We had many speakers at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek but it was the "Ted Talk" that did what our conferences were designed to do. Twenty years ago our federal and state agencies did not communicate with each other about our environmental issues. Our conferences brought citizens together with the agencies and hoped they would begin discussions. A few years later EPA announced their Memoranda of Understanding allowing but actually mandated agencies to work together. This year the public got to see what that looks like.

First Lori Yearout, epidemiologist with the Oklahoma State Department of Health revealed bad news:  the number of lead poisoned children in state designated Tar Creek zip codes is DOUBLE the percentage of lead poisoned children in the state and even higher in 2015 and 2016. Our kids are still being poisoned. If you have not had your yard tested, do it now, do it for your neighbors' kids and your own. More calls, more funding comes to get more done, call 1-800-522-0206 to have your yard tested. Our kids are lead poisoned TWICE the STATE OF OKLAHOMA's average.

What else can we do? Dr. Emily Moody from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City told us the very best thing we can do is wet mop. That would include wet dusting as well. Fine particles in OUR dust can contain lead and other harmful metals and you don't want to scatter them, you want to capture them so they will not be inhaled or land on items that go into your mouth or your child's. Dr. Moody explained no matter our age, we want to limit our exposure to lead, eat healthy foods and get this, lower our stressors.  

Back to Ted. Ted Schlueter with the Oklahoma Area Indian Health Service revealed startling news. He had tested wells of tribal members and was shocked to find lead in a private water well 3 times higher than the standard acceptable by EPA for municipal wells. He was able to find funding to connect some homes to rural water but he had found another one and knew all of the tribal wells in the northeast Ottawa County should be tested.
He presented tables, Google maps, addresses, amounts of lead in each well and then showed the Google map of the other tribal homes that still needed to be checked. It got quiet and then the magic of pulling us all together as one happened.

First the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality Project Manager spoke up and asked some questions, then Tim Kent with the Quapaw Tribe said a sister county in our Tri-State Mining District had connected ALL private wells in their county to rural water so no one was using a private water well in the Boone aquifer and EPA was able to do that and that there ought to be a way for EPA to do this work for Ottawa County.

Ted had showed the Google map indicating where the household was with the high levels of lead in the well water. LEAD Agency passed on PUR water filters for the homeowner to use in the interim to provide safe drinking water to the household. PUR donated 50 filters this year to help our community.  

Water connects us and our hope is that we protect our people by providing good water, but we have to be watchful to protect this drinking water source as we know there are intrusions of bad water to the Roubidoux that still need to be found and corrected.

We connected back to an earlier session on the expansion of poultry farms in northeast Oklahoma, all of which will be pulling massive amounts of water from the Roubidoux, this precious resource, this lake below this region we are counting on to be there as the water resource for our future.

1994 was a pivotal year. President Clinton signed Executive Order requiring fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Our keynote speaker Charles Lee was a key player in the environmental justice movement and we like to believe our conferences have been aimed at making sure environmental justice was included on our agendas.

In a 1994 letter from Don Acherman to EPA on display in my office he documented his concern that 34% of Indian children were found to be lead poisoned by the Indian Clinic in Miami. This letter caused EPA to respond with follow-up testing random kids proving children in our mining towns and Miami were too. EPA responded targeting high access areas first where children played then began yard remediation that is still in effect now for all of Ottawa County to protect children from lead poisoning.  All these years later, IHS got EPA's attention again with shocking numbers that will have to be responded to. Don Acherman and Ted Schlueter worked for the same agency, in the same position doing the same kind of work. Both spoke out seeking to share information to bring awareness to a public health emergency both deserve our gratitude.

If you missed the conference you will be able to see it and Michael Woodruff's skills on LEAD Agency's facebook page.

Respectfully Submitted with hope all are provided Safe Drinking Water,
Rebecca Jim

At a house near Tar Creek last week, I rang the doorbell only once not knowing if anyone would answer, as many people are gone during the day.  I stood and waited when I finally heard the question, who's there? from the other side of the door. I answered with my name only to hear from the inside, "Rebecca Jim, the infamous woman?!"
The woman opened the door and welcomed me inside. We stood and talked nearly an hour and she had read my columns and quoted one of them to me. It is really an honor to have the opportunity to share thoughts, experiences and really to be allowed to know someone new.  

A professor of Geology and her colleague from Emporia State University were bringing two students to recreate a USGS study completed in 2008 by William Andrews. He had been interested in learning more about the historic metal loading of the stream banks along Tar Creek. They hoped to learn what had happened in the ten years since his study was completed and with her permission the academic team would be able to walk to the creek on her property to collect samples and she agreed.

But she wanted to know more about the Man on the Log who had been in a previous column and where his place was and looking out  the window getting my bearings, he was really only a few blocks from her home. I told her she needed to have a log, too. Imagine all the folks along the creek could become Tar Creek Watchers! She like many of us feed the birds, but birds can be an indicator species, like the "canaries in the coal mines" of old. Two recent studies of the birds of Tar Creek will be discussed at this year's conference on the 2nd day and our pollution can harm our birds, come find out how.

The researchers came that day and were working the other side of the creek when the 3 volunteers and I found them. Dr. Schulmeister began immediately teaching about soil and the metals they would find just as my phone rang, there in the wilderness along the creek. It was Sharon Learner who is a journalist researching the connection between exposure to lead and criminal behavior. I stepped away to talk with her, found a big rock and checked for snakes before sitting on it. The soil lesson was continuing, everyone engaged either teaching or learning, just as the frog leaped by 3 feet high and reaching wayout with his frog arms after each jump. She was jumping for her life because a SNAKE was pursuing her aggressively with his head extended a foot off the ground, LIKE A COBRA. I hollered "SNAKE" because the frog was leaping toward the soil lesson. It took two more "SNAKES!" before they heard me and scattered, with allowed the frog to get away and the snake to give up.

