CHAT: Approaches to long-term planning for the tar creek superfund site, ottawa county, oklahoma

Tar Creek in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, a former lead mining area and part of the Tri-State Mining Area of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, represents the failure at multiple levels of administration and overview to address decades of environmental degradation, toxic land conditions, and environmental injustice. Communities and environmental officers, in collaboration with local agencies and academic research groups, have started to address the long-term remediation, planning and regeneration of vast mining soil heaps, polluted waterways and rivers, and land subsidence and mineshaft sinkholes that characterize the Superfund site's landscape and surrounding waste territories (see Figure 9.1).