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Feb 23, 2018 · But a section of the berm has eroded away. Now, the water flows out of its enclosure, eventually reaching a ditch alongside a lonely dirt road. From the ditch, the water flows into a nearby body of water that gave name to one of the largest and most expensive superfund sites in history — Tar Creek.
Apr 14, 2021 · From the late 1800s through the 1960s, miners extracted lead and zinc from the ground beneath the Tar Creek area in northeastern Oklahoma. But 50 years after the mine was shuttered, the region’s toxic legacy still seeps from boreholes into the water and drifts in the wind from tailings piles.
Jun 15, 2021 · Abandoned a decade ago—like its neighbors Cardin and Douthat, Oklahoma, and Treece, Kansas—Picher reveals a legacy of environmental indifference and staggering injustice. For just over 70 years, the town served an immense lead and zinc mining complex.
Local residents and tourists became terribly, emotionally upset for at least a decade after Devil’s Den Park closed its gate to the public. Very few pictures of Devil’s Den Park exist online. Please do not confuse Oklahoma’s Devil’s Den with Devil’s Den State Park in Arkansas on the web.
- ‘We Have to Find A Way Forward’
- ‘I Hope I Don’T Have to Move’
- A House from Hell
- This Will Bring ‘Bad Medicine’
- ‘Downstream from All That Waste’
- ‘This Is Bad, Bad Stuff Going on Here’
- ‘If You Can Imagine Being That Child’
- ‘Earthquake Capital of The World’
- ‘A Way to Protect The Ponca People’
- ‘Something Needs to Happen Here’
The degradation in and around Ponca City is emblematic of the systemic, long-term devastation of the environment that a group of lawyers and advocates are pushing to make an international crime. The campaign aims to treat “ecocide” in the same way as genocide or crimes against humanity, offenses that are prosecuted by the International Criminal Cou...
On a drive around the southern edge of Ponca City, Howe, a member of Ponca’s tribal council or “business committee,” brings his silver Ford Explorer to a stop next to a culvert, where a small stream flows out of the Phillips 66 refinery on its way to the Arkansas River. “Me and my friends would ride our bicycles down here,” he says, pointing to the...
A few blocks from Howe’s home and a block from the most recent spot where Phillips 66 is buying out houses sits one of the most extreme examples of the fallout from the region’s more than 100 years of oil and gas development. In 2013, Chris and Sherry Walls and their fourchildren had to flee from their home after the local gas company discovered th...
In 1908, not long after the last land run in the newly formed state of Oklahoma and the year Henry Ford unveiled the Model T, an oil prospector from the East arrived on the Cherokee Strip. E.W. Marland, a wildcatter and lawyer who had already made and lost an oil fortune in Pennsylvania, spent the next three years drilling dry wells, while living o...
Sitting in his print shop in the village of White Eagle, Howe recalled how his great uncle, Willie Cries for War, once sucked stingers out of his neck after he’d been stung by bees. Howe, whose black-rimmed glasses end in neon green at the temples, remembers Cries for War as a penniless elder, his money long gone, living in a spare bedroom of his g...
If the fumes and contaminated water were not enough of a threat in the region, until recently a fine black powder routinely covered the cars, lawns, clothing and pets of the people who lived just south of Ponca City. Just past the Ponca City city limits on highway 177, a petrochemical plant operated by the Continental Carbon Company manufactures ca...
Fighting for environmental protection and for the rights of Indigenous people in the face of extreme adversity is in many ways, a part of the Ponca DNA, Camp-Horinek’s, in particular. On a blazing hot August afternoon in the Clyde Warrior Memorial building in White Eagle, a building named after a Ponca youth leader and prominent civil rights activi...
In 2015, Camp-Horinek’s activism and Howe’s work on the tribal council came together. In May 2015, Howe, who had recently been elected chairman of the Ponca Tribe, received a federal grant to construct a veterans’ memorial at the Ponca tribal cemetery to honor members of the community who had fought for their country. The Ponca cemetery lies half a...
The Ponca Tribe is now in the process of developing a second rights of nature resolution, for the Arkansas and Salt Fork rivers, which Camp-Horinek says would give the rivers stronger legal protections. Such protections come as the enforcement of environmental regulations on Native lands has been called into question. Following the Supreme Court ru...
Driving north from the Ponca Tribal cemetery, Howe heads towards his great uncle’s former allotment. He is halted by a gate and a “no trespassing” sign at top of the hill on the north side of the landfill. The view from this side of the landfill looks a lot different from what Howe’s ancestors would have seen from the place where they once laid the...
Sep 8, 2023 · That waste has already seeped into the site’s groundwater and poses a threat to the nearby Arkansas River. Now, the EPA and Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality have dedicated funds to clean up the site and protect residents as well as the environment from the lingering contamination.
People also ask
What happened to Tar Creek?
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May 29, 2021 · When this hostile takeover happened, it was almost always to Quapaw with deep ties to the tribal community and with valuable mineral deposits in their land. In the 1960’s, once mining companies devoured the metals found under Picher, they left. The damage they left behind is visible everywhere.
