More than 40 years after the EPA deemed it a Superfund site, cleanup in the Tar Creek area in Ottawa County is seeing ...

Picher, Oklahoma, resembles other ghost towns on this list. It was once a profitable mining town that shrank when the mines shut down. But Picher’s story has another, more disturbing chapter.

Picher, once a thriving lead and zinc mining community, is surrounded by polluted bodies of water and huge piles of mine tailings, also called chat. Millions of dollars already have been spent ...

In this story: images from Picher, the largest of the three mining towns that make up Tar Creek, and nearby areas. Sometimes described as “America’s worst environmental disaster,” the former ...