The Rise and Fall | Picher, Oklahoma | Short Documentary
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- čas přidán 28. 06. 2024
- Picher Oklahoma in the US, is a ghost town, and apparently one of the most toxic places you could have lived in the United States......
Officially abandoned the EPA continue to work on it as a superfund site, cleaning up the toxic wastes of lead and Zinc mining.
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Sources:
1
www.okhistory.org/publication...
2
cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/Sit...
3
pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2006/5097/S...
4
semspub.epa.gov/work/06/82584...
5
semspub.epa.gov/work/06/18173...
6
engg.k-state.edu/chsr/files/c...
#disaster #Documentary #History #TrueStories
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Can’t you just throw your stuff out on yt? CD Baby did it for our albums. I don’t hold with dedicated streaming services, they just make money over your back, but from what I’ve heard so far, I like your music. If it IS on yt, post us a link, won’t you?
I kind of prefer the dumb cases. Like the radiological devices being torn apart and people taking the glowey stuff home to show their kids... Or the concrete not settling correctly and the whole thing coming down. Abandoned towns are plenty when it comes to mining operations, worldwide.
I love almost all of your videos, but this one is plainly boring 😂
Do town of wittenoom Western Australia
Asbestos related was messed up
Hello John, I learn much from & very much appreciate your You Tube videos as a subscriber. However, I suggest you broaden your horizons (& those of your subscribers) by high lighting the harms of "multi national" corporati YOU TUBE RESTRICTED MY REPLY!
Living anywhere in Oklahoma will reduce your life expectancy - Someone living in Oklahoma
I doubt that. I love it here and have seen health improvements over the west coast. The people are polite and friendly, the cost of living is low and affordable.
🤣😅💚
And probably your IQ.
@@johndoerr8853tornadoes though. And no cellars
“ I dunno what y’all gettin’ so wound up about “ - tornado
My Grandfather and his 2 brothers were born and raised in Pitcher during the 1910's-1940's. For anyone who is curious, here is their longevity.
One brother died at age 23! from cirrhosis. (Didn't drink)
Second brother lived to age 50, passing from a brain tumor.
Grandfather lived to age 62, passing from a heart attack.
23! years? How did he live longer than the universe itself? (Sorry, math humor, 23! = 2.6e22)
@@eaglescout1984 by giving 110%
Yikes! That don’t sound good
That's horrifying. Thanks for sharing. I bet all the families that lived there also have nightmare heath stories -- that would be great if we spoke with those families who were prior residents... Hmm Mr Plainly Difficult??
@@allisonmarlow184 That sounds like quite a tall order, not to mention an intrusion on people who have already suffered catastrophic losses. That would be bordering on "yellow" journalism imho.
As an Oklahoman, I'm glad to see this get more attention. Worth noting Picher got there because indigenous residents were declared incompetent and forced to sign unfavorable leases. Not only did the Quapaw Nation and their land get poisoned, but they didn't even profit from it. They have since gotten some of their sovereignty back & play a huge role in the cleanup.
Can the massive piles of earth excrement left behind by the by Mother Nature's colon cleaners be repositioned so as to bung up Mother Nature again, after a giant sticks a straw down there and gulps up all the fluid identifying as "water" but is really poisonous alien pee that giants consider a delicacy, has been swallowed up of course, to act as stability, in as much sense of that word can be derived when calling excrement stable 😳, so that the Wile E. Coyote holes stop appearing and the dangerful dust stops flying like dive bombers?
This video doesn't mention your extended version of the story. Video Author mentions that the land was leased by the tribes to the mining company. Could you cite the source of the extended narrative you described? The video author could use it to provide added information not originally in the video.
@BK-cm7bl what this person said is true, I remember learning about it in my native history class. Kinda racist of you to deny this ever happening. Didn't just apply to this situation either, how else do you think indian territory became a state? U think they were willing participants? U stole our land and ruined it so thx for that.(if it isn't clear yet, I'm native American)
@@claudespeed277I'm also supposed to have native amaerican in me somewhere, but we can't ignore some people will use tragedy for their own gain. So i like to see proof of things before i make a decision, instead of going on predetermined bias.
JAIL THE EPA Jail Corp. Gov. Jail
The idea of these companies extracting the resources, then walking away when it is no longer feasible should be dealt with harshly. It goes on far too often, in far too many places.
Go after the shareholders if you have to, the old "bankruptcy", then move onto the next project is all too transparent.
