Documenting the Disappearance of America’s Most Toxic Ghost Town
Picher is often cited as the most toxic town in the United States. Yet every year, its identity as a town is eroding. A May 10, 2008 EF4 tornado wrecked more than 100 homes and killed six in its corner of northeastern Oklahoma, scattering bits of buildings and possessions at the base of the chat piles. These hills of chat, a fine gravel byproduct of lead and zinc mining, are a toxic relic of the industry that polluted the community’s earth and waters for decades in the early 20th century. Underground tunnels periodically open into gaping sinkholes. Following a mandatory evacuation and buyouts, spurred by its 1980 designation by the Environmental Protection Agency as part of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, its homes are boarded up, its mining museum is lost to arson, and its schools are abandoned.
“I first visited Picher in 2008, shortly after the tornado,” photographer Todd Stewart told Hyperallergic. “The tornado had leveled houses in a significant part of the town, leaving only building foundations and pavement still in place.”
He saw the ground strewn with personal objects, like books, photographs, toys, keepsakes, and letters. “Although most of the town’s residents had left, indications of their lives were everywhere,” he said. “I realized that this would not be the case forever. I knew that eventually this place would become a landscape with little physical evidence of what had been before.”
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