Community | September 05, 2010 | 2 comments

Welcome to Picher, Oklahoma, the U.S.'s most toxic city

source: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_madmaxtown/

JanforGore
Picher sprang up as a 20th-century boomtown—the “buckle” of the mining belt that ran through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri. The earth underneath it produced most of the lead for US bullets in World Wars I and II and enough zinc to literally galvanize construction of the American suburbs. These raw materials were used to create stronger, water-resistant metal alloys, better batteries, and dietary supplements—the base materials of a modern society. Population peaked at 14,000 in 1926. When the lode ran dry in 1970, the mining companies moved out. Picher eventually became a Superfund site, and half a decade ago the state government offered residents an average of $55 per square foot to evacuate their homes. By September 2009, the police force had disbanded and the government dissolved. Picher was a dead city.

Except that a few people refused to leave. They call themselves chat rats, a loose and increasingly self-reliant colony armed with cell phones and Wi-Fi for communication and guns for driving off scrap-metal scavengers. It’s a life bordering on squalid—on the way out of the Gorillas Cage, Roberts spots shovel marks around the base of the burned-out signpost, the beginning of an attempt to steal it. Across the street, a former auction-house parking lot has become a dumping ground for tires. On the drive back out of town, he passes the abandoned high school and notices that the arts and crafts building has burned down. A man appears to be helping himself to bookshelves from an open classroom. Roberts can’t figure out why anyone would turn down the relocation money he’s offering. “Most people have bettered themselves through this process,” he says. “Now there are only radicals left.”

The apocalypse is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed. Urbanization has lured more people to bustling metropolises, but precious little thought has been given to what happens when these cities fail. Over time, the underlying systems and processes of civilization—from lead mining to offshore drilling to car commuting—slowly poison us. Power grids brown out, the climate heats up, and industrial accidents ravage ecosystems and cities alike. For all the famed cities with thousands of years of continuity—Paris, London, Cairo, Athens, Rome, Istanbul—most cities just stop. Picher isn’t simply another boomtown gone bust. It’s emblematic of what happens when a modern city dies: A few people stay behind, trying to hold on to what they can. They are the new homesteaders, trying to civilize a wasteland at the end of the world.
  1. groups:
    Community,   Green,   Current Tonight,   US Politics,   8 more
  2. tags:
    Environment,  Health,  Toxic,  Poison,  2 more
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2 comments // Welcome to Picher, Oklahoma, the U.S.'s most toxic city

  • ampersand
    • 0
      ampersand  

    • As we all know there are hundreds of similar, and larger, and even more toxic, waste sites around the globe in nearly every industrial country in the northern hemisphere India, China, and throughout the former Soviet Union. Similar in fact to the dark spots in a lung x-ray of a terminal cancer patient.

      If you add the toxic remainders of mines dug below the belt of the equator in Africa, South America, and parts of Indonesia, you could get a similar picture of cancerous hot spots in the southern hemisphere.
      With the possible exceptions of Australia and Germany almost nothing is done to deal with the toxic aftermath of our crude industrialization in these sites around surface of the planet.

      Add in the fact that this is still going on.
      Add in the fact that the nations that direct this are running out of the ability to clean up the messes, either through the usual lack of political will, or the universal paralysis that occurs when any "external" economic cost rears its head.
      Finally, add in the fact that a huge number of the countries that suffer from these toxic wastelands do not have either the political or economic resources to clean them up. (Including apparently now, the United States.)

      The good news in the the collapse of the US as an economic superpower is that most of its psychotic global military "projections of power" will diminish.
      The bad news is that there is no other nation (and certainly not the nominative global agency of the United Nations) will be interested, or able, to do anything substantive about cleaning up these sites.

      There will be progress in protecting some special communities from the worse effects of these processes but that isn't going to include the rest of the globe.
      No matter what the obvious need is, or the stirring, hopeful rhetoric used as a call to action, the huge majority of these sites will have to be content with what my favorite international engineering company calls "benign remediation."
      (That means nothing is done, but if you pay us, we'll continue to "monitor" the site.)
      Humans in their relentless diversity will insure that there will be some "Mad Max" inhabitants of these global wastelands as long a we have them. That looks to be a long time.
      I suppose you could liken them to macrophages, or maybe more colorfully to the "sin-eating" witch-doctors in some cultures.
      There but for the grace of Gaia, go you and I...

    • 1 year ago
  • JanforGore
    • 0
      JanforGore  

    • Mad Max in the US. I don't know if these people are brave or just stupid. But it is a tragedy what has happened to this town, and there are more , which is the bigger tragedy.

    • 1 year ago
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