Most of these were caused in a time before the long term effects were even know about, we didn't even know lead was bad (in the way it's understood today) for you until a good 15 years after these mines closed. These days there are funds paid in to by such companies to restore the environment after mining is completed.
@@johngaltline9933it was known in the century BCE you goof.
Google "Vitruvius lead poisoning", he was an architect that observed the “pallid color” of plumbers forced to work with it.
But rich people don't care. Don't be their fanboy.
As long as there's corporate lobbying and unbridled capitalism with politicians working on behalf of corporations to deregulate and allow them free reign, you're only dreaming.
@@ryaneylee Yeah, that's why placed like the old USSR and China are such garden spots!
@@thomaseastman8689 This is a complete non sequitur, because I don't know if anyone ever told you, but it's possible for more than one thing to be bad.
It's possible for USSR/Chinese style authoritarianism to be bad, and for US style nearly unrestricted capitalism to be bad as well, and these are not mutually exclusive, nor is criticizing or trying to fix one an endorsement of the other.
If "US capitalism, deregulation and lobbying are fucked up and making it impossible to fix these problems" instantly makes you think that USSR/China style "communism" is the only possible alternative, that is your own personal failure of intelligence and imagination.
"Unplanned subterranean repositioning" what a nice way of putting it, John 👏
Thank you!!
The phrase occurs at 10:09.
As you say, @thejudgmentalcat, John puts the situation forward sensitively. It is a sad situation for sure.
It's like the "unexpected fission surplus" as meltdown.
That line earned a gigglesnort from me!
I drove through Pitcher a few years back and my buddy and I drove down back streets that weren’t fenced off trying to figure out what the hell happened. This long form explanation is great!
Thank you!!
I hope it wasn't windy.
What am I saying. It's Oklahoma, of course it was windy.
Before the extent of the damage was recognized the Picher elementary school had to hire a reading expert. She discovered that more than half the students were reading below their age level, which set off such an extreme warning that more testing started and more work began. While everyone knew there was contamination, realizing the extent of the damage to children pushed to issue further up the Superfund site priority level and pushed more families out of town, trying to protect their children. When the tornado passed through the congressman for the area was happy, because this caused the area to hit top priority for evacuation. It's such a sad story.
I don't understand. If reading below their age level was a major problem, that would mean, quite literally, all red states have a major lead/heavy metal crisis.
Oh hey, an American contamination story I HAVE NOT heard of yet! And fresh off of John's computer too, nice. Much love from Colorado, USA. PS: THANK YOU for having your own voice, and NOT having some singsong pattern of reading - even professional radiojournalists do it, and it drives me up the wall! Your content is a breath of fresh, er toxic, er fresh, er radioactive, er fresh, air. ;D
Holy Carp, nearly a million subs, when did that happen? Earned it!
Glad you enjoyed it
Amazing how "the Greatest Country on Earth" so consistently manages to f*** up and show nothing but contempt for the well-being of its people, isn't it? I'm not trying to argue that many other countries do much better, but there is a huge discrepancy with what the US claims and what the facts show.
When I try to watch important content, it gets dumped if not accompanied by HUMAN narration!
re: "an American contamination story I HAVE NOT heard of yet!"
Why water in some countries - not able to drink? Only bot water (for bots) in some countries - eh?
I grew up living about ten-fifteen minutes North from here. Everything about this is true and just awful. People used the chat as landscaping gravel, they used it to make driveways for their homes, and used it to fill sandboxes for their children. The worse part is you can still drive by today and see fresh footprints where people have been walking all over the chat piles. Tar Creek is still so toxic that you are not allowed to swim in it, or eat the fish from it.
There's a similar story in West Chicago, Illinois. There was a company that extracted rare earth elements (principally thorium) from concentrated ore, and the waste tailings were offered to people as fill material. What they didn't really disclose was that this fill was mildly radioactive; not enough to cause burns, but enough to significantly increase cancer risk from long term exposure. And yeah, some of it was used on playgrounds and sandboxes. The plant is no longer there, just a huge vacant space, and so much contaminated soil was removed from there and other nearby places that they built a siding and loading shed along the adjacent railroad to haul it away for safe disposal.
"It's not a curse! It's a mining company!"- Arthur Morgan
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one thinking of RDR2 😂
@RivalGem53 good thing you posted that save before some fucking Shapiraboo went "good luck living without [insert batshit specific consumer good here], then..."
