There are lots of reasons, but ultimately we had to get the people with power in the room and let them learn to like us enough to want to help us.

When the first "Tar Creek Conference" happened 21 years ago, LEAD Agency was a baby as we sat down with the Quapaws, the Health Department, university researchers, high school students and community members to plan a conference. Why? Back in those days, too many children were lead poisoned and our hopes looked bleak. There was an urgency to get action to protect CHILDREN and to do that we needed to get federal and state agencies to LIKE US, to get those same agencies to break their own barriers, let us be part of the solution and TALK to each other SO they would help fix our environment quicker.

Miami High School Cherokee Volunteers were at a table then and Cherokee Volunteers returned for this conference as full functioning adults setting aside their responsibilities to rejoin the mix of the thing they helped create. The son of one was a winner in our first ever Poetry Slam Monday night.

These conferences pulled people who knew about acid mine drainage and health impacts of mining to share with the pubic, students and to put this out in front of the agencies charged with doing their job here. We wanted to create a place, a time for collaboration to spawn. And we wanted to be able to see it happen, right before our eyes. We figured if we made the possibility of it, added art and music, and a pie auction, why wouldn't it?

We wanted to get people in the chairs. We needed the diversity of our cultures to be valued in a space that provided time for it.

It was thought through. The template was established. Each year since, the pieces look different, but the components lego-together as we build how the conference will be the vehicle to bring us closer to cleanup of this environmental disaster we call home.

We learned about aquifers from the USGS, how they hide and where they lay and what divides them and their age, where they go and how they can bleed out and can be contaminated by what lands on the land, is absorbed and comes finally out of our tap at home.

Tons and money with lots of zeros. Tons of chat hauled off land costs lots of money. And will take MORE time and more money to bring those once Quapaw Reservation lands back, but 800 acres have been done and crops are growing there, not chat blowing there. We celebrate and wait and honor the workers there who are doing it. And their environmental department who put the plans together for the next plot of work to be done.

If you want to keep the attention of your audience, we learned you need to entice them with birds, or butterflies and we had both. It gets different when you look at how the environment we get up in the morning each day can harm the least amongst us, the birds we barely notice, continue to be the "canaries" for us.

Our hope is for each conference to spur our attendees to action. The action this time was to tell our senator he has made us mad. The Inhofe Amendment was blatant and the kiss of death to the City of Miami and a promise the next floods will continue to be worse. What came of it? Tribes, the City and LEAD Agency standing together, he will not divide us, only bring us together, stronger.

Most conferences you will attend are built to make you smarter. Ours does that, but we aim to make you feel human emotions. I had many and having my niece, Mary Moon, my brother Clark Frayser and my son Dana Jim there, gave me courage.

It takes time to move mountains. But it takes tears to move us. I had them this year. Maybe you did, too, attending or Facetimed with us.

That child did not see me cry. But the man he asked did. The question he raised was, " as a soccer player on the fields near BFGoodrich am I at an elevated risk for lung cancer?”

The only child in the room asked the question we all could not muster courage to ask. What about those children going to school nearby? or their teachers, the neighbors? Parents go to sleep each night wondering. But parents, it is worse. Your children may know enough to worry themselves.

Each day EPA is removing more danger by driving TONS of it out the gate. The urgency moves it and moved Mike McAteer to fight for us. I can't begin to tell you how important it is to know someone inside that agency.

It is a remarkable thing to see people from the past set back into one of the last places I saw them in action, 21 years ago. Cori Stotts and Chris Robinson were a force when they were in high school. They took on Governor Keatings' Tar Creek Task Force and bellied up there and asked the big questions, because they deserved answers and they were not getting them.

Collaborations occurred this time, I witnessed them, snapped a few, and others will surface. People in charge sat down with our moms and talked one on one to reduce their fears.

The annual conference at Tar Creek was filled with citizens, agency people, not nearly enough angry people but all informed and inspired to demand this place better.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
 

Agencies we may know only by their initials will be gathering in Miami, OK on September 17 and 18 at LEAD Agency's annual environmental conference. If conferences could gain legal status, this year would mark ours. 21 years old, the conference would have earned adult privileges if that might have been possible.

21 years ago, we were all younger, more able and many still had our parents, who we thought would live forever. That was the year President Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice, a gallon of gas was $1.15, Google was founded and Viagra approved by FDA. Peace came to Northern Ireland and a little known man, Osama bin Laden threatened the lives of all Jews and Crusaders.

Tar Creek was already running orange and had been for nearly 20 years. It is still pouring metals downstream every day. Every 3 days we have the equivalent of what is known at the Animas River spill that occurred a few years ago. But our Tar Creek has been doing that for 40 years. A long time friend called me yesterday to ask about the corn seed she had sent me. She hadn't planted her seed because that river water had contaminated her soil, so she sent it to Oklahoma, to better soil. But then the rains came and continued all summer.

Remember the soggiest summer ever? No matter how well tended our gardens were, drowned gardens do not produce. But I saved her seed, there will be another summer, another time to plant. But her soil will not fare so well. Contaminated soils loaded with heavy metals like she has now, do not heal themselves. These metals will have to be removed. The people all along that river will have to organize and prove to the EPA their land is harmed and fight for clean soil and wait for the fix.

We are in the middle of our fix here in the Tar Creek Superfund Site, yes, right in the middle. Rather stuck. We never really fought for the cleanup, so it is fitting we got the cleanup we asked for. Slow, year after year, yard by yard it is occurring. The Quapaws have sped up the pace of the take down of the chat piles on tribal land. How did that happen? Their Chairman, John Berrey has spoken, loudly and forcefully to politicians and federal agents and he is getting results. The Quapaw tribal members' lands are being cleared off. The mess is off to its new home, the man-made structure looking like a mesa in the west, on their land. But stacked higher and higher. It will be seen, since it will be the tallest structure in the county, if it isn't already.

