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.”