The Ghost Town Of Picher Is One Of The Strangest Places You Can Go In Oklahoma
By J.B. VanDyke|Published October 31, 2020
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J.B. VanDyke
Author
J.B. Weisenfels has lived in rural Arkansas for three decades. She is a writer, a mom, and a graduate student. She is also an avid collector of tacky fish whatnots, slightly chipped teapots, and other old things. In her spare time she enjoys driving to the nearest creek to sit a while. If you were to visit her, she'd try to feed you cornbread.
There are plenty of outstanding strange places here in Oklahoma, but did you know the most toxic town in America is located right here in our home state? That’s right: unsafe mining practices devastated this area and a series of terrible circumstances and consequences drove off almost all human life from the land. If you’d like to visit a truly strange place, let’s take a look at this uniquely mistreated and unlucky town that used to thrive and now sits rotting among apocalyptic gray hills made of toxic waste:
There is something chilling about driving in a ghost town, isn’t there? As if the absence of residents is a breeze that blows right through you. That feeling is compounded in the ghost town of Picher, where a tornado ravaged what mining practices had already poisoned.
There are visual reminders of what this once-thriving community succumbed to. What you see in the picture below is “chat.” Chat is a byproduct of lead-zinc mining. Huge, heaping piles of chat can be found around the town of Picher. That’s because Picher used to be one of the most important lead mining operations in the nation.
For a century, unrestricted excavation undermined most of the buildings in the town, leaving behind these heaping piles of toxic waste.. In 1996, it was discovered that 34% of the children in Picher suffered from lead poisoning due to the environmental effects of unrestricted mining. Many of those children would suffer lifelong neurological consequences.
In 2006, the Army Corps of Engineers released a study that said 86% of the buildings in Picher, including the town school, were subject to collapse at any moment. The town was so badly undermined that there was little structural integrity to be found.
In 2009, the EPA and the state of Oklahoma evacuated and dissolved the town. Though, actually, the now-unincorporated community of Picher still has a handful of residents.
If you count super sad and creepy billboards as residents, it has a few more. Yikes.
You might be asking yourself if it’s safe to visit Picher. Certainly, you do not want to go ahead and roll around in the toxic mountains of poisonous metals, but the main road in Picher is still open. You are perfectly welcome to pass through if you want, though we wouldn’t recommend staying too long. . .
What do you think? Does an apocalypse road trip sound like an adventure you would sign up for, or does the instability seem too intimidating? If you have driven through the town, we’d love to hear about your experience in the comments.
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