Wasting Away Again in Tar Creek

February 07, 2008

 

 

By JERRY WOFFORD

Source: Freelance Contributor,

 

PICHER — When Whitney Diveley was a kid in this town, the 200-foot-tall piles of lead-tainted mine waste were a fun Saturday afternoon.

 

“When we were kids, we’d go climb on chat piles,” said Diveley, a former OU student who lives in Commerce, a town about five miles southwest of Picher, near the Kansas border. “We knew there was lead, but we didn’t think about it.”

 

These piles, called chat, which look like mountains of cream-colored gravel, and the area around them are also referred to as the Tar Creek Superfund Site on the National Priorities List of Superfund Sites, an Environmental Protection Agency list of some of the most polluted places in the nation.

It earned this distinction in 1983, when the EPA placed Tar Creek on the list, which was designed to fund cleanups of environmental disasters in the United States .

 

Since then, OU and other state and federal agencies have joined the fight to reclaim the land for safe use.

 

OU is finding ways to safely use the EPA estimated 50 million cubic yards of chat and is constructing water treatment facilities in the area, to be completed this spring.

 

There are currently 1,305 Superfund Sites in the U.S. and 11 in Oklahoma. Tar Creek is the worst in Oklahoma and in the nation’s top 50.

 

“People need to understand it’s the biggest environmental cleanup project in the state of Oklahoma, and it’s a big one in the nation, too,” said Kelly Dixon, environmental programs manager with the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality.

 

OU researchers on the job

In 2003, OU researchers along with state officials decided they wanted to show residents that there are practical, long-term solutions to Tar Creek.

“The idea was to demonstrate some of these technologies,” said Robert Nairn, principal investigator on two of the projects in the Oklahoma Plan for Tar Creek and associate professor in the school of civil engineering and environmental science. “We can do some things now to show some environmental improvement.”

 

Dixon said people in the area were tired of studies and wanted to see things change.

 

“It was sort of a way to bypass the federal process and the enforcement with the [mining] companies,” she said. “It was a parallel approach to the site that was going to get results quicker.”

 

The Oklahoma Plan for Tar Creek was introduced in January 2004 and OU researchers began their work during fall of that year.

 

Dixon said the Oklahoma Plan focuses on the perimeter of Picher, addressing environmental concerns around Picher.

 

“If we could attack the perimeter and shrink the size, we’d be that much better off,” Dixon said.

 

Nairn said OU’s work is focused on three aspects: building a passive water treatment facility to clean the metals out of the streams and groundwater, an affective way to use the chat as a clean aggregate for asphalt and monitoring the water and ecological conditions.

 

Cleaning what couldn’t be cleaned

Nairn is the principal investigator on the passive water treatment facility and the stream monitoring.

 

In January, the OU Board of Regents approved $700,000 in new funding for Phase II of the construction of the passive treatment system. The total amount approved by the regents since the beginning of the project is $1.2 million.

 

A passive water treatment system is a way to clean water without using much energy or large building complexes, Nairn said.

 

“Passive idea is just what it sounds like,” Nairn said. “You’re going to build a system that doesn’t require that sort of regular intensive operation and maintenance.”

 

The alternative is an active water treatment center, much like municipal water treatment facilities that require “24/7 operation and maintenance,” Nairn said.

 

Contaminated water enters the passive water treatment facility and passes through several ponds. Each pond has a specific function, such as removing the iron, Nairn said.

 

“By the time that water gets out of the system at the tail end, the metal concentrations have decreased and will discharge much cleaner water to the stream,” Nairn said. “Once they’re built, they look like a pond.”

 

The EPA’s final decision on the first specific cleanup project in the 1980s, called Operable Unit 1, stated the streams could not be cleaned, but Nairn said he didn’t believe it.

 

“It was determined 25 years ago that the streams were irreparably damaged,” Nairn said. “That’s one of the reasons we got involved up there because that’s not true.”

 

Shrinking the piles

The chat piles present a large set of problems for everyone in the area, Dixon said.

 

“[The EPA was] trying to attack the worst first,” Dixon said. “I think the volume of the chat piles is so daunting and intimidating, that wasn’t the initial focus.”

 

Nairn said even if the groundwater was clean, the runoff from the chat piles still contaminates the water.

 

To help that problem, OU research has shown that all of the chat can be used as an aggregate, which helps hold the asphalt together.

 

“The highest concentrations [of metals] are in the finest material,” Nairn said. “What we did was take all of it and incorporate even the [smallest] into the asphalt.”

 

When the chat is in the asphalt, it holds the metals, keeping them from seeping into the ground, Nairn said.

 

“When we do that, all the asphalt meets the regulatory criteria,” Nairn said. “It doesn’t leech the metals.”

 

Dixon said that, because of the volume of chat in the site, however, cleanup will take decades.

 

“There’s so much material there, it could take up to 20 years for the material to be used in roads,” Dixon said.

 

Though the piles still loom, Diveley said they are shrinking.

 

“Piles are shrinking because people are removing the chat,” she said.

After 25 years on the Superfund list, the Tar Creek situation is still a problem that won’t disappear overnight, Nairn said.

 

“It took a long time to make the problems. We’re not going to solve them tomorrow,” Nairn said. “But this is the first step. Let’s demonstrate what we can do now, and hopefully down the road here, we’re going to see big changes.”

 

What is 50 million cubic yards of chat?

 

The EPA estimates that 50 million cubic yards of chat exist in the Tar Creek Superfund Site.

 

• 1,562,500 dump trucks

• 107,735,401,860 cans of beer

• If piled on Owen Field, the chat would climb 5.36 miles