Picher (Oklahoma)

Ottawa County

40-58550

Picher is a former city in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, United States. The city is known as the center of the Tar Creek site Superfund. It is an approximately 100 km ² been designated by the U.S. authorities ecological disaster area, the extremely high contamination with heavy metals, especially lead, due to flourishing in the 1970s, lead and zinc mining in the vicinity of the town, has. After a long dispute over the remediation of soils, at least in the urban area, the authorities decided in 2007 to relocate the residents of the city and give the city of Picher itself.

During the heyday of the mines around the time of World War II, about 16,000 people lived in Picher. After the end of the mining industry, the city depopulated rapidly, so that in 2007 were only counted around 1000 inhabitants. In May 2008, the population was estimated to be only about 800, when the village was hit by a tornado and largely destroyed. A reconstruction of the city is excluded due to the planned evacuation.

Picher is subject resulted in 2 of the second season of the docu-fiction series Life After People ( "poison cloud ", USA 2010). The occurred in the town of environmental damage appear there as an example of what would happen after a fictitious global disappearance of humanity with their legacies.