@@seand.g423 I do not understand your response at all…what have I don’t wrong here?
This is the town my dad was born in. His grandfather help start the first union there. Thank you very much for this one as it hits home personally for my father and my heritage.
Some of the chat piles were and still are placed in the middle of the floodplains. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of urgency to clean them up either despite it being a superfund site. It will be devastatingly toxic for an alarmingly long time to come.
re: "to clean them up"
Clean them up - doing it how? One wonders how exactly. The most that can be expected is to 'stabilize' the piles so no more runoff into streams takes place?
More ghost town stories please, for my own personal selfish reasons. I am 27, born 1996, American, and grew up being shipped from one parent in Iowa (later other Midwestern states) to the other in Texas at least twice a year. A core memory of driving through these areas is how much emptiness, how many old towns, old houses, wild yards, it felt like driving through dying land. Mainly the 2000s and early 2010. I used to wonder what those towns used to look like, when the paint was new and that art on the grain elevator fresh. Even the graffiti is faded and dying. There's so many of them, I know most of them have boring stories. But I'd love to hear them anyways. Why does my country feel so empty and dead, there is so much empty space and so many dead little villages. Were they nice? Or do I only think that because I needed some nice place to escape out of the car into as we drove by.
In a capitalist community, if it doesn't make money hand over fist, it withers and dies.
As some one that's lived in the Midwest Belt my whole life, a whole lot of small towns died during the recession, and then another massive fact is that these towns were relying on farming for income, and when technology became gold it caused these small towns to collapse.
plus all the farming income structure is built to favour huge factory farms, and screws over family farmers hard. it ain't right. @@MyNameHere101
@@Snarf_Le_Wombat😂😂 withering and dying, the soviet communists were experts on that.
I live about an hour from there. My husband and I drove around exploring in 2008, about two weeks before the tornado hit, and it's not an exaggeration to say it felt post-apocalyptic. It was supposed to be cleared out, but a handful of people were still living there. It was surreal with houses surrounded by trash or completely burned out.
Is there much of it left now? I'd love to have a mooch around there but seeing as I'm in the UK that's sadly unlikely!
@skylined5534 I haven't been back in years, but it's my understanding that it's now cleared out. Except the giant chat piles that will outlast us all.
@skylined5534 If you're interested, I checked, and you can see most of the town with street view.
@@kristenjackson713 It's been a while since I've been through there, but I believe there are still a few buildings, and still a fire department and/or county building there, but almost all the old buildings are gone. The Picher mining museum building shown at 0:28 in the video has been burned down. I remember driving through there not long after and was surprised to see it in ashes and ruins.
Have any of you heard of Google street view??? It's a thing. 2008 and 2023 are shown.
"The same company also dug the community's first well."
...oh no
Oh yes Oklahoma…As a former resident,im surprised there weren’t more people injured. There’s a special level of incompetence here
Unfortunately it's not just there, it's anywhere that companies put greed over people.
Not incompetence. Indifference.
@@ginmar8134 I lived in Oklahoma during the pandemic; it’s both really
More ghost towns please, thinking of a bucket list tour of all the places featured in your videos.
Probably don't tour leadville, usa.
You'll come back with tentacles
This isn't an abandoned area but the Onondaga Lake (USA) pollution history is pretty fascinating
I live in Pennsylvania. Centralia is getting harder and harder to find, but follow the graffiti. Locals won't tell you shit.
Take a hazmat suit, oxygen rebreather etc
I was talking about this with some coworkers a few months ago when one of them piped up and said she grew up near pitcher. The chat piles were pretty much where they went to have a little stay-cation. She said they used to go sledding down them, make snow angels in the chat, etc. shes a respiratory therapist and somehow is healthier in her forties than i am in my early twenties.
Thank you for covering this! It makes me happy to see more awareness being spread about this, since Oklahoma is often overlooked both nationally and internationally, so its hard to get attention on issues like this.
Man, some people are just born hardy!
I'd be on my ass had I grown up there I think 😂
Heck yeah! John, please do more ghost towns and abandoned sites. There are plenty of abandoned towns out here in the western states of California and Nevada. Abandoned mining towns, government sites, and religious/cult sites. California City would be an interesting topic. There's also Bishop and the defunct Rancho Seco reactor area. My dad worked for the Army Corps of Engineers doing superfund and brown-fields remediation, so i'd like hearing more about their efforts to clean up these places. Love your videos. Thanks again.
