In my career I have been an environmental consultant for one of the largest international firms in the country. I have been involved in numerous environmental law suits across the country from California to Dallas to Charleston.
When I was in college, I did a special graduate research project on toxic trace metals. There are numerous plants that are called bio-accumulators. That is they preferentially pick up toxic metals and concentrate them in the plant tissue. Now this isn't a problem if the plant isn't a food plant. In the industry, certain plants are used to scavenge metals from affected sites, they are burned and the ash is encapsulated for disposal or the metals recovered.
An example of a bio-accumulator is Astragalus mollissimus and Oxytropis lumberti better known collectively as Loco Weed. They are purple and white blossomed plants respectively, and are found in the western 2/3s of Kansas. The plants can poison cattle, horses and sheep. The poisoning occurs through Selenium over dosing. As you may have guessed Selenium is a nutrient too, but in massive doses, like so many other things, it is bad, very bad for you.
When I first arrived in B'ville in 1980, I was fascinated by the Zinc smelters. My fascination stemmed from the fact there had been so many, and that Zinc a nutrient metal important to men to keep lead in the pencil as well as proper functioning of the related pump. What I also knew is that Zinc is intimately related to Cadmium. A not so nice metal, as well as Lead. We all know about Lead. Not only will it kill you coming out of the barrel of a gun, but it will make you kids dumb as a post if they choose to eat Lead paint or are exposed to it in other ways.
My interest stemmed from the fact that I noticed the prevailing wind usually blew from the southwest. I could see in my minds eye, the town wreathed in open smelter smoke blowing across the town, across the flood plain and on to Dewey. As the smoke cooled particulates would rain out containing Lead and Cadmium.
Not too much of a problem if you didn't breath the smoke or eat the soil, unless you had another exposure pathway, like food. I remember raising the question one day with my co-workers as we drove across town from R&D what they thought the Cadmium levels of the pecans from the orchard along the river was. You see pecans LOVE Cadmium. They scavenge it. So if you like those B'ville pecans, you are probably getting a good dose of Cadmium too.
The Japanese discovered the culprit disease caused by excess Cadmium, Mercury too. Mercury causes horrible birth defects. The Japs learned you shouldn't shit where you eat.
They were dumping Mercury laden industrial waste water into the bay where they did a lot of fishing. So they were poisoning the fish who in turned poisoned them. Not a problem for anyone but pregnant mothers. You just sweat it out in most cases. A little dementia might occur along with it; ever heard the term "mad as a hatter"? That is because hat makers used mercury to block hats and got a lot of mercury fumes in the bargain.
Back to Cadmium. It causes Tsai Tsai disease which translates to "Ouch Ouch" disease. Cadmium ions which are nearly the same size as Calcium ions, replace Calcium ions in the bones. The problem is it doesn't make strong bones. So the sufferer gets micro fractures in the bones which are quite painful.
I never did test those Pecans, but I never ate any either. Looking at Google Earth it looks like the orchard is still there, between Tuxedo and Phillips Blvds.
Now I was in the Houston air port one day on my way out of town when I overheard another consultant talking about Bartlesville. It seems I hadn't been too far off the mark. But the exposure pathway that caused the entire hubbub was different and so was the metal.
It seems that all the clinker or slag from the furnaces way back then were cheap fill and gravel to some enterprising eye. So they hauled the stuff off and used it to pave and fill the alleys throughout town. The house I had on Cherokee had a retaining wall and an elevated alley behind it paved with gray gravelly material. It seems the stuff was laden with Lead! The affected area according to the EPA report on the National Priorities List was a 135 acre site along 11th and Virginia Streets. It included schools, day cares, churches, playgrounds, parks, recreational areas and business properties.
Further they found that:
"NZC operated a zinc smelter on this site from 1907 to 1976, when it was acquired by the Zinc Corporation of America. NZC was also known as National Zinc Co., Horsehead, Inc., and St. Joe Mineral.
The NZC smelter had no air emission controls, allowing emissions to be deposited downwind in various areas in Bartlesville. According to 1992 EPA reports, lead and cadmium levels in the top 2 feet of soil are greater than three times natural background levels. Although the extent of the area of contamination has not been completely determined, it includes contaminated soils at two schools and three day care centers. An estimated 1,700 students attend the school and day care centers, and 170 people work at the facilities. "
It doesn't seem that they investigated the other smelter sites around town either.
If you haven't heard much about it, go figure, who wants to buy contaminated property?
I am sure the city fathers, Phillips, realtors and others have had a hand in it.
Some concerned person got on the stick and when National Zinc closed the plant grounds were declared a CERCLA Site. That's' Superfund to most of you. It stands for Comprehensive Emergency Response and Recovery Act, also known as the Lawyers Relief Act since 90% of the billons spent have gone to pay litigation costs and not to actually cleaning up. A Superfund court case amounts to a finger pointing festival. Maybe just maybe they actually find the responsible party and make them clean it up, but in most cases the company is long gone or been dissolved. Coppers Wood Treating, better know as the Creosote King , left contaminated creosote plants all over the country sitting on plumes of black gooey hazardous glop. Toxic to people and fish. The company is long gone morphed into another entity called Beazer. Yep, Beazer Wood Products and Home construction. They just walked away and made the government force them to clean it up. I worked on a suit for Conoco, before the merge. They bought a fertilizer plant in Charleston, next to an old Beazer/Koppers plant and got sued in a cross complaint.
