Photo: U.S. EPA

When does a town cease to be a town? Is it when the last resident passes away or moves out, or when public services like water and power stop running? Some towns die when industry leaves. Picher, Oklahoma started to die as soon as industry arrived.

Tar Creek is the 2009 documentary that tells the story of Picher and Cardin, modern-day ghost towns within the 1,188 square mile Tar Creek Superfund site. The 73-minute film features compelling interviews with residents who lived through the lead poisoning by mining companies that led to the towns’ demise and the cleanup attempts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that couldn’t save them.

The documentary was narrated, written, and directed by Matt Myers, who first experienced life in Picher in 1998 as part of a summer surveying job. Myers began development on the film in 2006, still gripped by the stories he heard from residents years ago.

Why care about this movie from twelve years ago? The Tar Creek Superfund site is still there. In the decades since people realized that this place was dangerous, the danger hasn’t been addressed. This documentary isn’t just a history lesson. It’s about the present and a possible future that we need to avoid for every town that extractive industry touches, not just for Picher.

Displacement is a theme throughout Tar Creek. It begins with the displacement of the Quapaw Tribe, who occupied land across much of southern Oklahoma and Arkansas before a colonial smallpox epidemic left only 135 survivors out of an estimated 35,000 tribal members.

These survivors were forced off of their homelands and into the corner of Oklahoma that is home to Tar Creek. The reservation allotted to the Quapaw was viewed by the government as worthless land.

That changed at the start of the twentieth century, when white settlers found lead deposits. The Quapaw were forced into lease agreements with mining companies.  If individuals didn’t comply, they were declared incompetent by the Department of the Interior, and their land turned over to the Department for management. When this hostile takeover happened, it was almost always to Quapaw with deep ties to the tribal community and with valuable mineral deposits in their land.

In the 1960’s, once mining companies devoured the metals found under Picher, they left. The damage they left behind is visible everywhere.  Mountains of lead-rich waste rock (what the locals call chat piles) tower over the town. The creek, full of residual metals, looks like “orange blood.” Abandoned mineshafts are so unstable and so close to the surface that Picher is on the verge of sinking into the earth at any moment.

In 1983, Tar Creek was declared a Superfund site by the EPA, one of the first to earn the designation. The Superfund is a pool of money administered by the EPA to support cleanup of environmental hazards when no other party can be held responsible. Because the mining companies that doomed Picher had since gone bankrupt, they couldn’t be brought back to clean up their mess. Some residents point to Superfund designation as the last nail in Picher’s coffin. “You just don’t bounce back from it,” said John Sparkman, former executive director of the Picher Housing Authority.

The EPA’s efforts were divided between remediating surface water and surface soil. Whole yards were excavated, with lead-heavy soils replaced with clay. While the clay didn’t contain lead, it created new problems for Picher residents. Clay was a nightmare for drainage and caused homes to flood.

In addition to creating more problems, The EPA’s costly attempts at remediation also didn’t resolve the real sources of danger in Tar Creek. The chat piles still combined with strong prairie winds to blow lead across the community, including on top recently excavated yards. Even after the EPA left, mineshafts caved in and swallowed homes whole.

Sparkman bitterly recalls taking EPA officials for a drive up to one of the largest chat piles, asking if they honestly thought the problem could be solved quickly. One official’s confident reply: “I’ll be able to retire here.”

After decades of failed attempts to make Picher a safe place to live, residents were bought out, and homes were demolished. James Graves, who had lived in Picher all his life, sledded down toxic chat piles as a child, and worked in the mines for years, called his hometown a “horrible, horrible place” while looking up toward the summit of a chat pile.

In the 12 years since Tar Creek’s release, some of what Myers predicted for Picher’s future has come to pass. The rusty water of Tar Creek is on the move downstream toward Grand Lake, a drinking water reservoir. Myers suggested that as those with influence and money saw their summer homes’ property values threatened on the shores of Grand Lake, they might finally take appropriate action to remediate Tar Creek.

Whether remediation at Tar Creek and other Superfund sites is finally successful will depend on the EPA’s priorities and funding, which ultimately depend on political will. As the Biden administration proposes a 21.3% boost to the EPA’s budget next year, there may be hope. Picher may no longer be home for its former residents, but with the right investment of resources, it could cease to be a hazard for homes downstream.

More broadly, Tar Creek is what we get when we prioritize metal extraction over our environment and our neighbors. In a world where we use metals in everything from construction to consumer goods, what has happened in Tar Creek is a tragic but unsurprising warning to us all.

Tar Creek is available to stream for free on Culture Unplugged. If you have an hour, Tar Creek stands as a worthy memorial for a community.