Ken Wagner came to Miami OK last February on what would have been my mother's 100th birthday. He was sent by Albert Kelly who was another one of then EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt's senior advisors at EPA headquarters. Ken Wagner has been chosen to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment come January.
 
When Mr. Wagner came in February LEAD filled the 2 hours he and Erin Chancellor spent with us with people who spoke of the issues citizens face in the Tar Creek Superfund site. As many as we could schedule got to meet him, and in this environmentally challenged county in Oklahoma, won't it be in our best interest to know he knows us, had sat with us and listened to our stories, our points of view, our fears and our hopes for the future.
 
Take some time, write a card to our Ken Wagner. We will stamp your welcome home or congratulation cards to him if you drop them by before mid-January. Won't it be great if he had a stack of them on his desk when he cracked the door open and sat himself down in his Oklahoma City office?
 
We are going to need a friend in state government who has been seen to have the ability to sit and listen. What made me think he did connect with us?  It was after listening to our Ottawa County Health Department nurse and lead prevention specialist and the mother of a lead poisoned 2 year old child with developmental delays who had lost his ability to speak whole words  and is now speaking only the first syllable of the words he used to know.
 
Before Ken Wagner left us he asked to know the name of that 2-year old lead poisoned child he met at the table with his mother. Mr. Wagner may not remember any of the rest of our names, but that child's, but he met us, sat and listened.
 
Elections have consequences and we have got to put our hopes in the hands of the folks with the keys to power, that they will use that power to protect our citizens, our environment and our precious little ones.
 
Now we have to hope that our new Governor will hand pick someone with heart, someone who knows Ottawa County, loved northeast Oklahoma, fishes our rivers and swims in Grand Lake and LIKES US to be head of Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Food.
 
As we all sat together with Secretary Jim Reese, our current head of ODAFF recently at the Afton Senior Citizen Center, lined up on the front row were the Grand Lake Water Protectors and many others who will be affected by the lack of regulations our state has put on the expanding poultry industry.
 
Every person who spoke had the attention of Mr. Reese, who admitted the Department of Ag had been "caught off guard" with over 200 requests for permits for new larger than life barns that flooded the agency over the last 2 years. What we saw was a person in a position listening and himself faced with the fact our state, our people and our water is sitting out here unprotected from this invasion.
 
But for the next month, he has the keys, and as he listened, I had hope he would use what power he has to cease, stall or in some way inhibit the expansion. I have that hope because people came, spoke up, shared their feelings and filled every chair in that facility, and were treated with respect. That is the least we can ever hope for, but the bigger hope is he will take that back and do what he can now in his remaining days. The other hope is the person who fills that seat next might be chosen carefully.
 
I grew up in West Texas, but my dad was from Vinita, had land in Craig County and knew when he retired he would return to live. I remember his 2 brothers taking turns calling him on the single phone in the hallway, telling him to hurry up and move back because all their friends were "dying like flies" and they needed his help attending all the funerals.
 
I am at the same age he was when he got those calls, and it is happening to me now, too, people dying like flies. But my regrets lie more for the fact many of those dying remind me that we must be an affected people, lately I am losing former students and even the children of former students. What affects us? our habits, our choices, but the wider environment we can do little to control, but if it could be making us sick, we must do what we can to make those who could improve it, DO IT.
 
We can learn from these senior officials the art of listening. We can reach out this season, let another person into your circle. Go to parades, breathe cold air deeply, enjoy the life you have, fight for another day even better than this one.
 
LEAD will be entering the parades this year, watch for the Jeep with the kayaks on top and the message: We Want Clean Water! That's what we want for Christmas!
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

You might have met her. If you experienced damages from the 2007 flood in Miami, or if you had lived in Picher and had damages from the tornado that hit almost a year later, you might have had to deal with FEMA. Joan Lewin was here, working with FEMA, helping us get through the disasters that had hit Ottawa County, too quickly.

