Last year Dr. Robert Wright decided to provide a gift to LEAD Agency to help us with our efforts to lower lead levels in the area.
 
Dr. Wright has been associated with Ottawa County and the multiple metals our children have been exposed to for now just over twenty years. He was originally at Harvard and now is in a position at Mount Sinae Hospital in New York City.
 
The gift is a LeadCare II, a portable blood lead analyzer that will analyze a blood sample, a simple drop of blood from a fingerstick providing results in 3 minutes. The Ottawa County Health Department has the exact same instrument, so if you have taken your child 6 years old and younger there to be tested for lead, that would be the first test they would have administered.
 
We will not duplicate their service, or that of the Northeast Tribal Health System, but to offer blood lead screening to individuals over 6 years of age.
 
Our plan is to set up at health fairs near the county health department and screen the mothers, the dads or those over 6 years so a family might leave with a fuller picture of what they may need to do overall to make sure everyone in the home is on track to lower those lead levels for the whole family.
 
We received the instrument months ago but it has taken time for us to gather together a team to train to use the up to date instrument and commit to helping us provide this service at various community events this year.
 
Then suddenly this week, ONLY this week it all came together. After presenting a session on local metal exposures in Dr. Lesli Deichman's psychology class Monday morning, several students volunteered to assist us. It seems many of her students are on track for nursing as a career, To top off the team we were joined by Karen Fields, who had worked with Dr. Wright and his MATCH Project for nearly a decade during the years the research was ongoing here. Our first outing with our LeadCare II will be at the NEO Health Fair on February 19.
 
We know that exposure to lead can be harmful to children but also to us in our later lives. While we able we should do everything in our power to do the things that will keep us healthy in our personal lives, but also in our workplaces.

TSET is a trust in Oklahoma established from the tobacco industry settlement to provide funds to improve the health of Oklahomans by reducing our leading causes of preventable death – tobacco use and obesity – to reduce cancer and cardiovascular disease.

TSET funds projects that can improve the health of every Oklahoman. With Pat Hecksher's help as the coordinator for TSET, LEAD Agency was able to improve and update our Worksite Wellness Policy recently, adding additional ways we can encourage better nutrition and more physical activity.

It is a wonder more businesses, non-profit organizations and churches haven't signed up to make more healthier places for people who work or volunteer in those spaces. We all need all the help and guidance we can get to change our ways and our official policies to make work be as healthy as possible.

I have been speaking with former BF Goodrich workers recently and BOY could that plant have done better for the health and safety of their employees! The workers were exposed to heat, unspeakable  heat, noxious and toxic odors provided poor air quality, but also deafening noise. Asbestos was everywhere, the "cortisone" of builders and business. It was on the walls, covered the machines that molded the tires, it was thick and thin everywhere. In addition, of course chemicals were part of the tire making process, and the workers' personal cleanup procedures.
We long to have safer work places because they will help us have longer and healthier lives. Businesses did not always have their worker safety rules in place because they were making sure their profits got  their upmost attention.

All sorts of industrial processes can get in the way of profits, no wonder some businesses slight their workers' health and safety.

Our BF Goodrich workers, almost to the end have kept quiet for loyalty to the company that helped them be able to feed their children and provide a home of their own. "Goodrich was good for me." I hear it. And business professionals long for the days of those paychecks were spent right downtown.

The company town helped keep the pressure on these hard working men to keep quiet and keep working, even when the air in the tube line was white from the soap stone dust heavy in the air. Soap stone dust would have been loaded with silica which we know can cause silicosis, but also some deposits of soapstone also had asbestos. To me these living legends would have loved to have had a safer work place or the use of respirators to provide some protection. With that they could have worked smarter to live longer.

