Post by Okwes on Dec 19, 2006 12:41:53 GMT -5
A peril that dwelt among the Navajos
During the Cold War, uranium mines left contaminated waste scattered around the Indians. Homes built with the material silently pulsed with radiation. People developed cancer. And the U.S. did little to help.
By Judy Pasternak, Times Staff Writer
November 19, 2006
Oljato, Utah -- Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967. They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent.
For the most part, they were happy with the purchase. Their Navajo hogan was situated well, between a desert mesa and the trading-post road. The eight-sided dwelling proved stout and snug, with walls of stone and wood, and a green-shingle roof.
The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. So three years after moving in, the Holidays jumped at the chance to get a real floor. A federally funded program would pay for installation if they bought the materials. The Holidays couldn't afford to, but the contractor, a friend of theirs, had an idea.
He would use sand and crushed rock that had washed down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled.
As promised, the 6-inch slab was so smooth that the Holidays could lay their mattresses directly on it and enjoy a good night's sleep.
They didn't know their fine new floor was radioactive.
Fifty years ago, cancer rates on the reservation were so low that a medical journal published an article titled "Cancer immunity in the Navajo."
Back then, the contamination of the tribal homeland was just beginning. Mining companies were digging into one of the world's richest uranium deposits, in a reservation spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were chiseled and blasted from the mountains and plains. The mines provided uranium for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic bomb, and for the weapons stockpile built up during the arms race with the Soviet Union.
Private companies operated the mines, but the U.S. government was the sole customer. The boom lasted through the early '60s. As the Cold War threat gradually diminished over the next two decades, more than 1,000 mines and four processing mills on tribal land shut down.
The companies often left behind radioactive waste piles and open tunnels and pits. Few bothered to fence the properties or post warning signs. Federal inspectors seldom intervened.
Over the decades, Navajos inhaled radioactive dust from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce desert winds.
They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit mines that filled with rain. They watered their herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the meat.
Their children dug caves in piles of mill tailings and played in the spent mines.
And like the Holidays, many lived in homes silently pulsing with radiation.
Today, there is no talk of cancer immunity in the Navajos.
The cancer death rate on the reservation — historically much lower than that of the general U.S. population — doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, according to Indian Health Service data. The overall U.S. cancer death rate declined slightly over the same period.
Though no definitive link has been established, researchers say exposure to mining byproducts in the soil, air and water almost certainly contributed to the increase in Navajo cancer mortality.
The government has never conducted a comprehensive study of the health effects of uranium mining on the reservation. But individual scientists working on their own have documented sharply elevated cancer rates near old mines and mills. High concentrations of uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals have been found in one out of five drinking-water sources sampled.
Particularly toxic were the "hot" houses built with radioactive debris.
In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls.
Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks.
Over the years, federal and tribal officials stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records show. The total number is unknown because authorities made no serious effort to learn the full extent of the problem or to warn all those potentially affected.
After years of delay, they fixed or replaced about 20 radioactive houses and then walked away from the problem. Navajos continued to use mine waste as construction material, and the homes were passed down from one generation to the next.
Not until 2000 did the Holidays learn that their hogan was dangerous. By then, the couple had raised three children and sheltered a host of other kin while the uranium decayed. The resulting alpha, beta and gamma rays were invisible; the radon gas was odorless. But the combination greatly increased the chance of developing fatal lung cancer, according to a radiation expert who sampled air in the hogan.
"It brings chills when you're told that your house is like this," said Mary Holiday, now in her early 70s. "All the years that you've lived here," she said, her voice trailing off.
Unsuspecting, she had gone about her chores in the Navajo way, clad in the customary velveteen blouse, long skirt, thick socks and dusty shoes. She chopped wood for the stove, cooked tortillas and brewed tea. She set up her loom to weave rugs under a juniper tree while the grandchildren played dress-up for hours inside the old hogan.