Last week the news coverage of the Camp Fire that had burned down the town, of Paradise, California, didn't mention Joan Lewin lived there and that disaster had found her this time. She lost her town, her home, but got out with her dog and her son, when many were lost, burnt to death in the fire, a fire so hot, dental records could not be used to identify bodies and cadaver dogs are over stimulated by what they are encountering as they do their gruesome work searching for remains.

Joan Lewin waited 2 days before posting on Facebook she was ready to get to the work she knew how to do, help people in crisis find their new lives.

As we experience Thanksgiving, what can we be thankful for? We need to be thankful that there are Joan Lewins in the world, people who get their breath after tragedy and dive in to find ways to serve others in the ways they know how to do. Keggy Roark did it after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. He knew how to make some of the best barbeque you might ever be lucky enough to consume. He simply closed down all his local interests and took his equipment and started cooking barbeque for the workers there at the site in OKC.

We have much to be thankful for. When we were hurting but also numb from loss, FEMA helped bring us to our new normal by providing the assistance they could. They also helped survivors find a new source of frustration and perhaps an agency to focus it and their anger. Starting over is never easy and  red-tape helped us figure out, starting over would be hard and personally costly. The U.S. government provides assistance but not a full-fledge do over.

Our new normal is now being experienced by thousands of survivors of the largest fires in California history. Joan Lewin’s hometown is gone, a city twice the size of Miami, OK with over 70 dead in the flames or the smoke, and a thousand more still missing. Their FEMA office has the usual service representatives, Social Security, Veterans Affairs, housing, loans, but at the FEMA office for the survivors of the Camp Fire, DNA swabs are being taken to better be able to identify the remains that are otherwise unrecognizable.

During the FEMA sessions we had in Ottawa County in 2007-8, I got to serve as a counselor through Grand Lake Mental Health, walking neighborhoods and listening, offering what listening eases and sharing information, since facts and services can be tangible service, too. During those times, I got to know Joan Lewin.
 
It was later that year, she picked me up in Sacramento, California and we drove to Chico for a Sustainability Conference hosted by California State University, Chico. We were scheduled to speak together for a session entitled, ‘Learning from the Tar Creek Superfund Site: Land Restoration and Community Recovery after Natural and Man-Made Disasters that contaminate the land and water—and how you can help your own community recover."
 
Yes, it was Joan Lewin who helped me understand the other disaster we had and continue to face is the man-made disaster left by mining companies after the lead and zinc played out here leaving us the toxic mess we are enduring.
The Oxford Dictionary has announced TOXIC as their 2018 word of the year, since toxic "seems to reflect a growing sense of how extreme, and at times radioactive, we feel aspects of modern life have become,” Oxford released in a statement recently.

The Tar Creek Superfund site and use of the word toxic perhaps helped propel the word to be chosen, as the choice is made by the number of searches for its meaning on the Oxford website.

Joan drove me through her Paradise, since it was only 12 miles from Chico, our destination. Earlier that same year, there had been fires that burnt the hillsides and were evident as we drove through what remained of the forest that November on the curving roads. I can visualize how driving those roads with thousands of people fleeing from this fire clogged the escape route, seen on the news, lined with the cars that did not make it.

Chico, sitting 12 miles away is now a tent city with thousands of the former residents of Paradise in tents, campers, wondering what on earth is next. Grief would be heavy there, and I am sure the walking counselors have been deployed and hard at work, listening to the horrifying stories of escaping and the fears and sorrow for those who they fear did not.

But what else did Joan post? Of the help they are receiving, the kindnesses that abound.

Soon she will be speaking of the New Normal she and her survivors will now seek, the one we have already found.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have known this about me, but I am an optimist. It is a hard thing to carry off, optimism in a world full of toxins and their polluters. It is absolutely awesome the power of the people when they band together and raise their voices for the greater good. That is how change happens, that is how the bald eagle is no longer endangered, that is how smog is a thing we don't have to talk about anymore.

