Blog Archives - Local Environmental Action Demanded

It's Hard

11/27/2022

I knew it would be hard.
The questions on the Flood Survey need to be answered but the heartache and disgust of what past floods have left behind here are heavy.

Whole neighborhoods have felt these losses and those neighbors in some cases don't even have each other anymore. Their homes no longer habitable are gone. All those front porches removed, leaving behind front sidewalks to nothing.

This community has experienced the force of a tornado many times without the wind. Just the destruction of what water can accomplish.

And the word destruction caused me to re-listen to Bob Dylan's A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall. There is a line I hadn't taken time to hear when he declares he will go out before the rain starts falling and go "where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters" and I wonder about the poison flooding our water that we have not fully considered until now.
The reality of what has happened, noting the years and the costs flood through answers the brave souls who have agreed to complete the Flood Survey provide.

The knock on your door is coming. Please be gracious and be open to the experience but know your answers will provide data this city has never had the heart to ask for before. But the City is a living being too. And has decided not to curl up and wait for the next high water event. The City is using all means to save itself and by doing so, save you and your property from sure to come disaster.

We cannot stop the rain, but now that we have started knocking on doors, we cannot stop listening and recording your answers and listening to the frightful moments you are reliving with us.

We understand we are asking hard questions and those who have been answering are proving just how hard they are.

A question at the end is asking each if you would want to volunteer to help LEAD in our work. A reply that is helping is for you to contact one other person and alert them of the urgent need for their time in answering the survey. Do connect us to someone you know. Grease, ease our way to another open door.

These pages of questions may be cathartic. When I was little, well really since I am still not tall, when I was young and felt nauseous, I always felt better after I "threw-up." As a school counselor all those years, I also learned that spoken words, sometimes words long unspoken can hide inside us and make us linger and harbor feelings that we stuff way down. But once spoken, free us and allow us to breathe again.

Last week just before the only holiday devoted now to foods and the joy of overeating them, our small team approached the last dam we had learned had been constructed on Tar Creek. We brought our tools to help pry the construction apart. The heavy stones had been laid and layered with sticks and soil and shored together with the smaller stones and braced with the large flat sheets of rock that must have been pulled from the bottom of the creek's bed. We were methodical. We went to the middle and worked both ways to allow water to flow ever more freely. The cloudless sky gave a glow to our work that slowly began to fade as the hours passed. There was more to do, but we had cleared the way for your Tar Creek to pass through here more easily on her way to load our Grand Lake with ever more heavy metal sediments.

There is no need to flood ourselves, right? Let's keep a watch on this creek and report any dams you see constructed. You don't want to allow that bad water from the chat piles and the deep wounds the mining caused the aquifer, to be refrained from passing through and more quickly backup and find your property.

That would be bad enough, but do not allow the work done by these thoughtless ones to stop it and let it fester as it blends with the properly attained waste water permit Commerce has to discharge into her adding dangerous bacteria, too.

It was hard work to deconstruct yet another dam. But it was only discovered because the eyes on the creek, the Man on the Log noticed and we were alerted. We would still be waiting for the Oklahoma Water Resources Board's referral to the Army Corps of Engineers who then would turn the responsibility over to the keeper the Grand River Dam Authority to manage it for you. Keep watching. Keep calling. Say something.

When we walked away that afternoon, I turned changed out of my rainboots and turned my mud covered vest inside-out and put it back on and knocked on another door.

The urgency is real. Your answers are too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Survey Your Moment

11/21/2022

What is LEAD Agency doing right now? We are deeply into surveys.

The word survey can be both a noun and a verb, since a survey can be a thing for a person to complete by answering questions or one can conduct a survey by asking the questions which will be answered.

Surveys can consist of a series of queries that will result in a whole stacks of answers to then have assembled, correlated and crunched into data that will in our case let the city, the county, or the tribes know how people, who may include the readers, feel about flooding or actually what those who have flooded have experienced. How many times and the ultimate question, what do you want or need help doing or what kinds of financial assistance would make your flood experience become a nightmare you won't have to experience again.

LEAD's survey team is assembled and will be spreading out in the previously flooded areas of Miami and outskirts to include Dotyville and Eastgate.

A survey takes time. Your time and our surveyors. If they miss you, they will leave a note letting you know they have tried to find you at home. If you find one of these, respond when you are able and schedule a convenient time for your surveyor to return. The team will offer you a flashdrive with LEAD's Flood Map and ways to deal with the risks we face living in a superfund site. Your flood story may become part of Air-Water-Work oral history project.

The other survey we are conducting also deals with water. Not what floods, but what is drawn from the ground from the individual drinking water wells of residents living north of Peoria, OK, to the Kansas border and east to Missouri's. These wells will be sampled either by Indian Health Service or the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality. The plume of mine water in the Boone Aquifer tainted from lead and zinc mining may be moving and these agencies want to check each well for heavy metals we know can be harmful to human health. What LEAD Agency is doing is a quick survey of these residents asking if they want their wells sampled and if so to assess who will do it. If a person with a CDIB card owns or lives in the home, Indian Health Services will conduct the sample, otherwise, DEQ will collect it. It is a slow process, but all of the people we have met understand that water is life and they want to make sure their water is safe, so it has been a 100% positive if their dogs allow us to get to the front door!

I would like to say, the delight for me personally has been to have doors swing open and people to step out onto their front step to meet for the first time, or as today, find a parent of my former students and learn what's happened since their children were part of my life, with some celebrations, but also some, sadly, tragedies.

These surveys bring us together. Each allows your choices, your answers to be recorded. Think of these as equalizers. None are better than another. We believe the answers will empower our city, county and tribes to speak more clearly on your behalf. Both of these surveys give you a voice to be heard, to be valued by local, state and federal agencies.

Over the summer I had a rare occasion to speak not for myself but to be the voice for Tar Creek, to express what had happened to her, what beliefs and regrets she could be feeling. Aaron Gibson was a graduate student twenty years ago who did his thesis on chat in our superfund site. He never got this place out of his mind. He had the idea to make a short 3 minute Super 8 film, and he created what I believe will become a classic, entitled: Take Care, Tar Creek.

He sent the link to view it this evening and I turned up the volume because Tar Creek, didn't speak loudly. But her message was clear, this stuff she carries is loaded with the lead essential to the war effort, that has poisoned our children and can harm us. Everyone near a creek, stream or a river must speak up for that water because essential elements may lie beneath. "There is in each of us, the right to life and what's been forgotten is water its self is life." Tar Creek affirmed we should all mobilize to protect our water, ending with the message that we must holler loudly, that, "This is your moment."

I believe it is yours. Holler loudly and complete these surveys.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A Night Out

11/21/2022

Red Dirt and Brownfields was not a place but a time.

A Geography professor, a filmmaker, an author, a photographer and an activist met unscripted to speak about a damaged place from their various perspectives. Each knew deeply, saw into, and knew the work that brought us together would not be completed in our lifetimes.

There was a great humbling repeated as each of these accomplished individuals quoted or referred to a thing said or done with my name batted about as if it was something worthy of remembering.

Red Dirt because the event was held in the heart of red dirt country, on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. Brownfields because someone chose to change it up and use the generic term for wounded place, known globally as a Brownfield where countries do not have the Superfund designation we use for sites in the US.

Each of the panelists brought notes and clearly had prepared with great thought what they would share with the public that evening. Myself, a few props and photos on the screen. But pulled together the way they knew our place, our water and our issues and how their work had made a difference and how we need their assistance into the future in the fight for clean water and environmental justice.

The quote above our panel read:

“Architecture is the thoughtful making of spaces.”--Louis I. Kahn

Todd Stewart had taken photos and returned for a number of years as Picher faded from life after the tornado and turned these into a book. But he had returned again to help us with our Endangered River designation, photographing the children’s excitement when they found the frog eggs in Tar Creek, just as the “Boys of Summer” came jumping into the place they had chosen to swim. They kept returning there and as we discover a month later, the water stagnant and no signs of life because they had dammed the creek and stopped the flow.

It was Kathryn Savage who happened to be with us that day and jumped in with us to tear the dam apart, she who had come to see this damaged place while completing her book of essays entitled, Ground Glass.

Laurel Smith spoke with great expertise on what restoration means and when we might know it has begun or been achieved and her students’ connection with our untitled most neglected Brownfields: BF Goodrich and the workers oral histories and now the flood of stories we will be collecting from you. And our friend Bob Nairn there to answer the HOW it all can be done questions we should have anticipated coming.

Daniel Simon, the editor of OU’s World Literature Today hosted the event. But in the latest issue, dedicated to the people of Ukraine, the issue available that evening were these words that stood out to me: “The city clings to us: we have to protect it like a child. A writer does this with words. ~ Evgeny Golubovsky.

And further when Anna Streminska says, “Language, the word itself, has become a weapon.” These words take me forward to the work LEAD’s Flood surveyors begin in earnest this week. They will be engaging and asking about the city and how it clings to them, wraps itself in water and immerses them and all they possess and how it was for them, the times, the dates, the loss, the ways they ready for the next round. Your language will become our defense, these words perhaps weapons that can be hurled to an agency in power over the powerless.

For who can stop the water? Water goes and flows where it is allowed and can be held and released, or held and kept as the weapon to use to force a capitulation from a city that must be protected. The protection coming? For whom? For You.
Postcards, your choice who to send your words. We will furnish the stamps paid for by a neighbor, one you may never have met. We will bring the email address to send words, your messages to protect your city, the city that is wrapped by water when the flood sets in on her.
A cousin of mine and her family came to our Night Out. It brought her to tears afterward, telling me our grandmother, who she was able to spend countless hours with, hours I never had the chance to spend alone, not even one, that our grandmother would have been so proud of my work and how the humanities and other disciplines bring their support.

What I am proud to do is to ask you to join this work.

That work: the hope we must have in a future or face being paralyzed into accepting wrongs left untreated as the way the world will have to remain.

Let’s get to it. We can’t Stop the Rain, but let’s aim to stop the flooding.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Who Done It?

11/21/2022

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou

This town has produced famous artists and film makers, actors and musical performers, a world famous ballerina and brainy medical researchers, our most important asset is the commonality of making this place home.

I love to read and having our very own hometown bookstore with Chapters makes it easy to find the next page-turner. We have a budding fiction novelist Vanessa Lillie. But who will be writing the next Tom's River or Coal River or even Radium Girls? What will ours be called? Slow Death by Drowning? The Lake That Swallowed Us?

Who is going to write the best selling mystery of how the whole town was slowly killed not by a person but an entity. One with the power to slowly kill a town by drowning it, bit by bit, home sweet homes -properties, lands taken out of production, crops and cattle lost. Wild-lives lost.

Will the central characters be the cast of mayors and their efforts first to sit down with the killer and try to make friends? or the lawyers who work to stop the evil act?
It could be a love story. I think it is a love story. About people who loved each other and longed to keep close by.

Will the writer weave in the tribal story? We have several that ought to be part of the Grand epic story you are living. Tribes forced from their homelands only to have their treaty-ed land be too soggy to use, perhaps unless they learn to grow rice in the often flooded fields they now have. Or the whole contaminated mess on tribal lands that bleeds down Tar Creek into your yards and shows up in the fish in that lake.

What about the Grand way people help each other when the flood waters are coming? The acts of kindness and strength used to save the heirlooms or the new refrigerator?

Maybe there could be some mention of the act of filling sandbags and the first time those become a thing in a person's life?

Inventory of losses, now that would be a chapter, but what about those Baptist Men and the sudden wave of them making mountains of sheetrock appear in your neighborhood and then that quickly gone to their next town in yet another flooded community.

But what if we had a spy who went to the yachts and the fancy dinners and got to sit next to people in power and heard them laugh when we are struggling to move grandma again. Or someone who knew the someones in power and through the decades tried to convince them we matter and our pitiful lives count.

Who is that?

Our main characters: come on forward, do the interviews and get this blockbuster to the printers while there is still some life left in this town. YOU are the main characters. Your lives matter. If your town was on fire what would you do?

What can you do now? You can start writing your own story. In the old days you might get your Big Chief Tablet and get started, now, use your I-pad, your computer, your old fashion pen and paper. Write like your life and property depended on it.

Tell your grief, your harrowing story of loss. Put the details in. Make a copy. You will keep one for the family bible for your ancestors to read and the other, bit by bit of your story we are going to send to the only entity that can save this place. We are going to send your story, actually YOU are going to send your story to not a person but an agency you are going to send it to FERC because while you were sleeping the creepy part of this story has been daily edging closer to you. The real threat that our Grand Lake will swallow your town is closer to becoming your new reality.

We put up that billboard on Main Street. Where are the next ones? This whole town has numerous billboards, everyone of them should be saying we matter and deserve to exist. Get with it. Find the fight, be part of it. And while you are getting your gumptions up, remember to vote and vote for people who will fight for you.

Lots of time you are yelled at, I am asking you all to yell. Don't just complain. Gather your wits and fight. You have the best team of lawyers doing their part. Tell your part. What do you give up each flood? How much does it cost you?

LEAD will be knocking on doors soon, or you may find us calling you, you may get our survey in the mail, take some time with us and answer these questions, they may wet your whistle and help you get your story ready.

Words are our weapons. Right can win. You must not be silent. Do not suffer in silence. Write like it matters. And then look around and see who is going to write the best-selling novel?

I think it lives in one of you.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim