Word: picher
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Some blowhards with pulpits insist on attributing acts of God to the sins of the victims, but recent days have provided awful reminders that natural disasters don't discriminate. A cyclone killed 50,000 in Burma; an earthquake killed 15,000 in China; a tornado killed seven in Picher, Okla. The only generalization that can be made about all the victims is that they were unfortunate. As it says in the Book of Matthew, "God sendeth rain on the just and the unjust...
...Picher has its own American saga, the tale of a former lead-mining center that became the nation's most contaminated Superfund site. Its creek was the color of Tang, its population dwindled from 20,000 to 800, and the government was starting to buy out its holdouts in order to raze the ramshackle town. On May 10, Mother Nature beat it to the punch. Now everyone seems to agree that the town of Picher is dead and its residents will be compensated fairly. You can't blame them for the twister...
...behalf of scores of lead-exposed children. A separate suit demanding a cleanup was filed by the Quapaw Indians, whose land was leased for the mines. And environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has joined a class action to force companies to relocate the population of two polluted towns, Picher and Cardin. Court papers suggest that mining executives knew as early as the 1930s that the contaminated dust was dangerous but sought to, in their words, "dissuade" the government from intervening. A mining-company lawyer says the charge is based on "out-of-context reading" of historical documents...
...their ranch houses. In the past decade, studies have shown that up to 38% of local children have had high levels of lead in their blood--an exposure that can cause permanent neurological damage and learning disabilities. "Our kids hit a brick wall," says Kim Pace, principal of the Picher-Cardin Elementary School. "Their eyes skip and jump. It takes them 100 repetitions to learn a sound...
...confidence, the Oklahoma legislature last week passed a $5 million buyout for all families with children under 6. John Sparkman, who heads the Tar Creek Steering Committee, a group of buyout supporters, veers between cynicism and despair. "They think we're poor white trash," he says bitterly, driving past Picher's boarded-up storefronts. "The votes here don't affect any federal election--so why bother? We've agitated till we can't agitate anymore." Meanwhile, at Tar Creek, the toxic dust keeps blowing in the wind...