Catherine Price by 101 Places Not to See Before You Die

Author:101 Places Not to See Before You Die
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-12-13T02:25:24+00:00

Chapter 50

Picher, Oklahoma

As a vacation destination, Picher, Oklahoma, has one thing going for it: privacy. Come for the weekend and you’ll likely be the only person there—the government paid everyone else to leave.

That’s because the town, which was once home to about sixteen thousand people, sits on top of huge deposits of lead and zinc. Its mines yielded nearly five hundred thousand tons of ore in 1925 alone, and metal from Picher was used for bullets in both World Wars.

But after World War II ended, Picher began to collapse. Literally. Thanks to huge natural and manmade caverns beneath the town, its main street was fenced off in the 1950s for fear that it would cave in, and in 1967, nine homes sank into an abandoned part of the mine.

Things went downhill from there. After the last of Picher’s mines closed in the 1970s, a local rancher noticed orange spots on the coats of his white horses. He followed them to the field and discovered that the water in nearby Tar Creek was orange from acidic liquids seeping up from the abandoned mines; it turned out to have such high levels of heavy metals that in 1983, Picher was named as one of America’s first Superfund sites.

The town survived, but then in the mid–1990s, a local nurse and doctor noticed that a suspicious number of Picher’s kids were having trouble in school. They also noticed that one of the children’s favorite leisure activities was playing in the hundreds-of-feet-tall mounds of gravel mining waste that surrounded the town. They encouraged families to have their kids’ blood tested, and the results confirmed their fears: more than 190 of the students had lead poisoning.

You’d think that all this—the collapses, the Superfund site, the lead-poisoned children—would be enough to make people move on their own. But when the federal government launched its buyout of Picher in 2006, motivated by a report showing that an even more substantial area of the town was at risk of collapse, a surprising number of residents refused to leave.

But fate had it in for Picher. On May 10, 2008, a devastating tornado hit the town, killing at least six people and destroying about half of Picher’s remaining homes. It was the last straw. Now devoid of residents, Picher’s only remaining attractions are its dilapidated buildings, its infamous orange creek, and a swamp filled with floating tires.

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