PICHER — The Bureau of Indian Affairs decided to leave 30 million tons of toxic chemicals on the Quapaw Reservation after a 1920s mining boom, and the tribe is still cleaning it up. The Quapaw Nation has spent 11 years remediating Oklahoma’s well-known ghost town Picher — which is on an EPA Superfund site that covers 80% of its reservation — in an effort to give the tribal land an agricultural future. “It will never be residential.
It will never be commercial, but it can still be usable,” said Cherokee Environmental Scientist Summer King, who joined the cleanup project in 2016. Since 2013, the tribe has removed an estimated 8 million tons of chat , lead and zinc from the area. Last year marked the project’s 10-year anniversary .
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