“We’ve got to clean up Bokoshe. We’ve got to stop this cancer rate. “
For six years, freelance documentary photographer Carlan Tapp has been photographing the coal ash dump around the southeastern Oklahoma town of Bokoshe…the town OK Energy Today has reported on over the past few years.
Now Tapp is out with a series of photographs detailing what he saw and revealed by the Pulitzer prize-winning news organization, Inside Climate News which is dedicating to covering the environment and energy.
The story is entitled “Is Coal Ash Killing This Oklahoma Town?” It begins this way: “The wind that blows through Bokoshe, Okla. is an ominous one. A small, low-income town near the Arkansas border, Bokoshe sits in the shadow of a coal power plant. Its toxic byproduct, coal ash, is trucked daily to a nearby dump, and when the wind blows through town, that ash rains down on its residents. They believe it is to blame for the asthma and cancer that runs rampant there.”
Tapp told Inside Climate News what prompted his interest in the small community in southeastern Oklahoma.