There are times when just a few voices can do magic, but to stop the invasion in the county of the mega chicken houses coming to the horizon near you sucking up the water your children could have counted on for their generation, this is not a time to be silent. One set of 6 mega houses will be near what might have used as a huge tourism draw to see the Ribbon Road and can change the esthetics of the Oklahoma they might have wanted to see "where the wind comes sweeping down the plains" when the site and the possible smell hits our tourists, our countless Route 66 bicyclists and European travelers with their convertibles and the packs of brand new motorcycles who pass through here may hurry on by.

Protect what you have while you can. Speak out and loudly, together if you can and it will sound like Ron Stowell's Chorus Class: pure beauty. If you did that as a community and demanded clean air, clean water, you might get them. But I will promise you it is easy to lose when you are already loosing by accepting what you already have. It is amazing what can happen and has been shown to happen when the gears start working here.

How did the Coleman Theater get restored? How did the Quapaw Nation get the first contract to cleanup a superfund site, their own? How did the towns of Picher and Cardin get a federal buy-out? Power to the people. I rest my case. We can win them all. BF Goodrich could be first made safe and then cleaned up, the lead levels in our children can be zero like other communities around the country, the infiltration of mega-poultry houses can be stopped now. We don't have to let corporate goals be empowered by our local or state leaders and your silent acceptance.

The term fence-line neighbors defines a group of your country friends who are calling themselves Grand Lake Water Protectors who will be sitting on the front row at a meeting Monday evening Nov.19 at 6:30 p.m. in Afton at the Senior Citizens' Center in order to ask questions of Jim Reese, with the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry about the mega-chicken house expansion coming to Ottawa County and about to be their fence-line neighbor. They could use your help, attend that meeting and the ones that follow as this group grows their power to protect our future.

Nettie Detherage organized the first meetings, pulling in the Cherokee Nation, the county commissioners and GRDA and now she is bringing us together in Afton for this opportunity to speak with the man who signs the permits for these facilities. There will be more meetings and they will need your support.

A man who identified himself as Peter called last week just as Lois Lively and I were attaching the shower curtain rings onto the banners Academy students had created demanding cleanup of the BF Goodrich site. He asked if he could get copies of all the documents we had concerning BF Goodrich. It was one of those moments you might have had when you actually look at the phone in disbelief that that question could have been asked at a more remarkable moment.

Before answering I asked, "who are you with?" He was the attorney representing both BF Goodrich and Michelin Tire Companies, while we were on the floor attaching messages we very much hoped he would be able to see because he was coming to Miami this week. We practiced putting the banners up on the fence, got photos and saved the banners for reuse.

Wouldn't it have been great if he was coming to let us know those companies had decided to offer our community closure, compensation and a trail to reparations? to listen to the people who were made sick from exposures, those who live over the benzene plume, those who have buried relatives who had worked at the plant and given their lives for the livelihood the work provided their families. He could consider the lost property values and the utter mess that does nothing to inspire the youth of the community who go to school just yards from the abandoned, demolished mess it currently is.

The attorney did not want to consider the "pond" north of the plant where all the liquids from the plant were discharged  or the "dump" because DEQ had closed it years ago with clay and BFG's benzene is simply "mineral spirits." He dismissed every concern any citizen would have listed but apologized for coming a day early because he had forgotten he had to be in court AGAINST OUR FRIENDS representing the companies the following day.
That visit was disappointing. My spirits dampened by corporate America, but as Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Music heals all forms of misery."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

We might have thought of BF Goodrich as the rich man who built a plant that put your daddies to work and made sure a lot of their children got to get educations so they never had to work a dirty job like they did. That happened, but BFG built other plants just like ours in other places near rivers, made messes that got left behind and eyesored their neighborhoods, too. But the sites are also landmarks like Akron, Ohio where they were forced to remove the upper parts of the iconic smokestacks since the bricks were no longer stable. 

