Piles of toxic mine debris, known as chat, dot the landscape ... serve as tombstones to a community that is long gone. Picher, Oklahoma, is emblematic of what happens when a mining boomtown ...

84-year-old Orval "Hoppy" Ray arrived fashionably late to a celebration in Picher, Oklahoma, a vacated mining town at the center of one of the nation's largest and most polluted toxic-waste sites.

PICHER, Oklahoma (CNN ... afternoon to conduct air and soil tests, she said. The EPA is concerned that the storms and debris could have upset the area's "chat piles," which basically consist ...