By 1967 the mines had closed, but the piles of waste remained. The people living in Picher and other parts of Tar Creek didn’t know how dangerous the mounds of waste were. “They’d get a piece of cardboard, slide down the chat piles on a piece of cardboard, get an old car hood and slide down it.” “Wintertime was perfect for sliding down,” he says, telling us about how he and other children approached the lead waste in their backyards. He grew up in the area and has fond memories of playing on the chat piles. Ranny McWatters is treasurer of the Quapaw Native American tribe that owns the land. Shells of houses still stand in the what was once the town of Picher, a reminder that it used to be home to close to 15,000 people at its peak. This place was once booming, home to small mining communities. But as my reporter, cameraman, and I get close, we see they’re massive piles of tiny rocks: millions of tonnes of toxic waste called chat that came from the abandoned lead mines that make up the site of Tar Creek. From a distance, they look like mountains sloping across the Oklahoma plains.
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