Hi John, if you want to cover more ghost towns I recommend the case of Villa Epecuén in Argentina, it's a very interesting one and not many english-speaking channels talk about it.
Great content as always and thank you for your videos.
As someone who has started to see repeats of content across various channels I consume, (I'm still watching, I like to see how the all cover things differently, I also live close to Oklahoma in general, so I knew of this, been meaning to visit when I'm near-ish) but I'd love to see some lesser known stories from the non-english speaking parts of the world, as those are the less likely for me to find out about organically in any other way. You've already got my curiosity going, I'm gonna look it up when I'm done watching 😎
Thanks for the recommendation - I'll look up this one too. It's easy to change cc to interpret into English.
@@rottweilertrainingUK
True though it's nice to have a real person narrating in English!
@@skylined5534 funnily enough, everything I found on it on CZcams was in English :)
Wow, I knew about the Picher tornado; it was one of those super scoopers that utterly drmolished a good chunk of town. I had no idea that was almost a blessingbjn disguise, since it forced so many to leave.
What a place. The oldest inhabitants must've seen the dust bowl and then been driven out by this.
I look up how strong the tornado was, found out it was an EF-4 with winds speed around 175mph.
Been through there on a trip with my mom back in autumn of 2018. Mom was 93 that year and we drove from the US state of Ohio out to California and back finding and traveling on the remaining bits and pieces of Route 66. Highly recommend that trip! Took us three and a half weeks and our experiences were priceless. For two old ladies my mom and I saw wild historic sights, met wonderful fellow humans, saw nature in untold variety, and learned so much history.
I grew up in the region and used to go through picher on my way summer camp in the 90s. The next time I went through was as an adult. It must have been after the town was abandoned, as it was after dark and there were no lights. I have a high degree of "geo memory" (not sure what to call it). Once I've been someplace I remember how to get there and what I looked like. It was one of the most disturbing feeling driving through someplace I knew should be there, but no longer was.
You should check out the rest of the area. There are plenty of issues with sink holes and strip mining in that area of northeast Oklahoma and Southeast Kansas
Closing Line : the industry that put the town on the map, was the very same one that took it off. I would like to paraphrase that into: the industry that took the profits from the land, was the very same one that left the repair bill to be paid, by the very same people who paid the taxes to their government! I wonder who sent the most “thoughts and prayers”?
The satellite imagery does not do justice to how many and how big those chat piles (mine tailings) were and how many ghost towns exist is such a small area like Zincville, Hockerville and Leadville. In the years I lived in the area, late '70's - mid '80's you would see hundreds of rail cars (FRISCO RR) loaded with chat heading off to who knows were, to be used in various forms of construction. Nearly all of our paved roads were made from the chat as well as our parking and play areas in Quapaw, am sure every town there was the same. There was one huge pile just south of Picher that had a subsidence up high in, I think, the eastern slope near the crest. Story was someone died in the hole coming over the top as this pile was very popular for offroad activities. Unlike all the other towns in the mining district that spanned the Northeastern corner of Oklahoma, the Southeastern corner of Kansas and into Missouri, Baxter Springs in Kansas made it illegal to mine within the town. I left in '84 and would visit for a couple weeks once a year until '87, I feel for my neighbors, we all ignored the warning signs, for decades...until it was literally too late.
Back when I was a younger man and living in the Midwest I used the Pitcher/Treece mess as a classroom example of why there is an EPA. It is a great example of the combination of geology, economics and greed and what they can do to people. I sure wish I had my notes on this.
Ghost towns are fascinating stuff, especially since a lot of the modern ones are stories like this, where the exact thing that made the town boom eventually makes the town go bust.
One of the worst aspects about the 2008 tornado is how much of the toxic dust it sucked up and spread across the region. I live just up the road in Springfield, MO and we are prone to the same weather systems that generally follow the I-44 interstate corridor through the region.
The irony of somewhere called “Pitcher” now having such crazy toxic water as well as other things rankles my brain 😵💫 Yes more interesting abandoned towns/sites please!🙏
Hey Mr. Difficult, growing up in the Hudson Valley NY in the mid-80s, could you maybe do a video on the Hudson River cleanup? It had some involvement from famous people & has a happy ending (or so I've heard).
Disaster Qualifications: I recall going over bridges & seeing raw sewage floating by & we couldn't eat anything we caught out of the river.
