As I parked in Tulsa outside the hospital before dawn Monday I was remembering that only a few weeks ago I had read my grandfather's handwritten notes on surgery he had taken during a class in medical school, "You must have courage to use the knife." But as I was discovering with each step, you must also have courage to have the knife slice into you. And that is what I was walking toward to have done.

For over 20 years I have monitored my calcium levels after having had a bone-lead scan done at the Harvard School of Public Health and learned  I had a body burden of lead trapped in my bones. And in order to just keep it sequestered so as not to be released into my bloodstream to continue doing damage to my organs, I have watched my calcium and  had my blood lead levels checked every year since. When my calcium was low and for numerous years it was, I added calcium supplements.

Since the body is tricked by lead and treats it as if it were precious calcium, lead if whirling around in your bloodstream isn't excreted out of your body it is grabbed and stored in your bones in case you might need it later.
Sometime back another switch got flipped and my parathyroid started blasting out calcium to abandon. Understanding that nothing in abundance, could be right and seeking balance, I agreed to submit to the knife to have a surgery to correct the issue.

There is something extreme about having your throat cut open that seems harsh, but when results afterwards determined quickly to be effective and have thus far proved to have been positive, the decision to proceed undaunted, well, I am happy with the choice. And happy when you get old and qualify for Medicare walking in is not as scary financially either. I long for a day each person no matter her age can receive medical treatment as a human right.

In our community at a meeting last weekend I was introduced to a number of people as the "Conscience" of Ottawa County by our state Representative Ben Loring. Now that is a burden to carry, but at least I was not introduced as the Cut Throat Conscience, as might have been stated this week!

There are lots of reasons to speak out in Ottawa County and those who know me understand having a soft voice can be a challenge at first, but speaking out can be contagious and those who Flood are signing our DEMANDS that they are not going to take it anymore! They ARE speaking out, too. There are lots of ways to have your message heard. Everyone who had signed these showed up last weekend to meet with the woman who is challenging Senator Inhofe for his seat in Congress. You were there, your name was. Keep signing, and we will keep sharing your messages to any politician coming to town, or to those who will carry them with them to seats of power. We are on a roll.

You say? Yes, we got 25,120.74 tons of asbestos-containing material removed in 1,675 trucks loads and shipped out of here. AND all 53.82 tons of Carbon Black is GONE all done in 166 days. That is power to the people with EPA finding $4.6 million to serve and protect us.

Remember there is more to be done and when you are the Conscience of the County, you would expect the rally cry to begin, get more done, do more at the old BF Goodrich site, finish the investigation, the state must force the companies to DO RIGHT by the people, or move over and allow the EPA to step in and help us determine how much danger the neighbors are in, how much benzene and other chemicals are we talking about, how far have they spread, what damages do we deserve and who is going to do something about it?

We need to be protected from the next flood and we deserve representatives who will fight for us. We will hold "I Flood I Vote" rally again soon. Need a shirt? We have them.

Sign a Demand.  We are LEAD Agency - Local Environmental Action Demanded.   These are not appeals, or pleas. We demand and deserve to be protected.

The responsibility lies with each resident in Ottawa County to demand of each other to find out if their property is contaminated with lead in the soil and if it is to have it removed, both for free by calling the DEQ Hotline. They are not going to be knocking on your door anytime soon, but you can call and ask them to come and take some soil samples, take some samples from gravel driveways.

You can be a Conscience of Ottawa County. You can ask your neighbors. We can share the title. We can make our community safer for the children who are going to play in that backyard of yours or want to plant their very own garden. What's that number? 1-800-522-0206.

We are not going to take it anymore. We all have a conscience and we can all muster up some courage to use our voices.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Growing up before digital devices, we had to get ready for the future with the toys of the day to keep us busy and engaged for hours in solitary, focused activities. We learned first to draw with a stylus decades before stylus' brief moments of importance on smart-phones. We used the Magic Slate to draw on gray plastic sheets and when we lifted the sheet, our creations went with the lift, and we could start over.

We graduated to Etch a Sketch, engaging both our hands allowing us to manage turning motions into an art form, only to lose that image when the whole device was shook, which began the chance to do it even better.

This is important now? Yes, this interactive map DEQ has developed for Ottawa County lets absolutely anyone play and move around the map to view who's property has tested clean for lead or has had the lead removed from the yard or the driveway as indicated with the little pink dot. It is important to learn how to play because you can find out if your neighbors are playing smart or if it is you who will be the last one in the neighborhood to get a pink dot and make sure children are protected from lead. (We and others have found some anomalies... that caused us questions, but we called DEQ  and Ellen Isbell welcomed the questions, since she wants it to be the best instrument for us to use!)