The Toxics Release Inventory had not been invented when our BF Goodrich plant was operating, but the his sister site in Tuscaloosa, Alabama listed #s released into the atmosphere last year, letting us imagine how many tons of emissions belched out of ours all those years of operation. Many families who lived in the neighborhood remember the carbon black if they did laundry and hung it out to dry, or had a car they doted over. But anyone who was in Miami remembered that smell. Where there is smell there are emissions and we must have been recipients of a lot of what came out.

One sister site in Calvert City, Kentucky is a superfund site and the site in California is damaged, too. The site in Thomaston, Georgia had what we have, "liquid" and asbestos and it was deemed a removal only site, which sounds like a quick and easy-fix  for those Contaminants of Concern which are determined to be concentrated and may cause harm to humans if exposed.

Benjamin Franklin Goodrich made it big with rubber and when Akron, Ohio residents raised $13,600 dollars to encourage him to choose their site, he made it the Rubber Capital of the World for a time. He made real money when he made tires that could be inflated with air, air is cheaper than rubber, first for bicycles, then for cars.

The City of Miami supplied the land for our BF Goodrich plant. And the City waits patiently for the land to be returned to it. With renewed ownership the city could pursue cleanup through a Brownfields program EPA offers, a way to make wasted land reusable. But ownership has been hard to come from out of state owners who hold firm to titles. But the guy with the cape in this story is a humble official who works for EPA and has worked in our county years back on the Tar Creek Superfund site. He knows us. He knows we have issues and that this is an environmental justice site, a place where it has been piled higher and deeper on us and our health and wealth has suffered from our exposure and damaged unusable lands.

Manufacturing plants like to be built near rivers, generally so their products can ship easily but I wonder if it might also be easier for discharges to go unnoticed into water. But a much easier way might be to let it seep into the ground, in our case creating a plume of benzene some 8 to 12 feet below the surface under part of the abandoned plant and stretching into the neighborhood receiving some treatment and monitored periodically. At the Goodrich site in Kentucky it was required to pump and treat contaminated groundwater to prevent its discharge to their river, that would be their Tennessee River.

Say lead, think Tar Creek Superfund site and chat piles, but the BF Goodrich plant in Tuscaloosa up until 2010  was admitting they were emitting lead in their air emissions which also included 109,277 pounds of other chemicals according to the Toxics Release Inventory.

We know there are health concerns with our Goodrich site, asbestos and the benzene, but is that all there really is? Has the site really been assessed fully? We want asbestos and benzene removed, the debris cleared off, the deep pits secured. But what about the rest of the site? the oozing discolored water, the dumps many workers say are north of the site, and off site closer to the river, our Neosho.

If our caped EPA man is coming he will need to convince our PRP's, our real Potentially Responsible Parties to come and do what is right, to enter into an agreement for clean up for that piece of land and return it repaired to the city who gave it 75 years ago. That would be one of the honorable things that could be done to help this community end this relationship on the good faith it began.

In a 2016 Joplin Globe story the Dobson Memorial Center hosted a get-together for BF Goodrich former workers 30 years since the plant closed, there is a photo of 3 former workers inside the fence with one holding a brick. We know you served your families well, dear former workers, don't cross those fences and take souvenirs anymore, the gates are posted with warnings about the asbestos, not to enter without a respirator. Let's let the man with our future in his hands take it from here. Be ready to show him where the dumps are, let me know if you are willing.

Miami Academy students and their faculty are broadcasting our hope, "Get IT Done, ASAP" with banners, letters and much more will follow.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

My son drove me and Martin Lively to Bonne Terre, Missouri to see the lead mine which is open for tourists and we got to be them one recent afternoon. I rode in the back seat reading Union Busting in the Tri-State, The Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri Metal Workers’ Strike of 1935, by George G. Suggs, Jr., a book my son had bought for 10 cents at a book sale in the library in the town Will Rogers was born near.

