Toxic Town

[bbqboy]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/magazi...wanted=all

One problem with Treece, Kan., is that the ground keeps caving in. It has happened more than a hundred times over the last century. On most occasions, the subsidences — that’s what the scientists call them — are small, like when a sofa-size crater opened up on 10th Street last year. Other times, they are much worse. In 1966, a 300-foot-wide, 200-foot-deep abyss swallowed up the road out on the edge of town. Somehow no one died.
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What Remains of Treece

Alex Webb/Magnum, for The New York Times
Della Busby and her husband are the only remaining residents of Treece. More Photos »
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From the Baxter Springs Heritage Center and Museum.
Treece, Kan., around the 1920s. More Photos »

Alex Webb/Magnum, for The New York Times
Contaminated rock just over the border in Picker, Okla. More Photos »
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I first visited Treece in 2010. From the airport in Kansas City, it’s a half-day’s drive down Highway 69, the industrial sprawl giving way to fields of sunflowers and prairie grass. Then you enter a dust bowl, land so flat it’s more like a dustpan — so flat, in fact, that in 2003 researchers discovered that the entire state is flatter than an actual pancake, which the team purchased from one of the IHOPs that dot the landscape. Getting nearer to Treece, there are junk shops and single-wide trailers selling kittens and breeze-box Baptist churches with signs announcing, “Hell Awaits.”

At the entrance to Treece, something strange happens: Mountains appear on the horizon. Except they’re not really mountains. They’re mounds of toxic stone. Gray, treeless monuments to the town’s more profitable past.

According to local legend, Treece was founded by accident. Two accidents, really. The first occurred in 1914, when the Picher Lead Company of Joplin, Mo., sent a crew out to deliver equipment to Oklahoma. When the truck got stuck in the mud between the two towns, the company ordered its workers to drill a hole to pass the time, and the crew unexpectedly hit a thick vein of lead and zinc underground. The company then bought mining leases for the area, creating the town of Picher, Okla. When, a few years later, a Kansas land surveyor accidentally moved the state line four blocks south into Picher, the north side of town became part of Kansas. A wealthy resident called the new town Treece, which also happened to be his last name.

Thousands of people from the Ozarks flocked to the two towns to work the mines. They would haul stones to the surface by the bucketful, then crush and grind them to extract the minerals, dumping the waste — worthless rock called “chat” — in piles across town. By the 1920s, the area was the No. 1 producer of zinc and lead in the country, supplying metal for most of the ammunition in World Wars I and II.

But when the minerals started to run out in the 1960s, the largest mining companies went bankrupt or left, and their workers left, too. By 1981, when the Environmental Protection Agency ranked the area around Treece and Picher as the most contaminated in the country, only a few hundred people remained. By the time I visited, Picher had been abandoned almost entirely, and only 170 residents still lived in Treece with those toxic towers of stone.
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[blondemom]

There was a little town in TX called Kingsmill that we would drive thru to get to my grandparents house. It was on Highway 60. Well when my Grandmother died I drove thru the town and it was gone. All that was left was the grain elevator all the house's were gone the little diner the store's everything.. I asked my family member's about it and they said one of the local companies had bought the town because of a chemicals in the water. I think it was very common years ago for many business to think that they were in the armpit of the country and no one would give a flying fig. No one really knew what would happen years down the road.