Last Ones Left in a Toxic Kansas Town
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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.
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.