Reading the book got me in the mood for the venture to Bonne Terre and provided appropriate questions to ask upon arrival about the history of the mine and their experience as a superfund site. The guide denied any need for a strike at their mine, as the miners were paid living wages. Garrett Couch, a resident of Bonne Terre had told me about the mine last summer and how perplexed he was that “buy-out” was never an option for their city built on top of their mine, with much of the city undermined as Picher and Cardin had been.

As we entered we saw what our miners might have seen when they arrived to work. We experienced the wonder of the space, the moisture of a deep lead mine whose upper level is used for tours  while lower levels are flooded with clear water used by scuba divers. Even Jacques Cousteau spent 5 days there exploring. Lead was found not too far below the surface in the town, but several things were different than the mining in our Tri-State District. In Bonne Terre, had a fellow running the mine, who wanted to live there. What we saw beneath the surface were the random pillars in the mined caverns, but they were in their traditional shapes, not carved and chiseled to create subsidence risk. We also learned the wages provided a living for the miners, well enough they were able to purchase livable homes in their town just above the lead mine they hollowed out beneath.

At this mine, they walked in and they walked out to their main street. But it was still a lead mine and much like us, became a superfund site. Their home's yards were contaminated with lead and remediated like many of ours have been and still need to be. But their town is undermined, a town of 7,000 people. Buyout didn't come up as an option for them because no study was done to predict the subsidence risk, so cleanup happened and the chat they had in yards and playgrounds became a huge mound right in town that grass doesn't thrive on, but a cover of rocks, clay and some soil cover it all. It is a chat pile you cannot miss made of the waste from their mine.

My face felt wet like a mist that forms slowly on a windshield. The miners would have had hard hats and would not have felt the drips coming from the roof of the mine that we felt hit our uncovered heads suddenly as the rain water filtered through that stone ceiling above us.

As we walked through the man-made caverns their work was evident everywhere, shovels left leaning here and there. But up high in the rooms scaffolding was left strapped near the roof and guy wires pounded to the pillars for miners to work. They would have heard the sound of the attack made by man to the earth, the very structure of the earth beneath their homes.

We always heard of the random pillar technique used in the Tri-state district mining field. But at Bonne Terre, we saw the pillars are big like legs of monster elephants, but they were much closer together than I imagined, as if they cared about the land above their heads, or the company cared about the men's lives below. We felt small in those rooms we wandered through and felt sensations of true awe to see the earth's ribs showing all around us. Local mining lore tells when a new “room” was blasted open and light hit it, the newly exposed faces of the minerals and metals shone like a fairyland. Our guide had heard about the Tri-State District and Picher’s mines and the unique specimens of metals and minerals which have ended up on display in museums around the country.

Honorable hard working men spent their youth and their health in those mines and in our local mines.  When our mines played out, many moved on to factory labor with the BF Goodrich Tire plant in Miami. They labored there and were followed by their sons who carried on that tradition just as sons had followed fathers to the mines. Today many may live in the neighborhood near the abandoned plant and see it in ruins and live with fear of the benzene that lies beneath and the asbestos that has been left behind in the deep and in the power house might still find ways to harm their health.

Bonne Terre is proof a superfund site could be cleaned up. Ours will take longer because of its size. 
BF Goodrich isn’t a superfund site but it's a mess that needs a cleanup that is long overdue. Say it like you mean it, make it Bonne Terre, Good soil.

Through the years there have been casual comments generating some tinge of laughter when Tar Creek comes up, with the quip about the Tar Creek Monster. Art students have depicted the monster in various ways. One of my all time favorites, was Meredith MacQueeney's done simply with pen and ink. But I saw him for real the other day myself. He can be found not far after leaving the Neosho River upon entering the mouth of Tar Creek. He doesn't greet you as you enter, he is more the sentry for those who leave.