What if we had a map with layers we could click through to see exactly how each property and those living in that spot might be effected by other aspects of the environment.

Who could develop this map? The layer DEQ has offered showing lead-free pink dots is a good start. What if we could layer the regretfully new flood plain map to see which homes and properties may be most at risk for the next flood, and perhaps by which water so we might then be able to measure amounts of metals deposited from Tar Creek and where they come to reside.

It would be valuable to have a map that also showed where the benzene plume lies beneath the neighborhood near the old BF Goodrich plant, but also showed where the waste drained to the north of the plant into the lagoon and the path the water flowed then to the river, both above ground and the path ground water might have flowed.  I would want the wells on the map that had been drilled both to the Boone and the Roubidoux, all over the county, including of course the BF Goodrich wells on that property.

You need a map to show air deposition, as Bob Dylan would have said: "You don't need a weather man  To know which way the wind blows." But if we had a map to show what went into the air and how it passed over us? What if this map could indicate where smell is detected and what is in that smell and where the 150,000 pounds of styrene emitted just north of Miami might land. We would want to reconstruct where all that asbestos blew in the 5 years it took to be so safely removed and how 80 years of wind deposition from the chat piles might have added to each backyard garden.

It's like we need a three dimensional map, right?

Then we could see who and where and how our environmental justice issues lies upon us and why I stay awake at night wondering how on earth this can be right.

And why one thing at a time, we will be giving you a chance to tell anyone who will listen that YOU ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. For now the pages are out in the community, sign one to say you are tired of being FLOODED.  We intend to collect these white boards and show any politician wanting votes exactly how you feel. So far you can sign them at: Intertribal Council, Papa G's, Post Properties, RIC Insurance, Farm Bureau, Allen Sign Studio, Sooner Printing, NEO Realty and Solid Rock Realty, more will go out. Let us know if you want to be part of this effort.
Any politician in office or running must acknowledge the environmental issues this community, this county faces. We don't need a cheerleader, we need all hands on deck, knowing how science and the environment effect the health of our people and the hope of the future and how to talk to people in power who can and must make decisions to protect us.

And for this task, until we have a layered map of the degradation to our air and water quality, our defenders must study where we are damaged, who may be affected and how on earth the changes can be made to make it right for the public.

Ask any politician seeking office what the legal issues are when dealing with GRDA and FERC and why it is important to listen to hydrologists and the implications new jobs bring if they also bring new hazards to our health. These are serious times and floods are looming. Popularity contests have consequences. 

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Flood Survivors and their friends stood up for themselves
at the "I Flood I Vote Rally" saying this flooding must STOP.
 
Each one had a story, and as a community we need to remember to collect this part of the history of this place. The traumatic times in our lives stay with us, like those snow globes, pick them up, shake them and the snow falls again. That's what its like when a flood survivor begins to speak. It is like they are there again, seeing the slow motion disaster a flood has been described to be. They can name the people who were there, the time it took to load up what could be loaded in the last remaining truck and the barely making it through the water before it was impassible. Or what was left behind as you and your grandchildren leave home for the last time with a few possessions as they load up on the rescue boat. Never to return. Leaving all lost treasures a child can amass as well as the lifelong treasured memories their grandmother can never hold close again.

We can shed a tear. I do, just recalling the latest, freshest stories heard this week. One woman told me "it's like no one cares anymore -- like this is the norm, but this is not normal." I know this not normal, because there are countless towns around that never have a single person flood. Whole towns do not know to worry when the rain begins to fall.

But there are people who are not going to take it anymore. I know that because they signed their name to it this week at the first ever I FLOOD   ~   I VOTE  RALLY, but they left a lot more room so you can add your name too.
A flood is a dirty deal. Dirty water. Catastrophic losses. Personal, private losses.

Stressors to any family and their budget, their plans for a weekend, or the summer, or the birthday they spend in a shelter or sequester in a motel after the Red Cross shelter closes.

Ever so slowly lives finally begin to start over.

When you start over, it means the little things, too. Like paperclips and safety pins, starting a home with nothing, not a thing. No junk drawer in the kitchen as a "go to." When you are eleven and know you are going to start your own business rebuilding bicycles and  have your collection covered with water and mud for weeks, the start is over before it ever begins.

One elderly woman said Catholic Charities just wondered if she and her family still had any unmet needs. Yes, they needed beds, after sleeping on the floor on mats for the last seven months. Unmet needs. She  answered that question and in 2 days, the truck came with beds, mattress and bedsprings AND all the bedding for them, brought them in and SET THEM UP.

