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Think WATERSHEDS

7/31/2022

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We can get our head around the Tar Creek watershed, we know those ephemeral streams who catch up to her and add their flows to her stream. We even can get the Neosho watershed because with Tar Creek we get knee deep into them at high water events or watch as the roads close and we automatically reroute our days' errands. But think bigger. Let's think about the whole Tri-State Mining District and those combined watersheds and get the calculator out to find it is 2,500 square miles of lands that from 1885 to 1970 engaged in hard rock mining. And all the land that was gouged open, dug into, scarred and left with her innards strewn about for all the world to see or climb upon ooze out metals every time the rains come.

Water the source of all life, can move mountains, can carve canyons and will bring down and through this grand watershed the stuff that all that mining left behind and blend it with the sediment it scours away and takes that load far from its source and deposits it time and again downstream. Year after year, rain event followed by rain events, these deposits land on land that was never mined - but as if we never mind-ed, it lays those deposits over and over. The loads accumulating and the plants who grow there, that thrive can harm us.

There is a model that is being discussed, which will be a visual take on what exactly is happening in the big watershed that both EPA's Region 6 and Region 7 have released to the public for you to have a chance to give comments back to them, by August 3. Officially it is entitled: Draft Fate and Transport Model Analysis and Proposal for the Remedial Investigation and Feasibility Study for the Tri-State Mining District.

The document discusses and explains the virtual model and how it can be manipulated to illustrate the actual lands and the waters that flow on it, through it and lie beneath it. And what happens if any bit of the landscape changes and how that change can impact or improve the environment it leaves behind. Looking at it in this way, studying it, messing with this more in one bend of the creek, leaving this chat pile and then removing it. All done on a computer which can analyze those actions and give the designers of our future quick immediate feedback, rather than get the bulldozers out and move material for a couple of years and find then that those actions might have HARMED us. Using this model can speed up the actions that will occur. At least that is what this document brings to us.

Note the first words: Fate and Transport. Our fate actually is being the center of this document, but it never says THAT. Fate and Transport is the movement of contaminants in sediment and floodplain soils from where they are to where they end up as water moves them. This model can allow us to see the various contaminants of concern and how they travel from their there and to us where we are.

Our fate is determined by that stuff and how it travels.

There is a real study of how water travels the natural path water takes to cut and scour and then deposit. "Water cannot be contained within the banks of the creeks and streams, so the water spreads out over the floodplain (with) the natural path it has." The hydrology of the Tri-State Mining District is almost mind blowing. All that has laid and left as residue lies in this larger watershed and please imagine with me those creeks, streams and rivers and where that water flows and where it comes to reside.

Think on a GRAND scale. That was a hint. The watershed drains to and is captured in our Grand Lake o' the Cherokees. That same lake that holds the waters coming and allows some waters to flow on through and generate power, until in-coming water can no longer be only maintained in time and space and begins to gather and spread outside the boundaries holding it, backing up our water until it comes in our front doors. We have worried simply of our carpets getting wet and the work it takes to muck out our homes and businesses to start over, but how does our environment muck out? It doesn't. Layer after layer of muck from the Tri-State Mining District has spread out on the environment broadly for over a hundred years. Flood after flood.

And this will continue until that source material throughout the 2,500 miles is removed.

The model can use historical data and the model's keeper is asked you, the public, to comment on how else and what else to consider. You get a voice. I am planning to use mine and hope you will too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim




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Bales of Hay

7/24/2022

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Since I became LEAD Agency's Tar Creekkeeper, recognized by the Waterkeeper Alliance for being her best advocate, I have struggled to get my vessel from one place to the next. Hiking it up and onto my Jeep since you might not have noticed, my height has made this a challenge, until yesterday.

There in my barn are the last remaining square bales from hay we baled back after the 2007 ice storm. They have lost their prime and have dried out to be so light as to allow the smallest of people to lift them with one hand. And as such are the perfect step stool to use to stand upon to lift that kayak up and on for traveling.

People don't value square bales like they used to. Boys earned their first real money during summers of the past by working the hay fields, lifting those fresh, heavy bales up and onto a truck. They got stronger by doing it and used it as prep for the fall's football season. Technology has changed and tractors lift and carry those bales that teams of football players would have difficulty getting huddled around to move.

