America Took Half Its War Metal From This Town. Then It Paid Everyone to Leave. Picher, Oklahoma

GHOST MAPS · American places that emptied out — and what was left behind. ▶ Watch the series:    • Ghost Maps   On May 10, 2008, an EF4 tornado tore through Picher, Oklahoma — and the government announced there would be no money to rebuild, because it was already paying the whole town to leave. Picher sat on Quapaw allotment land over the richest lead and zinc field of the First World War: more than half the zinc and nearly half the lead America's war effort needed came out of this one district. What the mines left behind was seventy million tons of lead-laced tailings piled two hundred feet over the ball fields, a creek that turned orange in 1979, one child in three testing positive for lead poisoning by 1994, and a town where 86 percent of the buildings stood over voids and could collapse at any time. This is the story of the men who stayed anyway — a pharmacist who vowed to be the last one out and kept his word — and of the ending nobody expected: the Quapaw Nation, whose land it always was, becoming the first tribal nation in American history to lead the cleanup of a federal Superfund site. CHAPTERS 0:00 The storm that changed nothing 0:52 The claim 1:48 The arsenal 2:40 The mountains 3:30 The ledger 4:27 The creek turns orange 5:19 One child in three 6:11 The argument 7:01 The ground gives way 7:57 The storm, again 8:53 The man who stayed 9:44 Whose land it always was Sources include the Oklahoma Historical Society's Picher, Tri-State Lead and Zinc District, and Quapaw encyclopedia entries; the EPA Tar Creek Superfund site profile; the 2006 Army Corps of Engineers subsidence study; contemporary reporting by the Tulsa World, The Oklahoman, KTUL, the Associated Press, People magazine, CNN, and the Los Angeles Times obituary of Gary Linderman; and the L.E.A.D. Agency. Archival photographs via Wikimedia Commons, FEMA, the Library of Congress, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; photographs by formulanone, Peggy Davis, and others under CC BY-SA licences (full credits in pinned comment sources); stock footage via Pexels; music licensed via Epidemic Sound.