Another woman who is just moving back into her home this week, is going to deal with the mess of setting up house again and then she is going to "come up fighting."

Floods can de-neighbor neighborhoods when the Red Tagged homes are torn down, creating green space with useless sidewalks. Floods can ruin the economy of a town for a time and challenge businesses with hard decisions. Not all the decisions are made yet, as we wait to see how high the next flood will be, and when it might come. But it always starts with rain and rain seems to keep coming. Our ground is already saturated before this spring's rains.
You know why LEAD Agency put up that billboard and how we had to pull us together and begin with the first I FLOOD ~ I VOTE RALLY. I can't take it anymore either. It was suggested we should be marching down Main Street to rally, but the retired teacher said no, we should go to the Capitol to rally!

We are open to your ideas and we are open to listen to your stories. What has happened to you, how did flooding affect you, your family, your way of life? Pull up a chair on the front porch at the LEAD Agency, bring your stories and let's organize that next rally.

Our Senator needs to know us, needs to hear your stories, bring your friends, there is always room in the front yard, ours or your own. People came to our rally who had never stood out on a street to let the world know how they felt about anything. It has been such a private thing, so many secret ways we hide our tragedies, so as not to burden others, who may have been suffering themselves, or as we know were mobilized to help a family member or had a coach who called them into service to help someone they had never met before. 

We can get lost and isolated, but we can gather and be stronger together and our voices heard on local TV and our stories out on Oklahoma City's Journal Record or in the town of Shawnee's newspaper. Get that? There is more to say and we are just getting started.

What'd you say? "I can't take it anymore."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Last week as an invited speaker for Emma Colven's Environmental Justice senior capstone class at the University of Oklahoma, the students were discussing the research they had conducted at the Western Heritage Collections. Inspired to do my own research in that facility I found a ledger my grandfather must have carried in his pocket containing notes he had written while studying medicine in 1870.

The volume is bound in red leather emblazoned with a single word on the front. Inside the pages contained his handwritten pen and ink notes. One statement on the page entitled Operations Surgery stood out to me: "You must have the courage to use the knife when necessary..." Isn't that the truth? Courage is necessary to move forward, to take a stand, to speak up, but for our surgeons, surely it does take courage to enter the skin of a patient and take actions to save a life, that moment knowing exactly where  and how to cut and he continued with: "one must not let your feelings have anything to do with the operation." It is hard to be brave, to find courage, I know. Not one of my college classes had a bit of instruction on how to be, find or have any degree of courage, but knowing how could have emboldened me or others and made any number of actions easier to master through the years.
 Like speaking up on climate change.

You might become a believer in climate change if you were outside working in the garden on Monday while both the front and back doors were open to let the breeze flow through, like we did at the LEAD Agency that afternoon.
But 70 degrees one day and two days later schools and businesses closed due to snow is really not climate, it is weather. And weather has been known to change, we grew up knowing that, as they say, "Don't like the weather? It's Oklahoma, just wait a few days and it will change." But having lived in other states, they say the same thing about their weather!

But climate is bigger. Climate is the bigger picture, it is how extremes can affect all of us, not just the pocket of people who get some wind damage or number of times we sit in the "Fraidy Hole" but how many times the county gets washed down the river and how high the river gets each time, and those times are closer together when 100 year floods happen year after year.

The Quapaw Nation hosted a Tribal Resilience Workshop this week and I got to attend one day, and the second day, the snow threatened and made me leery to go to find out even more facts about how this is going and how quickly our future generations will be madder-than-hell at us for allowing it and not doing our level-best to reel it in and save the polar bears and lightning bugs from extinction.

When looking up Resilience you will find it is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. That is what has happened after the floods, after the weather disasters people face. But the ability gets harder when the difficulties keep coming.

That grandfather of mine, didn't have children until he was in his 60's and together his family experienced what they called the Little Ice Age before 1920. My father's clearest memories of that time were  everyone used skates, there was so much ice, it was how you got around, and the fireplace in their home burned wood, single long logs, they walked over as they protruded out of the fireplace into the living room and pushed them forward as they burned.

                What is the difference between weather and climate change? Weather refers to short term    atmospheric conditions while climate is the weather of a specific region averaged over a long period of time. Climate change refers to long-term changes.

We weather the storms, but we hope to endure the effects climate change will have on the earth and her people, as our island people keep coming because the sea is rising and taking their homelands under, there will be more migrations of people walls will not contain, leaving lands where draughts have dried up their soils and water. There will be more flooding for us to come, making simple gardening a challenge and large scale farmers unable to plant or harvest the food a nation requires to feed her people.

