA is counting on education to keep children from future harm. But the lessons are getting a mixed reception.

Joey’s mother now dusts with a wet cloth, a recommended way of reducing lead dust inside homes. In another case, however, the agency cleaned a yard only to find that the homeowner later hauled in chat as filler for a swimming pool.

“This material has been here for generations,” Bennett said. “It’s going to take a number of years to solve the problems.”