But the remnants have become my new method of mounting kayaks to service.

This week these also are assisting in gathering samples for the scientific research Wellesley College is conducting here in the Tar Creek Superfund site and where her contaminants come to reside. The value to us all is that others coming with questions may provide answers we had not known to ask.

Dan Brabander has a long history at this site, having accompanied teams of researchers in the 2000’s who looked both at human health but also the substances lying in our environment that we know impact our health. He, as others who have worked here, we have learned, come to never forget us. You, by the way, in the amazing way you are you, have been part of the reason, too. When a community is open to meeting strangers and providing information, greetings on the sidewalk, casual conversations at a café. You are remembered. And our site gnaws at them, too. Respecting us impounds their need to come back to wrestle with their universities, colleges, foundations to fund work that can ease our load of toxins and help us have an environment that seasons bring joys to enjoy.

So this week, Dan has brought his team of female students: Iris Cessna, Alice Dricker, and Leslie Monzon
and a former student, Claire Hayhow, who took her own vacation time from a job at the Silent Spring Foundation with actually another former researcher at our site. They are investigating for us the things that are required for life on this planet. Air, water and soil. They are exploring how we measure what and how much and how big particulates are that hang in the air we breathe. Samples are being taken at wetlands near chat piles, both of the plants that are thriving in them, but the sediment beneath and the water they release into our creeks. What about the orange staining on the trees we are now so used to seeing we don’t even see it anymore? They are XRF-ing it in the field checking for the levels of metals that reside ON our trees.

A fleet of vessels join us this morning as we lift off at Riverview Park with the Grand Riverkeeper boat, the Tar Creekkeeper kayaks, the 3-woman canoe, with Paige Hankins at the helm took off to take a core sample of the channel bar where Tar Creek meets the Neosho. Dan was with other researchers in those early years of this century and took a similar core there and brought it back to our other LEAD Agency office and laid it out on the floor of that building. It looked like a tiger-tail, with orange and black stripes, solid and tube like. And we are off to collect its sister this morning. With the cool morning, the rare coolness this morning, we hope to continue down to Twin Bridges to find the next one where the Neosho meets the Spring. I have heard it called almost a dike that is forming that may be helping to flood us in those high rain events. If we find it and can core it, Dan and his team can tell us what it consists of, and perhaps much more.

We are launching and would love for you to join us in future launches as we explore and try to better understand what lies beneath us, what we float upon, what our soils hold and what we are breathing.

In the meantime, be kind to strangers, they come back to find the answers to what harms us.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim



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GROUND GLASS

7/17/2022

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I recycle my glass. It hasn't been easy since the place in Vinita folded and quit taking any. We have all hoped Red Cedar or the City of Miami would take on recycling glass, but in the meantime, every quarter, I load up glass separated by color in old empty 16 pound cat food sacks that accumulate during that period of time at home. Once full, they line the back of the 98 Chevy pickup and go to Claremore to the MET.

There is really nothing louder than glass breaking when it gains speed on its way down into the metal bin and crashes against the floor, shattering into the slivers you do not want to have impale you.

But ground glass, is a term that hasn't been part of my experience. But is the title of the newly released book of essays by writer Kathryn Savage. Reading each page is a walk through a woman's discovery of place, her home-based place and those of others she would later encounter as she dealt with the deep feelings of loss and grief and how the places we hold as home can harm us as we simply live our lives in toxic places.

Kathryn shares the intimate remembrances of time with her father, who longed to live, but whose body could not heal. She comes to believe her neighborhood and so many others housed near industrial complexes could be at risk of exposures to what lies beneath in the aquifers, in the ground water and certainly in the air and soil.

 She and I have spent hours talking over the last several years. But what I didn't know is her conversations and visits to other toxic sites and the people we meet inside the pages of Ground Glass. Kathryn is a writer, and introduces us throughout the book to writers, poets and artists who have influenced the direction of her artistic search for the connectedness to land and in many times to land harmed by man.

As it turned out Ground Glass is a medical term for the way lungs look in x-rays and CT scans, the gray areas can indicate grave health concerns such as: pneumonia, cancer and COVID-19 and in this book, an indication doctors noticed in the x-rays of the author's father: a hazy opacity resisting interpretation.