By the time of the discovery that now torments her, she had lost her husband, Billy Boy, to lung cancer and congestive heart failure. He didn't smoke, but he'd worked in uranium mines by day and slept, unknowing, in the equivalent by night.
Her grandnephew, too, would soon die of lung cancer, at age 42. He had neither smoked nor mined. But he had lived in the hogan for three years as a teenager.
The dwellings in the Holiday family compound faced east toward dawn, in accordance with Navajo tradition. Behind them loomed the mesa, with a pale green uranium stain that started at the old mine and pointed down the cliff.
'Where is our guardian?'
More than 180,000 people live scattered across the region bounded by the Navajos' four sacred peaks. More than a homeland, it is their holy land. The tribe's creation stories are set here, among the painted deserts, ponderosa highlands and layered sandstone cliffs.
The U.S. government appealed to both Navajo patriotism and self-interest when it asked the tribe to open its land to uranium exploration in the 1940s. The mining would aid the American war effort and provide jobs, federal officials said.
Some of the mining companies were conglomerates like Kerr-McGee Corp. Some were small like A&B Mining, a Utah firm that was the last to mine the mesa near the Holidays' hogan.
Early on, federal scientists knew that mine workers were at heightened risk for developing lung cancer and other serious respiratory diseases in 15 or 20 years. Many did, and eventually their plight drew wide attention. In 1990, Congress offered the former miners an apology and compensation of up to $150,000 each.
But pervasive environmental hazards remained.
Starting in the late '50s, government scientists and inspectors had written memos and journal articles calling attention to the dangers posed by open mines and exposed tailings.
But the warnings failed to spark vigorous action. Pleading lack of funds, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian Health Service dodged responsibility, declining to study the health threats comprehensively, much less eliminate them.
Navajo leaders tried sporadically to force federal action, usually without success. On occasion, they withheld information about uranium-related dangers from their own people, reasoning that there was no point stirring up fear if there was no money for a solution.
Efforts to repair the environmental damage finally began in the 1980s but have been fitful and incomplete. Unable to agree on a thorough cleanup under the federal Superfund program, the tribe and the U.S. government settled for half-measures.
From 1984 through 1995, the Department of Energy spent $240 million to cover tailing piles at the old uranium mills as part of a nationwide program. Tailings are the fine sand left over when ore is ground up to extract uranium. They retain most of the radioactivity and give off large quantities of radon, an odorless, cancer-causing gas.
But the tailings cleanup, though important, was limited to the mills. It did nothing to ease the hazards posed by the abandoned mines.
Over the last decade, the tribe has used money from a federal mine-reclamation fund to seal entrances and fill pits at most of the old mines. But the cleanup was incomplete. At many of the sites, radioactive rubble lies along cliffs and on hillsides.
Erosion compounds the problem. Desert winds constantly wear away the earthen caps at the mines, exposing chunks of radioactive ore. Gullies eat into buried pit mines, allowing rainwater to course through irradiated soil and contaminate groundwater.
Now, with a renewed push for nuclear power driving up uranium prices, the mining industry wants to extract more from the still-vast Navajo reserve. Tribal leaders are resisting.
By treaty and law, the United States is responsible for the tribe's welfare, Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. noted. But the government's response to the Cold War contamination has been half-hearted, he said.
"It's an emergency that is not being treated like an emergency," he said. "Where is our guardian?"
On their own
In 1975, Joseph M. Hans Jr., an EPA radiation expert, was sent to inspect an abandoned uranium-processing plant in Cane Valley, on Navajo territory near the Arizona-Utah line.
Vanadium Corp. of America had operated the plant and an adjacent pit mine in the 1950s. A successor company, Foote Mineral, closed everything down in 1969. Federal mining inspector Howard B. Nickelson reported that the local manager had assured him that "the area would be cleaned up. No final inspection is planned."
But Foote left behind piles of tailings and mine rubble.