Dr. Schulmeister will be speaking at our conference next Tuesday as one of the educators who have been using the Tar Creek Superfund site as her outdoor classroom for years. Sharon Learner will be in the audience and is interested in meeting people who have or have relatives who want to help her better understand the relationship between lead and criminal or aggressive behavior. Ms Learner has met numerous death row inmates who had nothing else in common but the fact they grew up in places near Superfund Sites, like ours that had lead as the "contaminate of concern" EPA had identified for cleanup.

Community Science is a new term, replacing Citizen Science and Luz Guel, the Community Engagement coordinator at  the Mount Sinai Transdisciplinary Center on Early Environmental Exposures in New York City will be addressing us Wednesday right before noon. We are all about collaborating with health professionals who know how to get a message out there so people find it interesting and act on it. This type of help is welcome from all sources.
Each year we wonder what will be on the cover of the Tar Creek Conference Program. This year both the front and the back images are woodcut prints from Dawn Hill's Miami High School art students, Trinity Smith's Stinky Fish and Fish Surviving by Tashauna Miles.

We think of the cover as our Winter Count image, the event each year that marks it in our collective memory of the "thing" that happened that year. We believe these young people nailed it, with the dead fish we saw in Tar Creek last summer and the image on the back: our hope for healthy fish in the future.

You can get your copy at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek next week September 25-26 at NEO in the Ballroom. Pick it up, stay and learn, become engaged or enraged, have some time with infamous people, state officials and activists. For more information and a schedule of events check www.leadagency.org.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I am really proud to be a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance serving as the Tar Creekkeeper for our very own small stream, damaged as she is, she is still ours, running from just inside Kansas until she meets and flows directly into the Neosho River, bringing all her heavy metals, every day.

The Clean Water Act passed in 1972 was made to protect this stream and other flowing waters throughout the country from pollutants that until then had not been regulated. This Act was set to make all our waters cleaner, but with time powers with influence  have whittled away some of the strength of this Act. We all need clean water and we need the folks that know how to fight for it. The Waterkeeper Alliance is one of those forces and they joined with another powerhouse, EarthJustice to speak up in a big way this week AND I and LEAD Agency's Grand Riverkeeper are standing with them for water.

Clean water, we all need it, we all deserve it and boy as the old proverb says, we are going to miss it when the well runs dry. Wells just counties away from us are going dry already and the reason is more wells dug deeper and running full blast are lowering the water levels in the aquifers they pull water from. A dry well is bad news and the end of an era for homeowners who have been pulling from it for generations. What has changed? What is happening? More water is being pulled out by the already numerous large poultry facilities and with the new expanding 100 houses coming in,  our country neighbors in counties nearby are organizing to protect their water. This can be us since 3 facilities with 300,000 chickens have applied for permits from the Department of Agriculture, 3 miles from Miami, OK. So the issue is ours and about to be. We need to learn more about the aquifers below us and the how quickly they can be depleted and how we will deal with that.

These are our issues and we will cover them at the upcoming 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek. Daniel Estrin is the General Counsel for the Waterkeeper Alliance and he will be on deck the second morning of the conference to outline why and how we are buckled up to fight for clean water. This week we joined a lawsuit against those who want to make it easier to pollute without repercussions.

The Clean Water Act has had amendments through the years that have made it weaker and the last administration rebooted it to protect the Waters of the United States, for us, for our use and future use. This created an uproar amongst those who believed water was already being protected TOO much. Many states including ours sued the EPA to basically make it more legal to pollute. EPA, under Scott Pruitt who had been one of the States Attorney General who had sued the EPA himself to wind those regulations back, then sat down with his former AGs and lessened our water's protection, but not enough for them. The legal fight continues. Now, LEAD Agency, the Waterkeeper Alliance and EarthJustice are on EPA's side trying to KEEP Clean Water alive in the courts.

The new weaker rules the States including ours are fighting for will make polluting our water much easier for industry and for agriculture. If you think back to this summer when our Tar Creek turned black, the Clean Water Act mandated attention, it caused every agency federal and state to come investigate and find the source and MAKE it stop. That bad water flowed into a stream bed that was dry at the time, and the mess flowed into another lay of the land that was dry at the time and then entered our Tar Creek. New rules would say that is not polluting. Do you want that? If you are the Man on the Log do you want that? If you are the kids discovering a creek running that close to your house that you could sneak out to swim in it and be back before you were missed. Or what if you saw those fish and went the next day and found only dead ones. Clean Water Act needs to be stronger, not weaker. We all need clean water and we are going to have to fight for it. But boy is it worth fighting for.

A bunch of this story will be discussed at the 20th National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek. We will learn from J-M Farms how shocked they were that they were the source of the bad water that killed fish in Tar Creek. You will learn from those who were charged with the investigation what they discovered and from the Secretary of Agriculture, James Reece who heads the agency with the regulatory authority to make sure cleanup occurred. This will be followed by the efforts and changes that have been made by the company to insure the agency and us that it will not happen again. The public needs to know and we are providing this opportunity for you.

Register early for the conference at www.leadagency.org or call our office 918-542-9399. You won't have to wait in line. You won't want to miss a moment.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim