When Rebecca Jim started a job counseling Native American students in Miami Public Schools in 1978, she quickly noticed the students weren’t like others she’d worked with.
“A lot of kids were different here,” said Jim, executive director of Local Environmental Action Demanded (LEAD) Agency. “They struggled with learning, paying attention, with behavior, with just getting by.”
Miami, Oklahoma is part of a county-wide Superfund site called Tar Creek, where a near century of mining scarred the earth with unmapped boreholes, water seeping out of the mines still causes the creek to flow red and 20-story tall piles of gravel and sand-sized mining waste called chat dot the landscape. Back in the 1990s, more than a third of kids tested in Miami had elevated blood lead levels. By 2023, 4% of Ottawa County kids had elevated blood lead levels, still twice the state average.
No amount of lead exposure is safe for children, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The heavy metal has been linked to brain and nervous system damage, learning and behavior challenges in children.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), state and Quapaw Nation have spent decades cleaning Tar Creek through the EPA’s Superfund program, and the massive job isn’t complete. Yet some families are buying homes in a former buyout area, prompting concerns that homebuyers don’t have enough information about contaminants present on properties for sale.
Some Ottawa County residents, physicians and activists continue to see the health impacts of lead and other contaminants from Tar Creek, according to interviews, EPA records and presentations from LEAD Agency’s Tar Creek Conference in October last year. They say exposure to lead and other heavy metals from the Superfund site have led to cancer and heart, kidney and other health problems.
“I have been burying my students, who shouldn’t have been dying yet and with conditions they shouldn’t have,” Jim told Streetlight in July last year.
She said that in the past year she’d attended funerals for former students she’d counseled: most recently, two who had kidney damage.
“It’s a complicated thing here,” Jim said. “It’s in the air, it’s in the water, it’s in the soil, it’s in your yard. Pretty soon, it’s everywhere, so you forget to do anything different and just live your life. So there’s a great deal of denial, but it’s a creek you should love and a river you should love, but the river floods you and the creek poisons you.”
Oklahomans may not know the risks of moving to the buyout area
Picher Field miners left behind 1,300 open mine shafts and 75 million tons of mining waste. Builders used chat as fill material that went into roads, parking lots, alleys and driveways around Ottawa County, exposing residents to contaminants in the waste for years to come.
The EPA splits Superfund remediation into separate projects, and one Tar Creek project focuses on chat piles and other mining waste in 40 square miles of northern Ottawa County.
Under this project, state-created trusts in Oklahoma organized the buyout of residents in and around Picher, Cardin and Hockerville, Oklahoma. During the voluntary buyout, which ended in 2012, about 830 homeowners, renters and businesses opted to move out of the buyout zone, according to EPA records.
Now people are moving back, EPA records show.
“It has been long enough that they either don’t know or don’t care about the hazards,”
Summer King, a former environmental scientist for Quapaw Nation who now works for the EPA’s Office of Superfund and Emergency Management, told an interviewer for an EPA report published in September last year. “Because the buyout was voluntary and not all land was purchased, some properties occasionally become available through the real estate market. Realtors are not familiar with Superfund issues and may or may not include Superfund disclosures in the contract.”
According to the EPA report, it’s possible for a homebuyer to purchase a home in the buyout zone without restrictions or deed notices detailing past remediation if a previous owner didn’t participate in the buyout program.
A family moved to the former home of a smelter and drank from a contaminated well
One example involved a property in Quapaw that was previously home to a smelter, which was used to heat raw mining materials to extract lead. The EPA partially remediated the property in 1999, 2005 and 2011, Skylar McElhaney, the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality’s (ODEQ) Director of the Offices of Continuous Improvement and Communications, and EPA spokesperson Joseph Robledo said. Robledo said the 2011 remediation was incomplete because the property owner at the time didn’t give the EPA access to the entire property.
A family later bought the property, where chat and smelter waste were still present. A previous owner had drilled a well that was contaminated with mining wastewater, and the family drank from the well, EPA’s report said.
Brian Stanila manages ODEQ’s site restoration and revitalization section. He said ODEQ first learned the family lived there after they contacted the agency to request their property be tested through its EPA-funded program to test and clean up residential yards that meet a certain lead level in Ottawa County. The sample showed the soil had elevated lead concentrations, he said.
Jim said she also had gone to the family’s property and taken samples to test for lead.
“It was god-awful high,” she said, adding that although the property had already been remediated, smelter sites tend to have higher concentration levels. “It’s not just some chat sitting there.”
One of the property owner’s children had elevated blood lead levels, Stanila said.
The EPA may develop a plan to improve public awareness of land use restrictions by 2028
In 2019, the EPA paid to buy out and relocate the family, according to the EPA report. Jim said the family moved out of state. The Quapaw Nation, which declined an interview request and didn’t respond to questions by email, bought the property. In 2021, the Quapaw Nation remediated the property again and plugged the well the family had been using, the EPA report said. The EPA-funded remediation included removing chat, smelter waste and former smelter buildings, Robledo said.
According to the EPA report, ODEQ filed deed notices on properties purchased during the buyout. The notices contain land use restrictions, including that kids who are 6 years old or younger can’t occupy the properties until the state determines they’re safe. Depending on the property, a notice might contain other restrictions.
During the Tar Creek buyouts, the owner of the smelter property at the time didn’t participate. Because the property wasn’t part of the buyout, it didn’t have a deed notice when the family bought the property. Robledo said the property now has a deed restriction that blocks residential use.
To cope with the issue of people potentially buying homes in the buyout zone without knowing about their history, the EPA report from last year recommended the EPA support ODEQ in developing a plan to improve the public’s awareness of land use restrictions in the buyout area by 2028.
A July version of the same report said that the plan should “at a minimum” ensure realtors know about deed notices before sales, create a system to notify local, state and federal agencies when properties in the buyout zone are placed on the market or have a pending sale, among other measures.
ODEQ’s EPA-funded soil remediation program doesn’t include filing deed notices regarding cleanup
Under ODEQ’s program to clean residential yards, the agency provides free lead testing for soil in Ottawa County. If soil tests at or above 500 parts per million, ODEQ provides free remediation that includes removing a layer of contaminated soil, filling the area with clean soil and resodding the property.
The EPA report from last year mentioned concerns that deed notices weren’t filed on the residential properties after soil cleanup. The report said that although the public has access to an ODEQ map showing homes that have been sampled and remediated, more efforts “may be warranted to ensure property owners are informed if any restrictions remain on remediated properties, properties planned for remediation or properties where owners refused remediation.”
The report recommended EPA evaluate how to improve the public’s awareness of previous remediation by 2028. Those methods could include filing deed notices or additional outreach to residents.
“Expanded notifications would help ensure that owners, occupants and future purchasers remain informed about risks and applicable restrictions,” the report said.
In the EPA report, Stanila said he was comfortable with efforts to minimize the public’s exposure to contamination from Tar Creek, except for the lack of deed notices for the residential yard cleanup program.
Asked why he’d said he wasn’t comfortable with the lack of deed notices filed for that program, Stanila told Streetlight in November that nothing runs with properties to notify future owners that their home was remediated. Stanila said the cleanups remove a foot of soil and place a barrier on top to warn people not to dig any further if they’re doing yardwork or maintenance.
“We try to publish that information out there in the world, but if someone’s not looking for it or (doesn’t know) to look for it, it might be difficult to find,” he said. “It would be nice to have that run with the title of their land so that they know, yeah, my property was remediated.”
The program was originally run by the EPA, which never filed deed notices on properties it had remediated through the program. Stanila said that EPA had “set precedent” by not filing the notices from the beginning of the program.
An EPA plan from 1997 included filing deed notices as an option to reduce the public’s exposure to contaminants from the Superfund site. EPA spokesperson Jennah Durant didn’t answer why the EPA never filed deed notices for the properties, but said the agency continues to “(implement) the remedy that was selected” back in 1997.
Stanila mentioned the map showing properties that have been tested is available online, adding, “while it does not follow property transactions, it is more widely available to the public than a deed notice.”
Stanila said filing deed notices with the county costs $18 to $25 per notice, but he didn’t view the cost as the main issue.
“I think the real challenge would be the reevaluation of all the previous properties where DEQ was not involved in the remediation and making a determination about what portions of each property would require just a deed notice or perhaps property activity restrictions, such as no digging or excavation,” Stanila said.
Wishing they would have known sooner
In the EPA’s report from last year, a resident whose yard had been remediated said their son’s blood still tested above 3.5 micrograms per deciliter for lead, the level at which the CDC considers blood lead levels elevated.
“The only thing I wish is that I would have known about it all sooner,” the resident told an interviewer. “I thought it had been completely remediated when I bought my property, and it hadn’t. I only found it out when my children had high lead levels. You don’t know how it will affect them.”
The resident worried about farm animals and floods wearing down soil and exposing their family to contaminants.
Jim has worked in Ottawa County for more than 40 years but lives in the country in Craig County.
“I cross the Neosho bridge every day and am in a world that is very different from where I wake up,” she said in July. “All I want is for people here to have that freedom to wake up with clean air, water down in the creek that’s still good, soil you can plant anything in and don’t have to worry, wild blackberries and wild onions you can pick all you want, and graze in the forest, but you can’t do that here.”
Contact Streetlight editor Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@streetlightnews.org. Follow her reporting on Bluesky or by joining our newsletter.
This article was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
Streetlight is a nonprofit news site based in Oklahoma City. Our mission is to report stories that envision a more equitable world and energize our readers to improve their communities. Donate to support our journalism here.
