Abandoned Picher, Oklahoma: The Most Toxic Town in America.
The title for most toxic location in the United States goes to a remote, and perhaps surprising location. According to the EPA's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), Kotzebue, Alaska, a city of 3,500 residents located 30 miles north of the Arctic Circle takes that dubious honor.
The mining waste was located very near neighborhoods in the town. The decades of unrestricted subsurface excavation dangerously undermined most of Picher's town buildings and left giant piles of toxic metal-contaminated mine tailings (known as chat) heaped throughout the area.
Welcome to Jerome, Arizona, America's largest ghost town.
As The New York Times reported, some 3,800 ghost towns exist in America, mostly abandoned between the 19th and 20th centuries for greener pastures and big city dreams. However, just because no one lives there doesn't mean you can't visit.
Its decline led to the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history. Today only around a third of its population remains to call Detroit home. The decline has continued despite several large-scale revitalizations.
Las Vegas edged Detroit for the title of America's most abandoned city. Atlanta came in third, followed by Greensboro, N.C., and Dayton, Ohio.
Centralia, Pa.
Located in covered bridge-heavy Columbia County in northeastern Pennsylvania, the borough of Centralia is without a doubt North America's most notorious modern near ghost town.
People established a community there, full of wooden structures including a church, jail, hotel, bank and schoolhouse, as well as shops and homes. At its peak in 1880, an estimated 10,000 residents lived there, but Bodie was abandoned during the early '40s. Today, it's a ghost town.
Can You Visit Picher Today? Yes, you can still visit the town, just as I did. As of the year 2023, some side roads are closed (due to chat and sinkholes) but the main road that runs through the community still exists and will still take you past town into Kansas.
Picher, Oklahoma, no longer exists as a community. In spring 2008 an F4 tornado damaged many houses and killed six people.
Today, Picher is a ghost town in the truest sense of the term. The school closed down, and businesses shut their doors for good. In 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency evacuated the town, deeming it unlivable. The Picher area's population dropped from 1,640 to 20 in less than a decade.
According to data from the table below, Hawaii has the best air quality with 99.40% of good air quality days, followed by Maine with 93.20% and Alaska with 92.30%. On the other hand, California has the worst air quality with only 60.60% of good air quality days, followed by Arizona with 64.60%.
Pripyat was officially proclaimed a city in 1979 and had grown to a population of 49,360 by the time it was evacuated on the afternoon of 27 April 1986, one day after the Chernobyl disaster. Clockwise from top-left: Pripyat central square. apartment buildings with the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement in the distance.
Some towns died because the economy which supported them finished or failed. Mines are worked out, timber is cut down, wells go dry, and new routes bypass the community. Still others die from natural or manmade disasters. Floods and droughts, heavy regulation, or total lawlessness ended their share of towns.
Out of all these phantoms however, nothing compares to the strangeness of China's 'Ghost City': Ordos. The city of Ordos is a heavily stylised population centre located close to the Ordos Desert, and it's one of the main cities of Inner Mongolia.
Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, is renowned for its thrilling roller coasters, delicious food, and family friendly atmosphere. In addition to the excitement of the park, there is a unique and immersive experience that takes visitors back in time to the Old West.
Does anyone live in Burj Al Babas? All 732 castles are sitting empty. Quite a few of the grand villas were started but not finished, with only about 583 actually completely built.
Premise. A group of kids, in this hybrid animated mockumentary series, discover stories around Los Angeles by directly communicating with ghosts who inhabit the city.
Which U.S. City Has the Least Children? The city in the United States with the least children is San Francisco, California, where only 13.4% of the population is 18 or younger, according to the 2020 census data. With a total population of 873,965, the city of San Francisco has roughly 117,100 children residing in it.
Scarfolk is a fictional northwestern English town created by writer and designer Richard Littler, who is sometimes identified as the town mayor, L. Ritter. It is trapped in a time loop set in the 1970s, and its culture, parodying that of Britain at the time, features elements of the absurd and the macabre.
Naypidaw, the capital of Myanmar, previously known as Burma. Ordos City, a city in China referred to as Empty City, more commonly known as Ghost City.