If you had 4 minutes to say something to someone in power what would you say?
 
At the National Service Learning Conference in Atlanta Kindel Maymi and I learned elevator speeches  from  Cathy Berger Kaye. Be ready if you were on an elevator with someone for only one floor, but your extended speech if you got to ride up several more floors. When lined up to get into our plane at the airport, I did it. Senator Inhofe was standing a few people in front of me. I walked forward to speak to him. He won't remember that encounter, but I do. It was my first elevator speech. I thanked him for finding the funding to help Picher and Cardin's Voluntary Buy-out and that I hoped he understood it was not over, there was more to do at Tar Creek. 
 
That is more or less what I asked a crew of people to do this week. To practice an elevator speech to give to people who might have the power to do something for us and for Tar Creek. Albert Kelly, charged with the Superfund Program at EPA, along with the administrator's other senior advisor, Kenneth Wagner and his council, Erin Chancellor were coming to visit and their first stop was with us at LEAD Agency. Ken Wagner and Erin Chancellor arrived without Mr. Kelly who had stayed home with the flu. I loved that he took care of himself and us and stayed put but am sure he will come and when he does we will have had more time to practice.
 
A mother came with a lead poisoned child who experiencing developmental delays. He has lost his ability to speak whole words  and is now speaking only the first syllable of the words he used to know. She asked,  "Why is my son's lead level still too high?" She is on the list to have her yard tested for lead, and waits to see if that is the source of the lead. I explained we have many more yards left to test and that all should be re-checked if they were remediated earlier to ensure us they are safe for children. Keesha Bunch insisted the parks, playgrounds and daycares as well as yards must be clean. It's not just Picher, this is not over. 

Ottawa County Health Department nurse Amanda Burnett explained it is hard to get accurate numbers of lead poisoned children in the county because so few are getting checked since testing is only suggested not required for children at 12 and 24 months. 

Our community's newest dentist, Chris Robinson has a multigenerational connection to this place, eloquently expressed his concern and asked the officials for help since thousands of kids have had neurological damage and we have to stop it from happening in the future. He had a couple of actions on his list. The priority is to remediate the source. Stop the flow of metals, stop the bleeding. AND stop the commercial use of chat, stop sending this material all over the place to damage other communities.

Dr. Shirley Chesnut explained how her nurse thought children being referred in the early 1990's for hyperactivity were exposed to lead and testing confirmed it.  When working in mental health she found depression, bipolar and severe mental illness common. She explained lead affects the neurological system, affects the way the brain works. She is also concerned about the high numbers of cancer cases and remarked, "Get rid of the chat piles. Until the chat piles are gone, wind will be carrying the metals into our communities."

Jill Micka spent her childhood outside and often near the Neosho River. In 2010 she was diagnosed with end stage renal failure. She asked simply with tears, "How do you honor God?" She used to like to be outside, take kids fishing, but with the flooding, contamination is everywhere. We are being denied our old people and denied where our kids can play.

She was one of the only people to say she was grateful for the visit, but went on to say EPA doesn't have a good reputation here but that their visit helps. She ended with a comment, "There are gifts around here," and I would say Jill is one of them.
 
Organic gardener Kelda Lorax brought maps indicating where her garden and farms are but expressed concern about our soils and the re-loading they get from the windblown chat metals. She asked for help on how to test the foods we grow and consume.

Growing up with his own "chat sand box" John Scruggs by 2nd grade was on Ritalin for hyperactivity. 3 years ago he was diagnosed with leukemia and during treatment his Oklahoma Medical Center doctor stated he had many other patients from Ottawa County.

Earl Hatley our Grand Riverkeeper  said simply, Tar Creek itself is unacceptable. Discharge must be treated at Douthitt. Channel Tar Creek, keep chat from entering it. How many 5 year reviews can you say it just didn't work before you go back to the ROD and choose another remedy? He suggested pump and treat, lower the water table. During the dry time put chat back into the hole. The Boone Aquifer is written off but the water could be treated and the water used for good. 

Martin Lively spoke early asked that our stories be shared. Our best leave and don't come back. It is dangerous for a child to grow up here and businesses don't want to come. We need support from EPA to help us get this fixed. Everyone is ready to do their part, we have potential and are on the cusp of rebuilding. Help us do this.
 
We filled our EPA visitors' time with concerns and hopes -  suggestions for change and a chance to meet a  2 1/2 year old already struggling with the effects of lead poisoning.
 
Respectfully Listened to  ~ Rebecca Jim
 

I remember the sound and I remember my reaction. I hit the floor and the young person sitting in my office was covered with shattered shards of glass and wrapped somewhat with the maroon colored cotton curtain I had on the lower portion of the large opaque windows that lined the east wall of my office out in the center portion of the high school.

It was earlier that school year we all were shocked by the images of the world  trade center twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon burning. It was the year I decided to retire at age 52. I wasn't going to work in a school any longer. I was not going to fear the sound of bullets, I would fight heavy metal in another way, as an environmental activist.

