PICHER, Okla.
(AP) -- Two turtles emerge from Tar Creek and greet
the morning
wearing the color of their watery home.
That color
is orange.
In town, a trio
of children race across a gravel-littered yard where a backhoe
scrapes away
contaminated soil. Kids here have had frighteningly high lead levels,
and there are
at least another 650 yards yet to clean.
A single July
morning in the Tar Creek Superfund site is enough to see
that work here
is far from complete. And yet, by Friday, the
Environmental
Protection Agency plans to end a cleanup that began in
1995 because
the state didn't come up with matching money to continue.
``We are demobilizing
as we speak,'' said Philip Allen, remedial project
manager at the
agency's office in Picher, about 100 miles northeast of Tulsa.
Whether they
return all depends on the state allocating the money.
And last session,
the Legislature didn't make the 10 percent match,
or $2.75 million,
to keep the backhoes running.
The main problem
is chat, a gravel-like waste from the region's lead
mines. It is
heavy with lead, posing a potential harm to a child's nervous
system. Before
the cleanup it was routinely used as filler in back yards,
school yards,
ball fields and playgrounds. It has been removed from
public places
already but remains around many homes.
The backhoes
chugged into Charles Turnbaugh's yard one recent
morning and
he was glad to see them. ``I've got seven kids,'' he said.
Turnbaugh's property
is among the last of the 1,300 yards to be cleaned
in the Superfund
project's $30 million first phase.
The Superfund
law, enacted in 1980 as a response to the chemical waste
contamination
at Love Canal in upstate New York in the 1970s, has
been plagued
with problems even advocates of the measure acknowledge.
Last year, the
General Accounting Office reported that $6 of every $10
spent on the
Superfund program went for support activities and not
directly to
site cleanup. The EPA disputed the analysis, saying many of
the activities
the GAO called ``support'' actually contribute significantly to
cleaning the
toxic waste sites.
According to
the GAO, about $1.4 billion has been spent by the
government on
Superfund activities in each of the past several years and
another $1 billion
has been spent annually by private entities under threat
of enforcement
to remove toxic chemicals from contaminated sites.
As of June, the
EPA reported that cleanup work had been completed at
nearly half
of about 1,400 polluted areas. Advocates point out the Superfund
process has
been working faster and more efficiently than ever.
But in Picher,
all hundreds of families know is that they'll have lead in
their town when
the EPA crews leave. Nothing prevents children from
playing on the
millions of tons of chat that rise up as mountains in the
40-square-mile
Superfund site.
A task force
set up by Gov. Frank Keating is studying ways to sell and
ship chat. It
can be used safely in asphalt roads and makes a good
anti-skid material,
said Brian Griffin, the state's environmental secretary
who dreams of
helping the economy while saving the children.
``There's enough
chat there to pave an interstate highway twice around
the globe,''
Griffin said.
The Tar Creek
site languished after failed efforts in the 1980s by the
EPA to stop
the acid mine drainage that turned the creek and its turtles
orange. Lead
removal started after tests in the mid-1990s showed a
bigger problem
-- local children had lead levels 10 times the state average.
The EPA contracted
with the Army Corps of Engineers for the cleanup.
The project
has been dogged by delays, allegations of shoddy work and
an ongoing investigation
into the contractor the corps hired to do the work.
But the effort
has brought good news. Health officials say recent sampling
shows a 20 percent
to 40 percent drop in the number of children with
dangerous blood
levels. It's not clear whether the cleanup or educational
programs or
both deserve the credit.
This corner of
northeastern Oklahoma has other hazards to contend with.
A study is under
way to determine if a sinkhole on the Oklahoma-Kansas
line threatens
a road and gas line. Griffin also is trying to get federal funds
to plug the
roughly 2,000 open mine shafts that pock the landscape,
something he
feels is paramount to public safety.
Meanwhile, residents
await more state funding that will make the
backhoes return
to this small town with a mountain of waste.
``I think it's
always going to be difficult to have legislators from other
parts of the
state wanting to see money spent in this area,'' Griffin said.
``We're just
cleaning up an environmental mess and they don't see the
financial benefits
of that immediately.''
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On the Net:
EPA's Superfund site: http://www.epa.gov/superfund
Oklahoma Department
of Environmental Quality:
http://www.deq.state.ok.us
Oklahoma State Department of Health:
http://www.health.state.ok.us/program/envhlth/sites/ottawa.html