Still can’t eat what you catch. The cleanup’s more or less done bc they’d need to dredge and they feel it’d stir up more of the old contaminants. But, it’s better. In some places upstate, it’s clean enough to swim, but I personally still wouldn’t. It still smells disgusting though
@@Anonymous-mt1tv oh, really? Maybe it depends on where you're at.
Ah, that brings up fond-ish memories of growing up near the Detroit and St. Clair rivers! They're not as bad as they were, but I still wouldn't swim in either, and there have been jokes about what's in the Detroit river other than water for over a century now. In the 1920's they said you could use it for paint thinner, and I'm not sure how much it's changed...
@@Anonymous-mt1tv uh, the entire cleanup WAS them dredging. They were dredging for like 7 years.
Yeah. They decided to stop because they felt they’d stir up more to the settled contaminants.
I live in Oklahoma and I’ve actually been to Picher a handful of times. It’s a very interesting history.
Great video as usual, John! As a weather geek I was tracking the May 10, 2008 tornado outbreak and heard about the deadly EF4 that struck Picher (21 fatalities in total from this single tornado, six of them in Picher as you mentioned) soon after it happened. Even then it was said that the tornado would likely be the final nail in the coffin for the town, as it would not be rebuilt due to the already ongoing buy-out/abandonment process stemming from the long-term contamination/subsidence issues.
Yes, more abandoned towns, please, and other Superfund sites. You rock, PD.
This has some real centralia vibes here
I like to see more videos of towns/sites abandoned because of human stupidity, etc. I look forward to your videos as you stay to the facts without embellishing them.
I’d love to see more ghost towns covered. I’ve always found them fascinating since i was a kid visiting my grandparents and exploring a small one near their farm.
Seriously - "Potential unplanned subterranean repositioning" aka likelihood of falling down a great big hole. Hindsight is a valuable, albeit mistimed, skill.
"unplanned subterranean repositioning" bwahaha 😆
Pretty cool that someone halfway around the world is talking about a little town in Oklahoma. Keep doing these kinda videos. I knew the history already but the video essay style you have going makes me wanna learn again.
1 big yes vote for ghost towns, especially the ones where human short-sightedness or stupidity were the cause (like Centralia, which I'm 99% certain you've covered already).
Was thinking this same thing
This was really interesting. And sad. The abandoned buildings and toxic surroundings remind me of Fallout 3. Yes please to more ghost towns, and the history of specific buildings like the one you did on the mental asylum (Bedlam?). Though honestly I find everything you cover interesting.
All of this.
I've been conditioned to love ghost towns and urban decay because I train K9s for search and rescue/fire rescue/detection work/military applications, which all include a great deal of rubble work. I also am just a lover of history.
The Fallout series did absolutely nothing to curb this enthusiasm. 😂
Now I see towns like this as a sort of playground I get to enjoy with my dogs in training (once we have any necessary permits, we're all geared up, and have full canine and human trauma kits in the truck just in case). Watching these videos just makes me want to take a road trip and see exactly how much figurative Radaway I'd need to pack to make it viable.
I have two dogs right now who are experienced enough that I would love to have them work on the chat piles in this town in particular. The footing would be neat to work with. I love mining town ruins. 😂 We'd just have to pack in our own water.
Love the ghost town stuff. If you want to do one where nobody got hurt, there's the Tocks Island project.
More ghost towns? Heck yeah!
It's an interesting town to visit to see nature taking back land. Not much of anything left due to the tornado though. I think there's less than 5 occupied residences remaining, so there's still technically people who live there, but it's really just people who work in emergency services/management for the area. There's a few former residents who will come up to people who visit the memorial, and are happy to answer questions
Was going to bed but... PD happened!
:D
Was a Great watch, forgot to mention last night mate. @@PlainlyDifficult
I'm glad someone is talking about this. Considering how it's the largest EPA superfund site in the US you would think it would get more attention.
Sometimes it’s cheaper to abandon it than to fix it.
@@neilkurzman4907 I laughed at your comment because it's so true. then I got immediately sad because, again, just how true that statement is
This, fortunately is like the 3rd video I've seen on Picher this year, so it's definitely gaining some awareness in the community as a whole, hopefully it helps over time to get stuff like this cleaned up more quickly and right the wrongs that have been done. But the government wouldn't want that, would they?
@@neilkurzman4907oh how I wish that was a false statement. But sadly, you're very, very correct. And it's pitiful that we as humans just tend to be cool with that, makes me sad.