As the Tar Creekkeeper, and using my vessel, the kayak bearing its name, I went down the ramp at Riverview Park to find the confluence of the creek from the Neosho River. Butch Flick, who had recently returned from being a fishing guide in Alaska agreed to accompany. The ramp was muddy but the launch easy, witnessed by the folks visiting in separate vehicles. The Neosho is a brown river but easy mover. It is a lot farther to the train trestle than it looks, but just before the bridge over the highway, turn left and there you are in the slow to sluggish for sure "Tire Creek," the tire always visible along this stream, Tar Creek. There is little evidence it is ever found. It is wide and slow. The big trees bare the orange stains of the past floods.

The Blue Heron complained along our route for the intrusion. And a big fish or his brothers leaped for joy to have us there. Quiet and slow. Both sides of the creek's wild spaces were slowly joined by tree stands back from the water indicating some people join the site during certain seasons. What we found was the makings of a treasure, a wildlife refuge, practically untouched. We came upon 2 fellows standing on the bank, one owned 30 acres with 300 pecan trees he had just listed for sale. Land is a hard thing to give up, didn't Will Rogers say, "they ain't making any more of it?"

But this land this creek will get a brand new start, once EPA is funded enough to get to it. It is complicated, first fix it in Kansas, then follow it, keep chat from the big piles from getting into it, dreg what bad is in it and then figure out how to deal with the mine water discharge, keep dredging it all the way to the other train trestle, the one past Twin Bridges. With funding this could already be over and Luke could get that land sold, or be glad, very glad he kept it as its value increases with the clean stream he would have on both sides of him.

We have to think about this stream and figure out how we keep it clean, and then we have to consider all those sister streams and those unnamed streams that feed into streams that must be protected. That means we have to think hard about choices we make now that may impact our neighbors. Each of us with portions of land must think hard about holding on to it or making restrictions on our deeds that will end up protecting our heirs and their neighbors. What we do to the land we do to the water. And we all need water and all the future generations must have it too.

When we consider the future, we must think big. It is heavy the responsibility we have. Do we protect the land owners right to pollute your air, your water, your land? How right is that?

The Tar Creek Monster is really there, it is the choices made many years ago to fail to spend the money to keep pumping out that aquifer so water would not hang out long enough to become toxic and taint us for the rest of our lives. The monster is the choice humans make that create the monsters that will haunt us, poison our children and make our lives intolerable.

My homework is to study the Oklahoma Agriculture Statutes. This section looks out for Agriculture, not our land, our water or our people. Ag is for Ag. Those pages indicate a lot of laws have been repealed, sections of our anti-corporate farming laws, because our early Oklahoma lawmakers already knew about corporate farming and put protections for us and those laws have been degraded since 1992 when Big-Ag started seeing our plains as gains for their companies.

Kent Ryals, an attorney in Vinita said that can be changed. I agreed and legislators need help in making the laws protective of what is important, our future. What we also need are people who want the laws changed, not to infringe on farmers, which there aren't that many of anymore. But to help farmers make good choices and the state's future. We need no more monsters, no more degradation.   

My other homework can be shared. Pick up a pen and write your letters now. Have an opinion. With the election coming up soon, write to those running for governor, since the winner will be appointing people who will serve in positions of power in every department of our state government. Elections have consequences and we must give the right to protect us seriously when we vote.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I grew up with parents who enjoyed time together. But every so often they would Rooster Fight. Each would pull a bent arm up close to their body and then flap it a time or two before the "fight" began. It never seemed like a real fight because they both began to laugh and it was over practically before it began. It was my kind of chicken fight.

But what we have happening right now is a Chicken Fight on a much larger scale and no one is laughing. It is just now reaching Ottawa and Craig County, but our sister counties are covered with trouble already.

It is time to join the Oklahoma Chicken Fight for Water and our Future. You can begin right away. No one has to know you have joined. You can start in your very own house, or on your break at work. Make a decision to do something. That phrase, see something, say something, that was made for us. Go in your kitchen, turn on the tap, see the water? Want to keep seeing water you can drink? Then, yes, say something about it.