His health triggers thoughts on how deeply we have all consumed the toxins around us, until as Kathryn describes herself as an industrial waste site. "I am both who and where I've come from." Bodies, she says are environments.

Her thoughts that his disease could have been accelerated by lived experiences actually triggered LEAD Agency over 20 years ago to conduct a Health Survey to find out if living here is dangerous to our health, and reminded me that it is time to take to the streets with that and a couple of other surveys this summer to ask you questions you long to be asked.

Kathryn appeared one hot afternoon last year when we discovered the first 2 child-made dams on Tar Creek and jumped in with my son and I to remove some of the stones to allow water to flow more freely.

Since then she has been organizing events bringing people together in Tulsa first to focus on Tar Creek and secondly to hear the poems of the incarcerated men and women and to meet the two women who have organized the programs that bring poetry behind bars.

One of the last pages of Ground Glass has a truly remarkable statement: A percentage of the sale of this book will support work being done by the LEAD Agency and the Greater Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution. She goes on to say, "Both organizations take action to counter environmental hazards and stand up for healthy water, air and environmental justice through education, advocacy and collaboration."

Now, that will throw you. What a gracious way to honor the work LEAD Agency does and to help us keep doing it.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim



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A Real Summer

7/17/2022

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It has begun. A real summer. Like the ones we remember, those hot and drier days that barely cool even deep in the night. These are the days we get through once we get the rhythm going. Starting early, drinking much more WATER and seeking every bit of shade. Our cars dive into patches of shade even if we know the shade will move during the day. We discover the cooling value of trees again and vow to plant more when the ground is not hard as concrete as it is now.

We watch the weather reports for the relative humidity because it is how hot we know it will feel when we are out in it, while always listening for the words announcing the dreaded microcystin or commonly known as blue green algae (BGA) with its distinct color and texture.

It was detected July 6 on Grand Lake in the Ketchum cove.  The BGA bloom could be seen extending from near the Hammerhead Marina boat ramp eastward toward Colony Cove according to GRDA. I wonder if it might have also been seen during our 4th holiday but the announcement saved for day after reporting to SAVE the lake tourism from the mass exodus the lake experienced when it occurred right before a previous July 4th weekend. THAT notice was handled by the state health department because is it a health emergency requiring immediate action. BUT all things can become political?

Yes, the responsibility of both detecting and making the public announcements were removed from the health department. But if you search those words on the Oklahoma Department of Health site you will find a great deal of information on health and environmental effects and impacts. You just might not find it in time. The state of Oklahoma blew its responsibility to protect us.

Pay attention this substance has color that grabs you. It is mind-blowing color and a texture you must not engage, don't drive a boat through it, even the spray is dangerous when air borne and inhaled. Your Senator Inhofe dove himself into it a few years ago and caused a holiday shut down and the state of Oklahoma figured out how to keep their lakes open for business in case it happened again. And it has. Maybe that is part of the reason he wants the lake deeper? Thinking delusion is the solution?

The other thing that has happened this week all over the United States, carried out by the Waterkeeper Alliance was the largest most extensive PFAS monitoring study ever conducted in this country to analyze samples taken simultaneously in surface waters. LEAD Agency's  Grand Riverkeeper, Martin Lively and the Tar Creekkeeper, Rebecca Jim, both walked and boated to collect their samples for the study. So what is PFAS and why would we want to know if it can be detected in our waterbodies?

We know about bacteria and even what color it can be, but PFAS Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are persistent organic contaminants that are pervasive in our lives and end up in water supplies in the US. They are mobile and make their way to drinking water resources, our rivers and lakes.

This stuff is everywhere. You feel them every time you handle a receipt from a cash purchase, and those grease-resistant papers, fast food containers/wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, pizza boxes, and candy wrappers are coated with PFAS.

The complex chemistry used in producing these compounds makes detecting them difficult, and parceling out this and that to see what health impacts they are producing in us is still a developing story. But they are persistent and they will be with us and in us. What Waterkeepers are going to provide is information to our watersheds that, "we too are at risk" the PFAS are here, or wouldn't it be a gift to find they are not here?