I loved my job as a school counselor for the Miami Public Schools and am pleased with the efforts that have been made to provide safety at school.

But this week another high school was the scene of a tragic shooting. My work allowed me to counsel youth and give voice to their concerns and provide hope and plans for their futures. They trusted me and how humbling that always was.

I remember when I first started working at Miami High School with DeWayne Mead and Jeannie Hammons. We would stand out during the 10 minute morning break and lots of other passing periods and together we knew every student in the building. And one of us spoke to each as they passed by us. it was personal and effective. We knew you, your name and what might be going on with you, academically, if you needed help with graduation costs, if you were succeeding in speech and debate, who your boy or girl friend was and how that was going. Between the 3 of us we knew you.

There were times a lonely person would walk by and one of us would speak up and hoped to lighten their day.
We reached out and it taught me to keep doing that even after both Jean and DeWayne left. 2002 and the sound was the glass shattering because a student pushed another into the window.

it wasn't a gunshot, no one died, my window was replaced. i got up off the floor and cleaned the glass off the student it covered. But that shock never left. I can't believe what all the students in all the schools that have experienced school shootings since that time, all those who survived and walked out of their buildings alive, but changed in ways that words may have not yet been found to describe.

Years pass but those crystal moments in our lives have the ability to return just as vividly as if they had just occurred.
I went to the University of Texas the year after the shooting from the tower on campus. Oddly 17 people were killed that day in August 1966 just as 17 died the day I wrote this article. 52 years had passed between each of those killing days, 52 years I was when startled by what sounded like bullets breaking out the glass wall of my office.

We don't forget but the human nature we have to internalize stimuli and recreate emotions we had once experienced is powerful. All those years ago, I got a research pass from one of my professors at the University of Texas enabling me to go into the "stacks" which were the stacks of library documents kept in the tower. It was a treasure of documents normally only graduate students got the opportunity to use for their research.  And there I found and unrolled original treaties of tribal nations and other treasures. But on one occasion I made it to the top floor and noticed a door, opening it, I found myself in the open air peering through the very place that shooter the year before had stood, randomly shooting his 17 people below.

How can this all be different? Of course remove the guns.

But I often think of the other things we could do, and that might be to pay more attention to the people in our hallways. Know their names, seek out  ways to meet their needs. Practice mediation, find a way to be tolerant to the outcast and those who remove themselves. Help people find a friend. A friend can make all the difference in your life and the lives of the lonely. Help others find purpose and feel better about themselves.

We could reach back to a story of the tribes who formed the League of Five Nations and provided a pre-curser of the Declaration of Independence. There was a time a thousand years ago when the people were at war with each other. A Peacemaker came and their weapons were buried under a Great White Pine and the war ended.  Perhaps we can find a way to come to peace with our own and stop the killing done with weapons of war so our children can be safe in our schools once again.

Respectfully hoping for peace ~ Rebecca Jim

You make a Christmas list every year with the items to find for the people you care about. But do you ever wonder what is on their personal wish lists? Why don't we ask them? Want to know what is on mine? It isn't long. It starts with a Clean Tar Creek, followed quickly with fresh clean air to breathe.

How to get them, now that is another matter.How to get there on the Clean Tar Creek means there really needs to be more people adding that to their lists and saying it out loud to anyone who asks. And if they ask, "What do you mean by that?" A good answer would be, start with the creek herself, then add the whole superfund site with her name. The better answer would then, follow the "contaminant of concern"

EPA has designated for this site (which is lead) and follow it to where it comes to reside, and that would expand our Tar Creek to the Grand Lake O' the Cherokees and her watershed. Want every yard in Ottawa County tested for lead and have the loaded ones replaced with clean soil that won't poison another generation. Want it all. Just like the whole Harry Potter series not just the first with the name sake.Think about how cool that would be to have a useable stream running through the neighborhoods and through towns and the NEO campus.

We have got to start thinking it and planning how to enjoy the future she would bring to each bare foot stepping into it come summer.

The man in charge of the Superfund Program is a fellow Oklahoman and he could be coming to see our Tar Creek any time. What if you get to meet him? And he were to ask what ought to be done here at Tar Creek to fix it, make it better. What if you got one chance to tell him. But what if you didn't know what to say, or didn't think there could be anything that could be done to fix it, that it would have to remain a dead stream, one without a name as it flowed through our communities. Just dead water ignored because we all thought it was too hard, impossible to clean up. NOT WORTH THE TROUBLE.But it is fixable. It is do-able. But I promise you it will not be done without a community that begins to speak up and WANT IT.

When the man in charge of the EPA Superfund Program comes to town and starts asking around about Tar Creek, there better be someone who speaks up and claims her because he is coming and we have a shot at it and her future could be in your hands.

Want it cleaned up so it will quit spreading the heavy metals: lead, arsenic, cadmium and manganese downstream but also depositing it along her watershed every day and more so every single time there are heavy rains that spread her waters and flood dry lands near her banks, depositing those metals to be pulled up by the wild onions, the blackberries and every other plant that sinks their roots into it.