Do you guys happen to know if Picher is still accessible to the public, or is it restricted access? I'm part of a nonprofit that temporarily utilizes areas of towns like this for training, and I'm not sure if we've explored Picher as an option.
Well damn, if I had KNOWN you were doing Picher I would have driven over and gotten you footage. Seriously, like 20 minutes away from me. Anything around Joplin, MO you just ask - I got equipment! (Gratis, free, no charge, all rights released, etc... I'd be happy to help.) I played on the chat piles as a kid, we all did.
Good job on this! Having lived near there, you hit on all the info that I knew about it. I can add that people still play on the chat piles (at least they did around 20 years ago when I was last in the area; I'd imagine there are still idiots who do).
Hey Jon love your music and your content. I have two ideas but they may not be very interesting to many. Up to you if you want to look into them. I lived in Odessa Texas and there is a superfund site next to where I lived. Two companies polluted the water table with chromium. I don't know much So I would like to know more . Anyway we can't drink the water or eat anything that is grown there. Next there was a airbase near there that had some interesting history. Pyote Texas. It was even an area used for a movie shoot in the past. And the Enola Gay was there at a time. Well take look if you want. I always love learning about our worlds foolish mistakes. I just wish the governments and businesses would learn from them!
My community almost ended up this way. Dupont made RDX all over this area, and a boat manufacturer was dumping MEK into the soil for decades. Not to mention the mountain of coal ash from the local power plant. After moving here and developing acute leukemia, I found out there's three superfund sights within 2 miles of my house....
I really have a problem with the fact, that once again this happened on indigenous lands.
The company that rented the land completely and permanently destroyed it. Great job...
I think including more ghost towns from all around the world would be great; from the far north west of Alaska to…
I love these types of videos! Yes please more! Thank you for the content you provide!
Glad you like them!
I live within 100 mi of the town of Picher and learned more about it here than i had anywhere else. Your videos are awesome man, well done!
And it took so long to evacuate this area! Amazing.
Picher is a wild place, there's still an outfit in there selling processed sand. Most of the roads have weight limits on them not because of any bridges or anything, but to keep heavy trucks from caving in undiscovered sinkholes and mine shafts. Going in to pick up sand is spooky as hell, driving through leveled neighborhoods with bare foundations and the occasional spot where patches of flowers still pop up where there was a garden bed or in two rows alongside a former walkway. I don't miss going in there.
Lovely video as always John !
Glad you like them!
Red state, crappy regulations, catering to dangerous companies that have poor safety and maintenance, yep pretty standard situation. 😬
Sadly true
Money matters more than everything to them.
I have driven through pitcher Oklahoma several times. its so unnerving seeing it empty and abandoned.
Getting so close to the big 1M dude! Proud of you!
And yes, more Superfund sites, please!
I've heard this story before, but you are so thorough.
Thank you!!
I grew up in a small town in northeast Texas in the general vicinity of this. Even before he mentioned the toxic waste I was thinking, "What a little hell hole."
I love hearing the current weather at your studio location at the end of each video. It's a nice touch
Tornado: Devine hint to leave. More ghost towns: YES.
More ghost towns please!
Great video John, thanks! Also, I love the advertising markers or whatever they're called just before your ad breaks. I haven't seen those on any form of TV in years! :)
My family lived nearby in Miami, OK from 1978 to 1982. It was a fun weekend outing to go play in the Pitcher chat piles and watch the dirt bikers and other ATVs drive on the piles and kick up dust. Our home was less than 1/4 mile from Tar Creek. We’d play in it all of the time, until seemingly overnight, the water turned bright orange and EVERY living creature of that creek not only died suddenly (the stench!) but us kids were fascinated because all of the dead creatures TURNED WHITE. All kinds of fish, snakes, turtles, frogs - all white. Never seen anything like it. A few years after the creek turned orange came the cancers and the miscarriages. Our neighbor died of breast cancer in her mid-30s. A physician family friend said his pracitces’ cancer diagnosis went up at least 25% within 3 years of Tar Creek turning orange. Keep in mind this is in Miami (pronounced My-am-uh), not Pitcher (9 miles away). My brothers and I both three of us have needed multiple spine and joint surgeries before the age of 50, and keep in mind I’m adopted so not genetically related to my brothers for any kind of genetic or hereditary explanation for this. I wonder how much smarter I could’ve turned out in life had my parents not decided to move me to one of the most toxic waste sites in the USA, in the time period in which it became its most toxic self.
US Army Corps of Engineers. "Corps" is pronounced "core", not "corpse". The plural of "corps" is pronounced "corze".
Yes please, more ghost towns
"Unplanned subterranean deposition" - a very diplomatic way of putting it!
I really enjoy your channel, there are some great companions to Picher, Ok, such as Centralia,
Pennsylvania, Love Canal, New York, and Times Beach, Missouri to name a few. A quick search of the EPA superfund list should give you plenty of material.
Brilliant 🎉🎉🎉 could you pls cover the train crash in Aushtubla pls.🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉
Thanks for the suggestion!!
Me in Oklahoma: I want out
Great video, John, thank you. I'd definitely like some more ghost-town vids!
Well done! Ghost towns are always a great topic.... I'd love to see more!
I'd like you to cover Times Beach, Missouri, a couple hundred miles northeast of Picher. This was a small town outside of St. Louis that had dusty dirt roads. They hired a guy to spray down the roads with oil, and the guy used waste oil that, unbeknownst to everyone, contained carcinogenic Dioxin. The EPA later shuttered the entire town, and the cleaned up location is now a park celebrating the nearby Route 66.
He already did
"This water is jank." Stop! I wasn't ready for that line 🤣🤣
Yes, more ghost towns, thank you ! Important to be aware of the sometimes negative, ongoing effects of industrial ventures. Thanks you 🏆
Ohh yes, definitely more Ghost Towns please, that will be an excellent addition to your channel, being a new additional theme but not too much of a deviation from your existing themes I believe it will be well-liked.
I find any topic you cover is interesting and I look forward to your video. Stories about ghost towns are super interesting. Now I'll be waiting for your ghost town series.
Re: ghost towns, good idea!
I grew up in OKlahoma from around age 5 to 15 and i recall in my early teens being told to not go anywhere near Picher for any reason as it was not safe, but i do not recall being told why it wasn't safe. My family moved away and i forgot about the place until now.
when my mom left my dad and took my brother and I down to texas to escape, we drove down through Picher. Really a bizarre place, I remember some grizzled looking dude sitting out on a stoop downtown, and that was the only person we saw there. Just him and the chat piles.
I really appreciate the in-video citations. Keep up the good work!
I've been waiting for this one!
Oh dear. I grew up in a mining town in Northern Ontario and we played in, on and around the mine tailings whenever we knew we wouldn't get caught. We even swam in ponds that formed on top of the tailings. We vaguely knew it was dangerous but my understanding was that it was physically dangerous, which was the main appeal, but I have no real memory of understanding it was toxic. This was the early 70s and it's possible many of us are suffering the effects decades later. Don't play in mine tailings, kids.
Yes to more ghost towns!
Loved this one. I live not far north of Pitcher so this was fascinating. Thank you for covering this.
Yes, John. More ghost town videos would be highly appreciated. Very interesting stuff indeed!
I really appreciate that you always include links to your sources.
Hi John. It's John. Love your work!! You do an awesome job.
Ghost towns are a great topic! I would really like to hear more! Thank you
Lost towns sounds like a great series!
This was super interesting!
Thank you so much for making this video!
I used to play on the chat piles, using it as a rifle range. I also coonhunted on tar creek.
Thanks for sharing, this is an amazing channel.
Look forward to each video.
A ghost-town series would be entertaining. Could be interesting to see other places, potentially nearby, that were abandoned.
More ghost town coverage would be appreciated. It's one of those topics that probably isn't overly popular, but it's really interesting to see the context of the events that led up to the disaster and what happened afterwards.
As a person who's family comes from exactly this part of OK, I love seeing this kind of content.
I literally have family that moved from Pitcher to south Texas in the aftermath of this crap, and it's nice to see it talked about as it normally doesn't see the light of day.
Hi John, yes - more ghost towns please. I'm sure that the topic on its own would yield a fair number of videos. If you could ghost towns from all over the world, not just the U.S. would be good. Thanks again for your videos.
I find stories about ghost towns absolutely fascinating. So yes. More, please 😊
Would love more videos on Ghost towns. Especially the ones affected by chemical or otherwise toxic screw ups from the past like Love Canal or Times Beach (though these have been done to death already on CZcams). Love these PD videos, keep up the good work!
Hi John! Really liked this video, and wouldn't mind seeing more vids. on abandoned towns. I also wouldn't mind being able to buy some "Balls!" stickers individually. Take care, and keep doing your music, too.