Wired isn't a perfect magazine. It's too flashy for its own good - sometimes by a huge margin. But every now and then, they nail one of their larger, feature articles.
This past month saw
Wired absolutely kill one of their articles: "Welcome to Armageddon, USA: a tour of America's most toxic town". In this article, they visit the last few residents of Picher, Oklahoma, a former lead and zinc mining town.
In eighty years of active mining, Picher saw 1.7 million tons of lead and 8.8 million tons of zinc taken by mining 181 million tons of ore from the ground, bringing $202 million in total sales to the area. Once the mines were abandoned, however, sinkholes opened under the streets, acid leaked into the water supply, 7000 acres of heavy metal-laden chat piles surrounded the city and blew into town whenever the wind blew, and the city folded up like a cheap suit.
The schools shut down. The police force dried up. The town disappeared.
Except for a few diehards who just won't leave.
The EPA has spent $140 million to replace the topsoil on a couple of thousand plots of land that the government has bought up, but still the place is all but unlivable. The people left have gone full frontier, relying on whatever they can kill or grow.
It's this next statement that freaked me out most from the article...
[Marsha] keeps a small garden with tomatoes and zucchini and okra, and he picks wild asparagus from around the edges of the chat piles, hunts quail and duck, and fishes for bass in nearby rivers. Both say they figure that cooking or freezing will eliminate any toxins.
No, it won't, folks. Heavy metals don't freeze out, and they don't cook out. They're elements. Elements have to react with something to leave. They don't magically change into not-heavy-metals by heating or cooling them.
These people are gonna die.
And, of course, the government has given almost all the poisoned land back to the Native Americans.
Because that's a lovely little circle.
Read the
article, folks. It's freaky.