When Hans arrived, Congress was weighing the proposal to cover tailings at closed uranium mills across the country. The EPA was assessing the scope of the task.
As Hans worked, he noticed a small community of hand-built houses nearby. He began to worry that the residents might have used Foote's leftovers as construction material. A few months later, he and some EPA colleagues returned with hand-held radiation scanners, air samplers and other equipment.
Berlinda Cly was 9 when the inspectors visited the home where she lived with her parents and eight siblings. "The meter went BEEEEP," she recalled.
To Hans' dismay, at least 17 of 37 homes tested contained radioactive ore or tailings.
Hans said he wrote to EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., recommending that the agency clean up the most contaminated homes or relocate the occupants. "You've got two risks — gamma radiation and you've got radon," he recalled. "It wasn't acceptable."
His higher-ups said no.
"I still felt uncomfortable," Hans said, so he urged the Indian Health Service to act. The response was the same.
"Finally, we got the message," said Hans, now retired and living in Las Vegas. "We didn't have the money to go decontaminating sites."
Still, he wanted to warn homeowners. Most spoke Navajo and were uncomfortable with English. So Hans went back with a translator.
"All we could say is, 'You got a problem.' "
He could offer no hope that the government would fix it.
Just 200 miles from the reservation, in Grand Junction, Colo., residents faced the same situation. But there, the government was moving with urgency to eliminate the health risk posed by homes, schools and churches made with tailings from the Climax Uranium Co.
State health authorities had armed themselves with research and demanded federal action. The local congressman, Democrat Wayne N. Aspinall, was chairman of the House Interior Committee. He held hearings and helped secure funds for a thorough cleanup, which ultimately cost more than $500 million.
The Navajos had no such champion. Nor did they mobilize politically around the issue. In their small, widely scattered settlements, people were only vaguely aware of a radiation problem.
In Grand Junction, canvassers went door to door, checking for contamination. Contractors replaced foundations and floors, uprooted trees and cleaned tainted soil. As a bonus, they upgraded substandard electrical systems.
During the Cold War, uranium mines left contaminated waste scattered around the Indians. Homes built with the material silently pulsed with radiation. People developed cancer. And the U.S. did little to help.
By Judy Pasternak, Times Staff Writer
November 19, 2006
Oljato, Utah -- Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967. They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent.
For the most part, they were happy with the purchase. Their Navajo hogan was situated well, between a desert mesa and the trading-post road. The eight-sided dwelling proved stout and snug, with walls of stone and wood, and a green-shingle roof.
The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. So three years after moving in, the Holidays jumped at the chance to get a real floor. A federally funded program would pay for installation if they bought the materials. The Holidays couldn't afford to, but the contractor, a friend of theirs, had an idea.
He would use sand and crushed rock that had washed down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled.
As promised, the 6-inch slab was so smooth that the Holidays could lay their mattresses directly on it and enjoy a good night's sleep.
They didn't know their fine new floor was radioactive.
Fifty years ago, cancer rates on the reservation were so low that a medical journal published an article titled "Cancer immunity in the Navajo."
Back then, the contamination of the tribal homeland was just beginning. Mining companies were digging into one of the world's richest uranium deposits, in a reservation spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.
From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were chiseled and blasted from the mountains and plains. The mines provided uranium for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic bomb, and for the weapons stockpile built up during the arms race with the Soviet Union.
Private companies operated the mines, but the U.S. government was the sole customer. The boom lasted through the early '60s. As the Cold War threat gradually diminished over the next two decades, more than 1,000 mines and four processing mills on tribal land shut down.
The companies often left behind radioactive waste piles and open tunnels and pits. Few bothered to fence the properties or post warning signs. Federal inspectors seldom intervened.
Over the decades, Navajos inhaled radioactive dust from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce desert winds.
They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit mines that filled with rain. They watered their herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the meat.
Their children dug caves in piles of mill tailings and played in the spent mines.