Follow that water until it meets the Neosho and leaves a delta full of metals in the river bottom and then flows the excess on down that river until it meets the other metal loaded Spring River to form the Grand River that is dammed 3 times before it meets the Arkansas River.That Grand Lake we love and know from the good times until now when her waters often bloom with algae, filled with the sink-full of metals and the toilet bowl of permitted allowances mix with our Tar Creek's metals to be the water that comes out of the faucets in households near and far from it for counties around.

Each one of the tap turners should be saying to the man in charge of EPA's Superfund Program, Fix Tar Creek. Boy howdy, now we would have a movement and that is how the things on the wish list get got. Rattle the bucket, ring the bell for the cause. What would it hurt to practice your elevator speech for the head of the EPA's Superfund Program.

Want Tar Creek clean, from her meager source in Kansas all the way to the bottom of the lake clean. There.If you never ask for it, it will never happen. How did Love Canal get cleaned up? Everyone in mass said clean it up.

We can do this. You have to believe, you already know I do.My wish list and probably yours will keep clean breathable air on it and together we will figure that one out, too.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

We have so much in common. It sometimes takes awhile to know that to be true, but take the time and there it is.

Fredas Cook drove his wife's car with Bhavana while Tim Jones and I rode in the back seat. It seemed more like a sentimental journey than a toxic tour as we passed by streets without names while the names of the missing homes and their owners were spoken aloud. Road after road, which looked much the same, different only by the mines' names and the size of the chat pile remaining. Watering trucks passed us and trucks loaded with chat raced by.

Weeks can pass quickly, too. Earlier this year AARP provided LEAD Agency the opportunity to have two assistants work with us and all this time "the Toxic Tour" was on the must do list for them. In December LEAD Agency got lucky again when a young woman from Western Illinois University sent an email out of the blue asking if we had an internship available for her. It was all she lacked to finish up a Masters in Public Health. So naturally after looking over her resume, YES was a definite answer. Bhavana came to spend 150 hours. We considered her background and the issues we face in this county and her plan came together on the project she has taken on.

But one day this week she took some time for her first tour of our superfund site.  What she discovered as we drove through the Tar Creek Superfund Site were the similarities our site has with her home state in India. There the mining is for coal, where ours was for lead and zinc, but waste can look much the same when it is left behind. We visited the Baxter Springs Museum where the photos of the young men who worked the mines looked back at us. We drove by abandoned poultry barns, which reminded she and I of an article we read just that morning about how the overuse of antibiotics in her home state's poultry houses could cause drug resistant diseases.

During a conversation over a meal we discovered a random connection of polio. Bhavana is a licensed pharmacist in India and one of her service projects there was to work in a community experiencing high incidences of poliomyelitis, most often called polio. She explained how she was able to find families and administer polio vaccine drops to prevent the disease. Across the table our guide reflected on his experiences as a child who had contracted polio after the flood in 1951. The disease, which is spread by a virus, can cause paralysis like it did for him for awhile. Though it is rare in the U.S. now, in her country it has not yet been eradicated.

My grandfather and another doctor were hired in the 1880's to vaccinate the Cherokees in the Cherokee Nation in what was Indian Territory for smallpox. Word would spread they were coming and Cherokees would be there waiting since they knew what horror smallpox was. I think Bhavana must have seen that eagerness in those neighborhoods in India as mothers made sure their children received polio vaccine.

Whatever we can do to prevent diseases and ensure there are cures that work for us, we must do and those curious souls amongst us must be encouraged. I won’t ever find a cure, but I will not stand in the way of those who might. And certainly once Bhavana's project is completed here correct treatment for some may be sought sooner.
Not all diseases caused by bacteria or virus have vaccines.  Preventing some diseases can be done by knowing more about exposures to toxins in our environment.

During events in 1984 and 1985 Union Carbide released chemicals in both India and in West Virginia that killed people and in 1986 Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act and established the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI).

Since the creation of the TRI Program, the information has provided a way for citizens to better understand possible sources of pollution in their communities that pose a threat to human health and the environment. This understanding can be the basis for actions and citizen empowerment. TRI also creates a strong incentive for companies to reduce pollution and be good neighbors in their communities.

The 2016 data has just been posted by TRI so I had to take a look. Typing OK and Ottawa and clicking GO, the pounds of toxic substances released in the county popped right up listing the industries releasing them. It was over a hundred thousand pounds released that year.

Then I breathed out and wondered how bad Craig County compared. I spend my days in Ottawa County, but I sleep in Craig County. So I went back to the home page and replaced the county with Craig and with resolve pressed GO, only to find ZERO toxic substances released in the county. There is a relief in that but a concern. On that report page for Ottawa County, the amounts have fluctuated over the years and each are listed with numbers creating concern.

The public and that’s us, we have the right to know these things and I would recommend you take a look.  

https://www.epa.gov/trinationalanalysis/where-you-live-2016-tri-national-analysis

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim