> The tailings from the mining operations are referred to as “chat” and were deposited into massive piles of small rock. We would play in these “chat piles” as a kid. Probably exposing ourselves to heavy amounts of lead and zinc dust.

I spent countless hours as a kid swimming in flooded coal mining strip pits, collecting fossils from those exact sorts of piles you mention (there's some cool shit there! They dig up so many layers so you get stuff separated by tens or hundreds of millions of years all accessible on the surface, shell fossils were extremely abundant and there were some sections full of fossil ferns of the same species more often associated with Illinois) and if I biked a couple miles down an arrow-straight road from our house, I could see an operating coal power plant in the distance, pumping nastiness into the air.

I reckon cancer's in my future. Whoops.