And like the Holidays, many lived in homes silently pulsing with radiation.
Today, there is no talk of cancer immunity in the Navajos.
The cancer death rate on the reservation — historically much lower than that of the general U.S. population — doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, according to Indian Health Service data. The overall U.S. cancer death rate declined slightly over the same period.
Though no definitive link has been established, researchers say exposure to mining byproducts in the soil, air and water almost certainly contributed to the increase in Navajo cancer mortality.
The government has never conducted a comprehensive study of the health effects of uranium mining on the reservation. But individual scientists working on their own have documented sharply elevated cancer rates near old mines and mills. High concentrations of uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals have been found in one out of five drinking-water sources sampled.
Particularly toxic were the "hot" houses built with radioactive debris.
In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls.
Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks.
Over the years, federal and tribal officials stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records show. The total number is unknown because authorities made no serious effort to learn the full extent of the problem or to warn all those potentially affected.
After years of delay, they fixed or replaced about 20 radioactive houses and then walked away from the problem. Navajos continued to use mine waste as construction material, and the homes were passed down from one generation to the next.
Not until 2000 did the Holidays learn that their hogan was dangerous. By then, the couple had raised three children and sheltered a host of other kin while the uranium decayed. The resulting alpha, beta and gamma rays were invisible; the radon gas was odorless. But the combination greatly increased the chance of developing fatal lung cancer, according to a radiation expert who sampled air in the hogan.
"It brings chills when you're told that your house is like this," said Mary Holiday, now in her early 70s. "All the years that you've lived here," she said, her voice trailing off.
Unsuspecting, she had gone about her chores in the Navajo way, clad in the customary velveteen blouse, long skirt, thick socks and dusty shoes. She chopped wood for the stove, cooked tortillas and brewed tea. She set up her loom to weave rugs under a juniper tree while the grandchildren played dress-up for hours inside the old hogan.
By the time of the discovery that now torments her, she had lost her husband, Billy Boy, to lung cancer and congestive heart failure. He didn't smoke, but he'd worked in uranium mines by day and slept, unknowing, in the equivalent by night.
Her grandnephew, too, would soon die of lung cancer, at age 42. He had neither smoked nor mined. But he had lived in the hogan for three years as a teenager.
The dwellings in the Holiday family compound faced east toward dawn, in accordance with Navajo tradition. Behind them loomed the mesa, with a pale green uranium stain that started at the old mine and pointed down the cliff.
'Where is our guardian?'
More than 180,000 people live scattered across the region bounded by the Navajos' four sacred peaks. More than a homeland, it is their holy land. The tribe's creation stories are set here, among the painted deserts, ponderosa highlands and layered sandstone cliffs.
The U.S. government appealed to both Navajo patriotism and self-interest when it asked the tribe to open its land to uranium exploration in the 1940s. The mining would aid the American war effort and provide jobs, federal officials said.
Some of the mining companies were conglomerates like Kerr-McGee Corp. Some were small like A&B Mining, a Utah firm that was the last to mine the mesa near the Holidays' hogan.
Early on, federal scientists knew that mine workers were at heightened risk for developing lung cancer and other serious respiratory diseases in 15 or 20 years. Many did, and eventually their plight drew wide attention. In 1990, Congress offered the former miners an apology and compensation of up to $150,000 each.
But pervasive environmental hazards remained.
Starting in the late '50s, government scientists and inspectors had written memos and journal articles calling attention to the dangers posed by open mines and exposed tailings.
But the warnings failed to spark vigorous action. Pleading lack of funds, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian Health Service dodged responsibility, declining to study the health threats comprehensively, much less eliminate them.
Navajo leaders tried sporadically to force federal action, usually without success. On occasion, they withheld information about uranium-related dangers from their own people, reasoning that there was no point stirring up fear if there was no money for a solution.
