Toxic town

       Mayor Bill Blunk sees no reason for sugar-coating his opinion when asked to describe this town."It's dead ... wasted land," he said.Almost anywhere else on the map,such bluntness could cost a politician his re-election. But not here. Blunk has the near-unanimous support of the population,140 people or so, who are perhaps singular among residents of municipalities in that they all want out of theirs.
       "I'd be happy to go as anyone," said Randall Barr, a retired sand company worker."You can't do anything with this land. What good is it?"
       For most of the early part of the 20th century, this little city in the south-east corner of Kansas had the feel of a rollicking boom town, its prosperity coming from land rich in lead, zinc and iron ore. Part of a vast mining district where Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma meet, Treece and its twin city across the Oklahoma state line, Picher, became the unofficial capital of a zone that in its heyday produced more than $20 billion worth of ore - much of it used for weaponry to fight World War I and II.
       But when the last of the mines closed in the 1970s, Treece was left sitting in a toxic waste dump of lead-tinged dust,contaminated soil and sinkholes. On a hot summer day, children can be seen riding their bikes around enormous mounds of chat - pulverised rock laced with lead and iron. It is the waste product left over from mining that is the cause of so many problems here.Uncontrolled, it blows in the wind.
       Both Treece and Picher - the much larger of the two towns, once home to 20,000 people and separated from Treece by only a gravel road, the state line -became part of adjacent Superfund sites that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)has been trying to clean since the 1980s.
       In Picher,the remediation of the land has proved so daunting that in a move without many precedents, the federal government decided to buy out and relocate just about the entire population,which had dwindled to 1,800 by 2000,leaving a dusty ghost town where the social and economic hub of the area used to be.
       But the buyouts stopped at the Oklahoma line. Treece remains similarly contaminated, but now even more isolated.Officials in Kansas have been practically begging the federal government to move Treece's impoverished people, mostly the children and grandchildren of old miners, off the land, too, but to no avail.
       "You can turn and see one block away is Oklahoma, unsafe," said Pam Pruitt,the city clerk."They got bought out,and we didn't? It's incredibly unfair.The people here, if they wanted to leave,they can't. They can't sell their property.They can't get bank loans to fix them up. They're just stuck."
       The EPA does not see it that way. The agency favours rehabilitation of the tainted soil in Treece, which mainly entails cleansing the top layer of sediment.
       Kansas Republican Senator Pat Roberts, a staunch advocate of buyouts,said he likens the strategy to "throwing a fancy rug over a hole in the floor". He believes it would be more efficient to simply move the people, which would cost an estimated $3.5 million (116.9 million baht).
       Nonetheless, the agency says that it can accomplish the soil-cleansing in a 10-year time frame and that Treece residents are safe in the meantime. In Picher,however, government scientists found that extensive waste deposits could not be remediated for several decades, and that residents would be at risk during the clean-up, hence the need for government-assisted relocation.
       "They are two independent sites from the way we look at it," said Mathy Stanislaus, the assistant administrator for solid waste at the EPA.
       Stanislaus said that in Picher, the residential areas were interspersed with mining waste sites, but that in Treece,the residential areas are a distance away from pollutants. Still, he said, the agency is "taking a hard look" at the residents'concerns and will continue to evaluate
       their situation.
       Such explanations do nothing to ease the worry of the people in Treece, who in addition to living in fear of lead and other poisons,have lost their stores, petrol stations,some public services, jobs and social outlet along with Picher.
       That town ceased to be an official entity on September 1. Only a few diehard residents remain,unconvinced of the health risks, or unhappy with their buyout offers.
       They live in a gothic landscape of varying degrees of disrepair, as a few residents walked away from well-kept properties just last week while most others took buyouts years ago, leaving dozens of houses to collapse upon themselves. Stray dogs wander.Faded signs announce places that are no longer: the Picher Mining Museum and the Church of the Nazarene, a 24-hour truck stop.
       "I had a perfectly good house," said Vickey Phillips, who moved out of Picher four years ago."But they said it was full of lead."
       The psychological impact of Picher's move on Treece has been overwhelming.
       "They are in essence one town," said Senator Sam Brownback, who grew up north of Treece and is pushing for buyouts."Yes, there's a state line that divides them, but that's a man-made distinction. It is very much one town."
       About 161km north-east of Tulsa,Treece is entirely residential, with the only public building being its two-room clapboard city hall. Most of the population, which has a poverty level more than twice the national average, is feeling increasingly depressed about the isolation and a sense of creeping abandonment.
       "There's nothing here but a city hall,honestly," said Regina Palmer.
       Glenda Powell is among those hoping for a buyout."My father was one of the last miners," she said."He died of cancer,and so did my mother, bad lungs. This has always been home, and I don't know where we'd go, just a place where we can breathe."