Who will you tell? You can start with your household members and they can pass it on. We can inform the people we know that water and a healthy future is at stake.

Then what? Tell every local elected official you are concerned and you want them to speak up. Every local tribal elected leader. They all respect our Mother Earth and know Water is Life. Call the next layer of elected officials, the Governor and everyone running for Governor. Call the Secretary of Agriculture and Forestry James Reese and each of his board members. Good start. Then call every other agency that has something to do with water in the State of Oklahoma, and by all means call the Oklahoma Water Resources Board.

Many of us learned to write letters while we were in 5th grade and because of email and texting, we probably haven't written one since, but this would be a great time to start. Write all of those folks you called, as a follow up. Just like in texting, use ALL CAPS SO THEY KNOW YOU ARE SERIOUS. And you really could TEXT most of them too, without a stamp.

The dirt is being moved on new chicken houses south of Miami and north of Vinita. Each of these BIG ones are 3 football fields long. Some of us can't even walk that far without getting winded. But once they come in getting winded could happen quick for folks you know who already have asthma and COPD. We could care about them and the air we breathe. We could protect the air quality and speak up for it to all those folks you contacted about the water quality.

Ottawa County has paid her dues, providing the lead for both World Wars and having the land left like it was the war zone. She dutifully provided jobs for breadwinners with BF Goodrich which now sits abandoned like a second warzone with fears of asbestos and Benzene beneath the ground nearby. Ottawa Countians have had generations of our youth lead poisoned and their potential and our communities' hopes for their futures dampened. All that heavy metal dust has fairy dusted all of us ensuring many lives have been lost years before their expected expiration dates. Tar Creek got hit in 1979 and has been the blight we want to forget as she runs silently past us and dumps her load of metals into the Neosho out of sight, just past the boat ramp in Riverview Park.

We are a Superfund Site with her name. We are a damaged place. Every resident in the county can have the soil they live upon tested for lead because it could have been spread and been long forgotten. But lead does not sleep, it will not cease having the power to harm children, no matter how long it lays there. It must be removed.

Craig County for the most part has protected herself all these years. We are not a superfund site, we did not grow with the influx of workers to a polluting plant like BF Goodrich. We have good people who breathe good air. Your neighbors need your support now. Your neighboring counties need your support now.

Vinita and the Rural Water District #2 drink Grand Lake. For an 18 month period ending last year we were all drinking water with HAAs which can cause cancer and other illnesses especially for our most vulnerable. That was because the lake water needed more chlorine added to kill what was in the lake water before you drank it. The chlorine changed our water. More chicken houses produce more litter and that litter can lie in the Grand Lake watershed and add to its burden which will cause it to be treated and that treatment can harm us. More chicken houses = more waste that will be distributed on the land, harming our Grand Lake or her sister lakes downstream.

We pay with our health, we pay for treatment and we pay for corporate farming. This is an industrial disaster come upon this land and her people that can harm our environment and suck water right out from under us. Chickens love water, just like you do. And when you have 300,000 chickens per house and 6 going in right away, you might want to add in your message that you want our Roubidoux to remain drinkable, the tap water you drink is at risk. Why?

It goes back to mining days, when they mined the Boone aquifer, and when they quit, water filled those abandoned caverns where it brewed into a Toxic Tea, not like J-M Farms Toxic Tea compost nutrient rich water that got loose and ran into Tar Creek this summer and killed fish. No this Toxic Tea is loaded with heavy metals, and when the caverns got full it has flowed down Tar Creek ever since.  The Roubidoux lies beneath the Boone and if lots of water is pulled from the Roubidoux, the Boone will try to fill it, and if it does, it can contaminate that tap water you like. You might not drink the Roubidoux but your Bluejacket and Ottawa County neighbors do.

