Continued progress with chat removal, land cleanup cited at annual Tar Creek Conference

Oct. 30—MIAMI, Okla. — More than 5 million tons of chat has been removed and at least 793 lead-contaminated acres of land within the Tar Creek Superfund Site have now been cleaned up, according to project leaders who participated in this year's Tar Creek Conference in Miami.

Entities that have been playing a critical role in cleaning up the site shared their progress during the second day of the 23rd annual Tar Creek Conference held last week.

Officials with the Quapaw Nation were joined virtually Wednesday by project managers with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality during the conference that focuses on the contamination left by decades of lead and zinc mining in the Tri-State District. Agencies updated the public on their latest achievements at the Superfund site, a portion of the Tri-State Mining District in Ottawa County.

But way more work remains to undo the damage left by decades-long mining.

Tar Creek spans over 40 square miles in the former mining area of Northeast Oklahoma and was added to the EPA's National Priorities List in 1983, making it one of the oldest Superfund sites in the country.

The Quapaw Nation, the EPA and ODEQ have been collaborating for years on monitoring and cleaning up contaminated land at the site. Mining began in the region in the late 1800s and trickled to an end in 1970. The mining and milling of ore, primarily lead and zinc, produced more than 500 million tons of waste in the area.

"The statistic for Tar Creek itself and the mining here in Picher was for every one ton of ore that was taken from the site, 16 tons of chat was left here," said Craig Kreman, Quapaw Nation environmental director. "That speaks highly to the amount of waste that was left here, not only in Picher but in the (whole) Tri-State Mining District."

More than 40 square miles were included when the EPA added Tar Creek to the federal National Priorities List. Kreman said that Tar Creek is one of four Superfund sites located within the former Tri-State Mining District, which covers approximately 2,500 square miles throughout Southeast Kansas, Southwest Missouri and Northeast Oklahoma.

An investigative study completed in 2007 estimated that 65.4 million tons of waste remained in the Tar Creek Superfund Site, which lies wholly within the jurisdiction of the Quapaw Nation. The tribe has been involved in cleanup efforts with the Superfund since 2001, according to Kreman.

In 2013, the Quapaw Nation was asked to remediate 40 acres of tribal land near Quapaw called Catholic 40. Quapaw Nation's Quapaw Services Authority completed cleanup work at Catholic 40 a year later, having removed 107,000 tons of chat and having capped two mine shafts.

"Back in the early 1900s, it was a Catholic Mission," said Kreman. "It was then turned over for mining and eventually turned back over and into tribal trust property. It was roughly 14 to 15 acres of mining waste that we addressed back in 2013."

Once the project was completed, the EPA agreed that the tribe should head up the cleanup of the remaining chat piles and mine tailings on tribal land within the Tar Creek site. To date, Kreman said, the Quapaw Nation has removed 4,374,385 tons of chat, capped 48 mine shafts and cleaned up 543 acres of land.

ODEQ has been working with the tribe on portions of Tar Creek where the state has removed approximately 1.4 million tons of chat and cleaned up approximately 250 acres of property, according to Zach Bradley, Operable Unit 4 Project manager.

The Superfund site is divided into areas of focus called Operable Units. At Tar Creek, Operable Unit 4 includes chat piles, mine/mill waste and smelter waste.

Distal 6A, a property adjacent to the Catholic 40, is another project that's been successfully cleaned up. Bradley said approximately 91,000 tons of chat was removed from 20 acres of the property, as well as four mine shafts were being filled and capped. The ODEQ grant on this project closed last year.

"This was our first project as a state lead," said Bradley. "We worked in coordination with the Quapaw Nation, partnered with them and they performed the work on our behalf."

Land that was once littered with heavy metals has been transformed into a thriving, vegetative space through cleanup. Kreman said the Tribe has been utilizing mushroom compost to aid in the cleanup process and to enhance vegetative growth.

Bradley said one of ODEQ's biggest projects to date has been the cleanup at a site near Beaver Creek.

"It's where we spend most of our time and effort," he said. "We remediated approximately 200 acres here with 1.2 million tons of source material (chat) removed from the project area, and we capped 19 mine shafts. This was a big project. We've been working on this project since 2017, and we've just recently wrapped up work out there.

"We're pretty happy with this project," he said.