This area, our people have enough KNOWN contaminants to deal with, we don't need more. What can you do to reduce your exposures in one of the largest superfund sites in the country?

Make sure you have had your yard tested now by DEQ for lead, easy with a phone call to 800-522-0206. Get your children 6 years old and younger tested for lead poisoning. Wet dust inside your home. Give the pregnant women a break and vacuum for them. Check the fish consumption guides for the number of local fish you can eat a month due to lead and mercury. Gather blackberries along somebody else's creek not our Tar Creek. Keep your kids at the splash pad and the big pool at Riverview and out of Tar Creek for yet another summer.

Lots of don'ts. Do honor water as life, use it to keep you cool and hydrated. Find the shade and share what you can.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 


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Exposome

7/17/2022

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It isn’t a place or a brand new museum. You don’t go there to explore. Perhaps you might think of it as a way to explain us. Who we are, or how we have come to be how we are. What has made us be sick or well, may be much more complicated than relying on our zip codes and race and age.

What if there was a map of sorts attached to us, way before we were born, perhaps reaching us even before our mothers were born and identifiers with a substance, date and place were paintballed on us invisibly all through our lives, always with the place so we become a map-maker of the places we have been and when. And then that map could be overlaid with the industries, brownfields, superfund sites and worksites we lived by, traveled near, went to school next to or worked and when. And then the layer of our feelings and lived experiences, from joys to traumas, with special attention given to the periods we might be carrying our offspring so that those might then transfer to the little ones at birth.

These are the visions of the people I was sitting near and hearing these last 2 days in New York City. These are not comic book writers or makers of future movies. These are some of the most brilliant medical doctors, esteemed neuroscientists, epidemiologists and researchers in the country. They have tired of trying to figure us out within the 15 minutes they have in the examine room with us. What makes us sick? How can they find out? They are tired of guessing and trying to find funding to research the one shiny popular element to see if it is the one. When we are actually a living petri dish our whole lives being exposed to every thing we have eaten, breathed in and worn or swam in, all of it. Do they add it together and then divide by what and create the formula to provide the what did this to us?

One of the esteemed men knows us. He spent at least 10 years of his life knowing our mothers and your children and through the lens of a project investigator monitoring over 700 of our babies and detecting the metals we know are here that we go to bed with each night. The heavy metals that made paychecks for men in our county and wealth for those who invested to make it. But he couldn’t also measure the rest of the exposures they may have experienced in their short lives, the benzene, aspergillius fumagatus or asbestos and styrene that could have been complicating the way our metals whirled around their bloodstream.

Research is precise. You ask a question and find that answer or not. But not all the answers come because not all the questions can be asked in the funding cycle he and fellow truth seekers sought.
These frustrations but then add to this the pressure to find those answers by people like me and from each mother he faced and each child born to this place or the multiple other places he and this room full of truth seekers went during their careers.

And that might be what brought them together as one to think through the next way they do their work. We will be better for it. I would give them my addresses: where I live now, the places and dates of the befores, and they can have it. Track me, allow them to track you. Sign up when they develop the permission to access what made us this way. Let them have the keys to the answers WE WANT.

These minds are spinning and seeking these answers. What brought them to this quest is and has been US and of course Robert and Rosalind Wright who are co-directors of the Institute for Exposomic Research, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

They were listening all the time. And that awesome acknowledgment brings tears to me now. You were heard. Your suffering noted, your child’s struggles tally marked, with each data point now a nudge to all of these people to work faster, smarter and get to it now.

They know you are waiting. And we deserve the answers from people we know cared all that time and didn’t have the method, the process to figure us out.

They are on it. You really did matter to them. Remember the Exposome when you tune in to Science Friday one afternoon on NPR. You inspired it. The look from your eyes and the eyes of all the mothers who had children in the MATCH Project and other research projects around the country, forced these researchers to find new ways to give us answers. You did this.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim


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    Rebecca Jim

    Rebecca is the Executive Director of LEAD Agency and one of its founding members. She also serves as the Tar Creekkeeper with the Waterkeeper Alliance.

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Local Environmental Action Demanded Agency, Inc.
Miami Office:                                Vinita Office:
223 A Street SE                             19289 South 4403 Drive
Miami, Oklahoma 74354             Vinita, Oklahoma 74301
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