Efforts to repair the environmental damage finally began in the 1980s but have been fitful and incomplete. Unable to agree on a thorough cleanup under the federal Superfund program, the tribe and the U.S. government settled for half-measures.
From 1984 through 1995, the Department of Energy spent $240 million to cover tailing piles at the old uranium mills as part of a nationwide program. Tailings are the fine sand left over when ore is ground up to extract uranium. They retain most of the radioactivity and give off large quantities of radon, an odorless, cancer-causing gas.
But the tailings cleanup, though important, was limited to the mills. It did nothing to ease the hazards posed by the abandoned mines.
Over the last decade, the tribe has used money from a federal mine-reclamation fund to seal entrances and fill pits at most of the old mines. But the cleanup was incomplete. At many of the sites, radioactive rubble lies along cliffs and on hillsides.
Erosion compounds the problem. Desert winds constantly wear away the earthen caps at the mines, exposing chunks of radioactive ore. Gullies eat into buried pit mines, allowing rainwater to course through irradiated soil and contaminate groundwater.
Now, with a renewed push for nuclear power driving up uranium prices, the mining industry wants to extract more from the still-vast Navajo reserve. Tribal leaders are resisting.
By treaty and law, the United States is responsible for the tribe's welfare, Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. noted. But the government's response to the Cold War contamination has been half-hearted, he said.
"It's an emergency that is not being treated like an emergency," he said. "Where is our guardian?"
On their own
In 1975, Joseph M. Hans Jr., an EPA radiation expert, was sent to inspect an abandoned uranium-processing plant in Cane Valley, on Navajo territory near the Arizona-Utah line.
Vanadium Corp. of America had operated the plant and an adjacent pit mine in the 1950s. A successor company, Foote Mineral, closed everything down in 1969. Federal mining inspector Howard B. Nickelson reported that the local manager had assured him that "the area would be cleaned up. No final inspection is planned."
But Foote left behind piles of tailings and mine rubble.
When Hans arrived, Congress was weighing the proposal to cover tailings at closed uranium mills across the country. The EPA was assessing the scope of the task.
As Hans worked, he noticed a small community of hand-built houses nearby. He began to worry that the residents might have used Foote's leftovers as construction material. A few months later, he and some EPA colleagues returned with hand-held radiation scanners, air samplers and other equipment.
Berlinda Cly was 9 when the inspectors visited the home where she lived with her parents and eight siblings. "The meter went BEEEEP," she recalled.
To Hans' dismay, at least 17 of 37 homes tested contained radioactive ore or tailings.
Hans said he wrote to EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., recommending that the agency clean up the most contaminated homes or relocate the occupants. "You've got two risks — gamma radiation and you've got radon," he recalled. "It wasn't acceptable."
His higher-ups said no.
"I still felt uncomfortable," Hans said, so he urged the Indian Health Service to act. The response was the same.
"Finally, we got the message," said Hans, now retired and living in Las Vegas. "We didn't have the money to go decontaminating sites."
Still, he wanted to warn homeowners. Most spoke Navajo and were uncomfortable with English. So Hans went back with a translator.
"All we could say is, 'You got a problem.' "
He could offer no hope that the government would fix it.
Just 200 miles from the reservation, in Grand Junction, Colo., residents faced the same situation. But there, the government was moving with urgency to eliminate the health risk posed by homes, schools and churches made with tailings from the Climax Uranium Co.
State health authorities had armed themselves with research and demanded federal action. The local congressman, Democrat Wayne N. Aspinall, was chairman of the House Interior Committee. He held hearings and helped secure funds for a thorough cleanup, which ultimately cost more than $500 million.
The Navajos had no such champion. Nor did they mobilize politically around the issue. In their small, widely scattered settlements, people were only vaguely aware of a radiation problem.
In Grand Junction, canvassers went door to door, checking for contamination. Contractors replaced foundations and floors, uprooted trees and cleaned tainted soil. As a bonus, they upgraded substandard electrical systems.