Superfund Update: Treece, Kansas
But when the last of the mines closed in the 1970s, Treece was left sitting in a toxic waste dump of lead-tinged dust, contaminated soil and sinkholes. On a hot summer day, children can be seen riding their bikes around enormous mounds of chat — pulverized rock laced with lead and iron. It is the waste product left over from mining that is the cause of so many problems here. Uncontrolled, it blows in the wind.Treece and Picher — which is the much larger of the two towns, once home to 20,000 people and separated from Treece by only a gravel road, the state line — became part of adjacent Superfund sites that the Environmental Protection Agency has been trying to clean since the 1980s.In Picher, the remediation of the land has proved daunting. In a move without many precedents, the federal government decided to buy out and relocate nearly the entire population, which had dwindled to 1,800 by 2000, leaving a dusty ghost town where the social and economic hub of the area used to be.But the buyouts stopped at the Oklahoma line. Treece remains similarly contaminated, but now even more isolated. Officials in Kansas have been practically begging the federal government to move Treece’s impoverished people, mostly the children and grandchildren of old miners, but to no avail.
Treece Journal – Welcome to Our Town. Wish We Weren’t Here. – NYTimes.com
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The mining companies should be paying for all of this, not the Federal government. How can people think the government should do everything for them.