Seems once Beazer/Koppers got nailed they wanted to spread the pain around. So they sued Conoco for causing the problem. We won on behalf of Conoco, but they still had to clean up an adjoining marsh because a bit of Lead was found there by the EPA. So in order to save the marshland from a bit of Lead, they had to destroy it. There were numerous civil war cemeteries and battle field on and about the site which could have been the source of the Lead, but no, they probably forced Conoco to dredge the marsh then replant it.
The last word, is if you look at the second photo above you can see that they have cleaned up the plant site. The total area affected as reported above was 135 acres. I do not know how they remediated the affected residential areas.
There are also another Superfund sites around town.
BARTLESVILLE HWY 123 LANDFILL HWY 123 NORTH OF BARTLESVILLE
QUAPAW, ST LAKE Landfill N. FUTURA & E CHICKASAW
CITIES SERVICE COMPANY 510 SOUTH KAW STREET
EAST BARTLESVILLE DUMP 5.5 MILES EAST OF BARTLESVILLE
JOHNSTONE & LUPA DUMP NORTH OF JOHNSTONE STREET
NATIONAL ZINC CORP. WEST 11TH STREET
OLD DEWEY ROAD DUMP 0.5 MILES N. of Bartlesville
SOMEX Limited - injection well 1350 South Virginia Avenue
7 comments:
That area stank like the devil until the late 1970s, when the smelters put some kind of filters on top of their smoke stacks. We used to hold our breaths when our parents drove through the area.
They replaced the topsoil and sod on pretty much all the houses west of the railroad tracks and south of Frank Phillips Blvd. I'm not sure if they gave the homeowners any additional payment. It was as odd sight, because for a while the worst houses in town had these great lawns.
If you watch the Ben Affleck movie "To the Wonder," he plays an environmental scientist investigating soil contamination in Bartlesville, which I assume is a reference to this.
IV. BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS/DIGESTS OF THE CASE HISTORIES NATIONAL ZINC SITE, BARTLESVILLE, OKLAHOMA
1) Brief History of the Site, Key Issues, and Conflicts
This case involves heavy metal contamination of the West Side of Bartlesville, a community with a large proportion of low income and minority (African-American) residents. The West Side had long endured a disproportionate burden of environmental hazards within the larger community of Bartlesville, coupled with a profound institutional failure to address environmental problems and concerns. There was a long history of distrust among West Side citizens for local government, which had failed to act on known contamination, research findings of elevated lead levels in West Side children, and citizens' concerns about possible health problems on the
West Side. This failure of state and local government to address (or even acknowledge) contamination and health issues was blamed on institutional racism, classism, and a lack of government resources. There was a clear and historic imbalance of power in the city of Bartlesville. Never cohesive to begin with, a proposal to list the contaminated site on the EPA National Priority List (NPL) further divided and polarized the community. Prior to the proposal for NPL listing, the only grassroots group dealing with the contamination was an active group on the West Side (Citizens Against Toxics/CAT). After NPL listing, other groups emerged to represent other interests. Agency-initiated public participation came to Bartlesville very late in the history of community contamination. [The first independent studies were done in 1975; ATSDR's health consultation, and attendant "public availability" sessions began in 1991.] This and subsequent public participation initiatives focused on issues relating to cleanup. The community was sharply divided on: the level of contamination; the health risks posed by the contamination; and federal- vs. state-controlled cleanup. An interest in using the cleanup process to confer economic advantages on the affected community was also an important element in the case.
I think the government dullards who wrote that take it a bit too far. They carried the clinker ash from the smelters far and wide to pave alleyways, throughout town. Not just the low income areas. They probably used it to build up the alleyway behind my old home just a few blocks from the Frank Phillips Mansion.
I worked with the EPA and in fact, when I was doing environmental consulting after leaving PPCO I was in Dallas headed for Tulsa to work up in the Superfund site in Joplin, I met a peer from another company headed to B'ville to work on the superfund site there.
My point is the EPA is and has always been a political organization. I had coworkers, idealists who majored in environmental science thinking they would work for Greenpeace or Sierra Club and they found out the only people paying wages were consultant companys or the government agencies. After a few years of working for "the bad guys" as consultants, they would leave and go to the state agencies or the EPA where they did nothing but oversee the work done by others, us the consultants. They were and probably still are worthless.
Recall the mine in Colorado where the EPA rep insisted that the consultant open up a mine filled with millions of gallons of acid mine water over clear objections of the consultant in charge? The consultant did what they were told by the EPA rep and as a result rivers in two states were contaminated by the acid mine drainage. Of course nothing ever happened to the EPA person. If anyone else had done it they would have been convicted, assessed damages and sent to prisons with hefty fines to pay.
That is how the government works, they hire the least capable people who want the fully funded pension. The EPA is filled with people not more competent that the US Postal Service, think about that.
Paint with a broad brush much?
Just so you know I’m Rhonda Lynn . Melissa and I were the ones that got all this started back then. We formed the group Citizens Against Toxics years ago.
Hi Rhonda. Been a long time. Email me at samtoufik58@gmail.com if you want. I would love to hear from you
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