Lots of chickens can drink lots of water millions of gallons per house quickly. So be quick with your letters, calls, texts. Very quick. It's your chicken fight now. My parents would be all over this one.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Our 20th National Environmental Conference began with environmental justice and ended with water. Trevor Hammons, the Supervising Attorney for Environmental Complaints with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality had presented at our annual conference and explained that there was water protecting us from being exposed to another dangerous substance, asbestos.  We were told water covers all of the asbestos that is left at BF Goodrich. One of our volunteers without our knowledge took a walk around that site -and came back with a flat light-weight fiber-covered item stuffed into a baggie.

DEQ was called immediately asking for the man in charge of asbestos sites in Oklahoma familiar with BFG, but he had retired and the new guy didn't know about the site, would look it up and get back with us. Our volunteer has left the state, but the site is here and a tempting place to take a walk about.

From our knowledge the only way left to be exposed to asbestos was to fall into the uncovered flooded basements, swim down a couple of levels grab some stuck to something, pry it off and bring it out of the water and dry it out. We remain concerned about the potential to cause harm left as it is.  The current owner left the state,  pays the taxes on the property to avoid the $10,000 a day fines that should be accumulating with DEQ.

There ought to be a way to be able to protect the public, clean up the site, deal with the benzene plume and rename the street after the other long standing building: Will Rogers, named after the man who never met the man who left that mess or the company that abandoned the town.

Waterkeeper Alliance asked all of their members to do a Clean Up in their watersheds in September. We listed it as an option for the Conference last week,  A Walk to Tar Creek and Clean Up, but no one signed up for it. We were going to walk to the creek that runs through the NEO campus right to the spot Jason Miller loves and not clean up the creek. Because number 1, we don't have the multiple millions it would take Number 2, we are regular  people and this is not a regular cleanup, this is a superfund site contaminated with heavy metals that are hazardous to people and obviously the environment. This will take a federal agency with big bucks to fund this, an agency and a program within it made special to handle this.

Even if we wanted to do a "regular cleanup" along the creek banks, pulling out debris and trash, should we? Every item would be covered with the superfund site metals and get all over us as we lift it and turn it to bag it. And where should the bag go? It would basically be toxic waste. Put it in the "regular" trash pickup?

How do we clean this place up? with power washers to the debris covered rocks? What about the fish eggs, the start of new life by the ones already taking up residences in our creek? Do we humans destroy other life to make our space look like we think "good" is?

We didn't have to explain this by the creek last week because no one signed up for the walk and cleanup. But imagine this creek gets her REAL CLEANUP and the metals are dealt with by the EPA through the Superfund Program created to be funded by fees placed on companies that manufacture substances that can pollute. So while we are imagining, we would include Congress re-authorizing that provision in the law so it is funded enough to do this cleanup with those fees and not be done with taxpayer funding from US.

THEN, we use the fire circle, Jason Miller brings his guitar, we have the cleanup and spend some time along the Tar Creek old timers remember singing the old songs and the news ones like the Tar Creek Anthem written by Jim Stricklan.

 This week brought some time to rediscover our Community Garden and a young woman in it getting  a couple of our home grown tomatoes who exclaimed they were the best birthday gift she had ever had.

She was a happy young woman vibrant active and as we pulled tomatoes and talked in the last light of the day, she told me I had been the woman who knocked on her door last year and found her beat up. But she got out of that relationship got a new life, a job and was totally unrecognizable now with her brand new life and tomatoes.

We can take the time to knock on a door, we can ask the big question, are you alright? Thousands of woman received help through the Community Crisis Center led by DeeDee Cox. Think of all the brand new lives she has been able to start.

I am hoping she in her retirement and they all get a garden going to share what they grow with the folks who wander by, and doing so ask those questions, are you alright? are you safe? Do you need help?

Our conference is available on the LEAD Agency Facebook page. Catch up and watch Channel 8 for the expansion of chicken houses in northeast Oklahoma series. Craig and Ottawa need to be concerned.
We care about water and all our efforts are needed to protect it. We require it for life.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
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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