Back in the Western History Collection, my grandfather's ledger was in a folder and the folder was in a box and the next folder was Miami, OK's Sam Fullerton. Surely the people who placed those folders in the box, never dreamed the two men were friends, and there they are in the box together for the duration of history! and began their lives just as the world's uses of fossil fuels was beginning.

Courage is what we all will need to go forward into the climate changed world we will live. But also courage to change what is making it worse, we will have to innovate away from fossil fuels in big ways and in simple personal choices.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The neighborhood edges right up to the fence-line of the old BF Goodrich plant. Eric Rollo and I talked through the fence a few days before the asbestos cleanup had finished, thanking him for the work he and his team has done for us. He looked past me, looking at the home-fronts facing the plant, he could see Will Rogers barely a block away. He simply said how important he saw the abatement, how serious he took the work, "We needed to do this for them."
What we needed to do for the workers was to value their time, their effort, the months away from home and family to work for us, to make our lives safer in the future.

We wanted to give these for the most part, nameless employees one home-cooked meal before they left us to go to their own homes before heading out on another mission to protect yet another damaged town.

On Sunday morning of the EPA Superfund's last week in Miami, I went into the backdoor of the Northwest Baptist Church and asked if LEAD Agency could hold a home cooked meal for the valued visiting workers. The first gentleman turned me over to Jack Trask, who hearing what we hoped to do, took me down the bright white hallway to meet with Pastor Michael Knight. It took only moments before he said yes to our use of their space for the lunch. But he asked a thoughtful question, "How's the water here?" We have nothing without water, we all will agree, so I shared with him my hopes to protect our Roubidoux Aquifer from the legacy mine waste contaminated water in the Boone Aquifer sitting above it. But we were standing only feet from where that nameless swallow perched aquifer with BF Goodrich benzene lies beneath the homes in his neighborhood. These are serious issues in the building serving the Lord to speak about on a Sunday morning.

Mr. Trask walked me out of the building with more serious talk about loss and real possible causes our community musters through each day knowing or sliding aside acknowledgement as we go about our lives.
According to Louis "Red" Mathia, LEAD's board president who had worked at BF Goodrich, then served as Miami's mayor for 12 years, learned the powerhouse was left standing, said even the concrete had asbestos in it and personally wanted every bit of it removed to be the most protective for the community even though EPA said the asbestos had been fully removed from it.

190 tons of debris have been hauled away in trucks. It took 9 months, working for the most part 6 days a week. While if you look on the Toxics Release Inventory website for Ottawa County, over 159 thousand pounds of another carcinogen was released to the air throughout 2018. We got one dangerous pollutant removed at an expense of several million dollars, but we are still being exposed to tons of another.

I divert. We pulled together neighbors, LEAD members, some friends of friends and in walked crockpots with chicken noodle soup, salads, barbeque beans, broasted potatoes, green bean casserole, delightful servings of southwest chicken filets and rolls from the Ottawa Tribe and Hi-Winds Casino, deserts and of course the obligatory 'Thank you CAKE' you would expect to see. But each table had real dinner plates and cloth napkins we had brought from home.

The decorations combined the thanks for work well done, but the hope for the rest of the work left yet unaddressed: what lies beneath that neighborhood, the benzene and other chemicals and what flowed out of the plant and headed to the Neosho River for the life of the plant and since its closure.

In other words, the TOP is done, glad of it, but BENEATH and BEYOND not yet. How do we get that done? We have to care, we have to speak up, we have to MAKE it happen. The investigation, the real investigation must begin and the results must be addressed. This community deserves a CLEANUP and so do our downstream friends.

Lee, Mike McAteer and Lisa McClure arrived right on time, and were able to take note of the comments on white boards the Pam Bevis had posted throughout the room written by Miami Academy students. They didn't just read them, they took pictures of them all. They took photos WITH them. Then the vested workers arrived and we got to enjoy time with them as we shared a meal. Academy students came with their award winning teacher, Marla Stidham. Each table took a turn to speak about our gratitude for their work and time in our community. But when Mike McAteer stood to speak, clearly touched by this simple meal. He said in his 29 years of working in contaminated communities, this was the first one to receive this outpouring of gratitude. We almost made him cry. And that almost got me, too.

How little it takes to show we care. We will all remember that moment and jump into wondering what kindness we can give the next person, group of people who choose to serve us in whatever way they do.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
https://myrtk.epa.gov/chems?ID=000100425
https://enviro.epa.gov/triexplorer/tri_factsheet.factsheet?pstate=OK&pcounty=Ottawa&pyear=2017&pParent=TRI&pDataSet=TRIQ1