All those initialed people are coming sort of like a reunion. They have grown old together, helping our land get better, protecting more children every year from the source material that lead poisoned so many. We are going to recognize two of them and a couple of our own local people who found the work that improved our hope for the future. You are welcome to join us in these formal recognitions as we plaque them.

The EPA will be in attendance. of course but missing Rafael Casanova, who you have read about over the years in this column. He passed away due to the exposure he received from asbestos.  His memory will be honored and we will call forward EPA's Janetta Coats to thank her for the respectful way she has been to our community these long years. We will surprise yet another when we ask Mike McAteer to come forward. He served time with the Tar Creek Superfund site and came back and with the long wet summer was able to safely clean up LOTS of the BF Goodrich site of the stuff that killed his colleague, Rafael.

Mike McAteer will update our community on the summer's work and what comes next. Will we be surprised? I hope so. ODEQ, more initials, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality's Ray Roberts will update the community on the Benzene and what the latest studies are showing and what actions will be taken to make us safer soon.

We'll allow questions, because we all will have them about the BF Goodrich site. But also we will hear about our aquifers, the Boone and the Roubidoux. USGS, the United States Geological Service and the OWRB, Oklahoma Water Resources Board are conducting a study of the water quality and quantity in them. They will be able to let us know if they are seeing indications those Mega-Poultry houses may be drawing down more than their share of water.

These two sessions should be filled to capacity. Without water, good, clean water, what do you have? The 900 children going to school near BF Goodrich need that safer air to breath, too. Be like John Berrey, be there and be heard.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

The country has been watching a slow moving disaster, a hurricane moving at 1 mile an hour, and even stalling. We know what slow moving disasters are in this corner of Oklahoma, we have seen them, lived through them. We have seen back water creep slow enough for the worms to run for their lives as they cross the yards and catch a ride in the water. We know more floods will come. We understand the need some feel to keep the lake "Grand" at any expense.

We have grown cynical with 40 years of bad water flowing down Tar Creek, the #1 Superfund Site in the Nation, with all the resources EPA has had, to allow the BIG ONE to fester all these years and Tar Creek to still be running metals into that Grand Lake of theirs. We get hopeful when the Quapaws take down another chat pile and the landscape reclaims the look of the Plains with crops and grassland.

But we got miffed when BF Goodrich closed and the jobs left town, then went silent for 30 years with the discovery of the Benzene plume 10 feet below the neighborhood nearby. We didn't holler for nobody. We saw the "Remediator" take down some to the buildings on the site, haul off the metals he could sell and then disappear with his bankruptcy leaving the mess of rubble piles. Those rubble piles contained tons of then loosened asbestos and when we found out it was like a hush came over us. The hope the wind wouldn't blow from the west and into the schools. And we held our breath.

The kids at the Miami Academy woke up to that concern, wrote letters, made some ART and created their own movement and now 2.8 million dollars later, we are going to breathe out easier. People came out and asked some questions, got some answers from EPA's Mike McAteer and were treated with respect. That first Phase is about to be completed. Come to the 21st National Environmental  Conference and hear what comes next at BF Goodrich. Come and help LEAD Agency award Mike with one of our Mike Synar Environmental Excellence Awards. But stay and help us start the movement we always needed.

At this year's conference we will have in the room at one time the 3 people who could put their heads together as one and make our homes and our lives safer, healthier quicker. Imagine if they saw a whole set of folks saying in unison, FIX ALL OF THIS MESS? We have not had this combination of people in power in the same room in Ottawa County since people put their minds together as one and struggled through and received the Buy-outs at Picher/Cardin. People have power. And we could use ours together.

The new Region 6 EPA Administrator, the Oklahoma Secretary of Energy and Environment and the Executive Director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality all at once, here.  This is the moment. You get a turn. You could see what a movement looks like, how it sounds, what a difference it could make in your lives and the lives of your grandchildren. Come try it on, sit yourself down in a chair in the Ballroom at NEO College and see what collective good can do.

If you have children who have been lead poisoned, who later struggled to get through school, who may not have reached their full potential and you might be raising their children, you will want our environment clean and every yard those children play in clean and lead free. If you want the legacy of BF Goodrich toxic waste removed, so the good memories of hard working men raising kids in the American Dream can resurface. If as a Quapaw you want your land reclaimed quicker. The list goes on to show, each of us have a reason to want our lives better and have a healthier community life. Come demonstrate in the simplest way ever, by sitting in a chair while the people in power over those decisions can see you there waiting, 40 years, 30 years.

Come early, Sept 16 at 4:00 bring your gloves for a 40 minute Tar Creek cleanup,  come at 7:00 with a poem, for the Poetry Slam and draw a cartoon for the Cartoon Contest, judged by Tulsa World Cartoonist Bruce Plante.

There has never been a real movement without art. So we added it and you will experience it as you walk into the Ballroom with the Picher Echo Exhibit created by Sabrina Staires who has achieved a sort of visual poetry.  Be part of the movement as the photos on silk display the echoes of the past.
 
We have a Vision for the Future and it all gets better with you in the movement.

As for the future, EPA breaks up the work at a superfund site in what they call Operable Units. The next one is OU5 and it is bank to bank streams, creeks, rivers and the water and sediment. A community meeting about this will be Wednesday Sept. 18 at 6:30 pm with a consultant who has broken the science down for non-scientists like me and some of you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
http://www.leadagency.org/registration1.html