Eventually the EPA and the state of Oklahoma agreed to a mandatory evacuation and buyout of the entire township. This can result in lifelong neurological problems. The state collaborated on mitigation and remediation measures, but a 1994 screening result found that 34% of the children in Picher suffered from lead poisoning due to these environmental effects.
The discovery of the cave-in risks, groundwater contamination, and health effects associated with the chat piles (children playing on the piles and putting it in their sandboxes, as they did not know the toxic danger) and subsurface shafts resulted in the site being included in 1980 in the Tar Creek Superfund site by the US Environmental Protection Agency. The decades of unrestricted subsurface excavation dangerously undermined most of Picher's town buildings and left giant piles of toxic metal-contaminated mine tailings (known as chat) heaped throughout the area. It was a major national center of lead and zinc mining for more than 100 years in the heart of the Tri-State Mining District. Picher is a ghost town and former city in Ottawa County, northeastern Oklahoma, United States. The mining waste was located very near neighborhoods in the town.
