At its peak, Picher and its neighbouring towns had some of the highest lead and zinc production rates in the country, earning the states of Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri the name Tri-State Mining District. These are the waste tailings left over from the area’s history of lead and zinc mining, dating back to the early 1900s. But get a little closer and you discover that these mounds are, in fact, enormous piles of chat – rock laced with iron and lead. House by house, the federal government has been buying up and destroying the buildings in order to facilitate an ambitious programme to rid the area of its toxic legacy.ĭrive through Picher, and the first thing you will see are mountains, or what many new to the area believe to be mountains. Even at its peak, only about 25,000 people lived here, on land that once belonged to the Quapaw Indian tribe but was sold to mining companies in the late 1800s. The tiny town of Picher sits just inside Oklahoma, near the border with Kansas, in the middle of the United States. It has been called the most toxic town in America, and now, less than 100 years after it received its charter from the state, it is being destroyed.
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