It seems a coincidence that our BF Goodrich plant that used so many forms of asbestos closed the same year that Asbestos Hazard Emergency Response Act of 1986 passed.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Years ago the people in America rose up, stood in the streets and demanded to have clean air and clean water. President Richard Nixon responded to the outcry when our rivers were on fire and cities' air was visible as brown haze from miles away.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 and rules began to pour out of the agency that would be protective of both our air and our water. Ever since, those rules have been chipped away, bits of those protective rules broken, erased by our Congress, under influence by lobbyists from mining, oil, other industries and agriculture.

Our country is not alone. The mining industry is a dirty business and what works for them is to continue business as usual, paying any fines that come is cheaper. It is their business model. We know that from the legacy waste the companies have left in our Tar Creek Superfund Site. And the unending flow of it down Tar Creek ending up in Grand Lake all these years.

Last Friday a dam in Brazil broke loose in a tsunami of red mud, releasing iron mining waste in such force 200 of their own workers were the first casualties as they were eating their lunch in a cafeteria near the dam.  The Vale dam collapse announcement caused Vale shares to "plummet" on the New York Stock Exchange that day.

I was in the backseat of a small plane with photographer Vaughn Wascovich years ago. He was taking photos of chat piles, but as the plane turned the landscape changed beneath us. There below were fields of green and trees lining Tar Creek. I knew it was Tar Creek because of the ribbon of bright red bordered by the trees. We both took photos of that moment. But it was his that got the attention of the TIME reporter who saw it and immediately knew our story should be told.

Now imagine what Brazil's red tsunami waste is looking like, wide, powerfully wiping away structures as it passed. This occurred in the state of Minas Gerais, barely missing the city of Brumadinho. The President of Brazil Jair Bolsonaro flew over it and exclaimed it was “difficult to not be emotional."

Someone was definitely at fault. There ought to be consequences. Minas Gerais state courts quickly froze billions of Vale assets. Vale had been involved in the collapse of another dam in 2015 which 250,000 people were left without drinking water and killed thousands of fish. Brazil's environmental protection agency fined Vale $90 million then, this time $2.1 billion has been levied for this disaster.

The Brazil office of environmentalist group Greenpeace said the dam break was “a sad consequence of the lessons not learned by the Brazilian government and the mining companies.” Such incidents “are not accidents but environmental crimes that must be investigated, punished and repaired,” it added.

Vale had requested a new license to expand the capacity of the dam so it would be allowed to hold more, but the National Civil Society Forum for Hydrographic Basins, a network of civil society groups  urged authorities not to grant the license.

Brazil's President Bolsonaro has attacked environment agencies for delaying development with excessive licensing requirements and has advocated freeing up mining in protected indigenous reserves. His efforts are much like our current president's attacks on the U.S. environment, to lessen the protections our laws have had for human health and the environment and give free reign for extraction on public lands for industry.

Indigenous rights and land in Brazil's Amazon region are at risk. Bolsonaro's belief is that he will "integrate" those citizens and free up property for mining and agriculture. He did this in an executive order transferring the regulation and creation of new indigenous reserves to the agriculture ministry – controlled by agribusiness lobby. This executive order has to be approved by Brazil's legislature in 120 days. Perhaps this tragedy may offer a look into the future for their country, of what de-regulation looks like.

Years ago, one of Miami High School Indian Dance team's youngest dancers said, "We're Indians, we ought to be for the environment." Well, yes, we all should be. Native or not. We have only one mother and only one earth.

There ought to be a law, and the law is still alive in Brazil. Five people have been arrested in connection to the collapse of the ore tailings dam! There was never anyone arrested for any of the environmental disasters we have in Ottawa County. But in a twist of irony our same young Native dancer when he was old enough to drive, did get the first fine for crossing the ditch the county had dug to keep our recreational riders off our chat piles, which are tailings piles to the rest of the world.

The chief of a native community that lives 14 miles from the Brazilian city of Brumadinho reported all life in the river on which his community depends for food, bathing and cloth washing is "dead" and polluted with the mineral-loaded mud. There is always another way to get rid of natives in the way of progress, one way is to pollute their water, kill their fish and ruin their environment for the foreseeable future. There ought to be a law.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim