Living and Dying in the Ashes
Photographer Carlan Tapp documents residents of Bokoshe, Oklahoma and the town’s nearby coal waste dump.
Carlan Tapp is taking on an unprecedented task — photographing all the ways that the coal industry is shaping our planet. His gorgeous and impactful photos from Question of Power are making visible and understandable an issue that is often too hard to fully comprehend. In the coming months Vantage will be running edits of his stories along with excerpts from our interview with him.
Oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico from BP’s Macondo well. Carlan Tapp has been photographing the unfolding disaster along coastal Louisiana and was ready to call it quits, calling his wife Nancy to let her know he was on the way back to Santa Fe. She asked how far he was from Bokoshe, Oklahoma, a tiny town near the Arkansas line.
Nancy and Carlan had been hearing little snippets of information about health problems decimating the 450 or so residents there and looking at a website some townspeople had started. It was more than five-hundred miles in the wrong direction, but he didn’t know when he’d be this close again. He wrote the site’s contact and began driving north.
“I couldn’t believe it when I rolled into the town,” says Carlan. “It blew me away. I’d done work on the Navajo Nation. I’d worked on the big coal ash spill down in Kingston, Tennessee, when their retaining pond broke and all the stuff went in the rivers and everything — I was down there for six months — so I knew what the hazards were of all the stuff. I roll into Bokoshe and oh my god. This little tiny town, it’s really poor. There’s a little café there and a couple of old brick buildings that are boarded up. The streets are just lined with coal ash. Holy shit, I can’t believe this. It was just coming off the trucks — it was all over the place, in the school grounds, peoples homes, on their cars.”
The trucks were cutting through the center of town to dump loads of spent coal from a nearby power plant at the Thumbs Up Ranch, a former mine repurposed for waste. Fly ash, the finest particles spewed out from smokestacks, comprises the bulk of power plant waste. It’s known to contain arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, lead, mercury, selenium and other toxic compounds. The powdery stuff is easily picked up by the wind and absorbed into the deepest recesses of the lungs. Those toxins leach into water and into the unlined dump, including groundwater that rural residents tap into with their wells.
Carlan’s initial email led to a week’s stay going around town, being introduced to the people of Bokoshe, and listening to how their lives had changed since 1998 when Making Money Having Fun, LLC began operating the dump. And he continues to return, keeping in touch with subjects who have become friends. His last trip was in the spring of this year, one he made after hearing that some folks he hasn’t seen in a while weren’t doing so well. While he was there he got in touch with Bill, whose wife Diane Reece had just died after years of battling cancer.
Diane was a pillar of the community who had been at the forefront of Bokoshe’s resistance to their polluting neighbor. She worked nearly forty years in education, handling Head Start programs, kindergarten and middle school classes. She applied for grants and helped found the town’s only library.
When her students wanted to study coal ash for science credit she had them write letters detailing how cancer and respiratory problems affected their families, and about how kids in their town were diagnosed with asthma at a rate six times the national average. Carlan recorded students reading their letters, and packets of audio testimony, photographs and writings were sent off to everyone from President Obama to the EPA. Oklahoma representatives took notice, as did a Tulsa television station.
On December 20th of 2013 the White House announced that Diane had been awarded the 2014 Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. She had died days earlier at the age of 61, succumbing to an aggressive form of leukemia. She had previous survived breast and kidney cancer.
Diane had lived within a couple miles of Thumbs Up Ranch.
“Every morning she and her neighbor would go out and they would ride their bicycles around this whole circle of the road,” says Carlan. “They both got cancer. Her neighbor passed, Diane survived the first bout. And then she got the second bout and survived that.”
Others Carlan has photographed continue to suffer from maladies they attribute to coal ash. Kenny Self knows what made him sick. He drove a bulldozer at other coal dump sites, his health getting worse the longer he worked. When breathing problems landed him in the hospital doctors diagnosed him with lung cancer. The solid mass in his lung was made of ash, now basically a chunk of concrete deep in his chest. Kenny’s arms are speckled with scars from when he would develop blisters from what was likely alkali burns.
Even the family which owns and operates Thumbs Up Ranch suffers. One of the founders lives at the entrance of the site and now has terminal cancer.
“I went out for a ride in a pickup truck with one of the community members,” Carlan says. “They just went down the road pointing out all the houses and told me all the different kinds of cancers all the people had died of.”
MMHF, LLC, now Clean Hydro Reclamation, wasn’t inclined to grant Carlan access to their facilities and he didn’t want to sneak over any fences to peek in. Shots of the ash heap were taken from afar on the grounds of Dub Talbert’s ranch next door.
There are no more cattle at that ranch. A lifelong resident with a lifetime’s experience working with animals, Dub was forced to sell off his herd after watching them suffer mystery ailments for years. Vaccinations didn’t keep the cows healthy. Ash was blowing all over the property, mixing with the grass and water, but there was no way to prove any connection to the dump and sicknesses.
“Dub’s had his cattle die, he knows from drinking the water, but he couldn’t afford to have a vet come out and do autopsies,” says Carlan. “The calves would be born and they’d stand up and they’d try to breathe and they couldn’t breath and they’d fall over dead. He just couldn’t take it anymore. He just couldn’t stand seeing them die.”
Despite the cocktail of dangerous substances found in coal ash, it’s not regulated like a hazardous waste. In 2010 the EPA began to consider drafting national standards for its disposal, but as of right now what happens in Bokoshe is the responsibility of multiple state agencies.
The Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality oversees air standards, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission watches the water, and the state Department of Mines polices the dump itself. The site is technically a mine reclamation project intended to smooth the scars of past digging. The ash now sits stories high at what is the state’s largest dumping grounds.
Coal ash is buried in landfills or mixes with fluids to sit in ponds. Agencies use it to treat roads in the winter and companies use it to mix concrete or make bricks. The DEQ did cite MMHF, LLC once for violating air quality which led to the installation of an enclosure to mitigate the wind from stirring up dust. Residents found the protection lacking.
After years of covering stories like what’s happened in Bokoshe, Carlan feels that the lack of coherent regulation plays perfectly into a larger game of money and politics which dictates energy policy in America.
“They get away with it because you’ve got people like Sen. Inhofe in Oklahoma who doesn’t believe in global warming, who doesn’t believe that any of this stuff causes any problems,” he says. “It’s really tough in the state of Oklahoma from a governmental standpoint to get things done.”
The only serious infringement that MMHF, LLC was found liable for came from the EPA when it found waste water leaking into a nearby stream. Once popped for violating the Clean Water Act the company stopped accepting waste water from fracking operations. If coal disposal standards are dictated at the federal level the state’s regulatory authority will no longer be an issue.
Change hasn’t come quickly enough for the people of Bokoshe. In 2013 a class action lawsuit was filed against almost 50 companies and individuals, ranging from MMHF, LLC to the corporation that owns the power plant where the coal ash comes from. Carlan’s work was submitted as key evidence to represent the community.
Just before his most recent trip things weren’t going well in court. The judge wasn’t impressed with their scattershot approach and the claimants were discussing their options to appeal.
And the story continues. The most profound marker of the five years Carlan has spent visiting Bokoshe is the number of people who have passed away. Those who survive continue living where the air they breathe and the water they drink could be killing them. The town isn’t rich and property values won’t fund anyone’s relocation to a new home. There is no escape, and the strain is obvious.
“You see the longterm effects,” Carlan says. “You go back and that time shows up. It’s not just aging. You see people’s lives completely turned upside down.”
