by Taylor Wiles
Mother Jones
September 2009
After decades of uranium mining turned the tiny
town of Church Rock, New Mexico, into a Superfund site, in August
the EPA moved seven resident Navajo families to Gallup apartments,
where they'll wait for five months while the EPA scrubs their town
of radioactive waste. But as the EPA hauls away the uranium
tailings and radium-infused topsoils that have been permanent
fixtures since mining ceased in the 1980s, Church Rock's remaining
residents are asking why they have been left behind. In 1979, the
largest spill of radioactive waste in US history occurred in
Church Rock when 94 million gallons of mine waste were
accidentally released into a stream. Children swam in open pit
mines and the community drank water from local wells as recently
as the '90s. (Now they haul in drinking water.) Cancer rates and
livestock deaths remain higher than they should be. As for the
families who remain, Church Rock evacuee and local activist Teddy
Nez says the agency "drew an imaginary line in the sand" that
excludes a residential area half a mile west of the Superfund
site.
Less than two weeks ago the Navajo Nation EPA (NNEPA)
and the US EPA walked the area where Nez's neighbors live and
tested the soil, discovering lower levels of contamination than
local researchers of the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project
found. Nez claims that when he asked for a copy of the EPA data
that showed safe levels of radium, they told him it could take up
to a decade before they could release the information, depending
on when the entire mine site was cleaned. (Clancy Tenley at the
EPA told me that they had only completed preliminary tests and
reliable results would not be available until later this fall.)
In the meantime, Nez's neighbors are staying
put, wondering how dangerous their backyards really are.
According to Michele Dineyazhe of the NNEPA,
these nearby residences will not be added to the current Interim
Removal Action, but will likely be part of the "final remedy" for
the Northeast Church Rock Mine cleanup. Currently the EPA is
reviewing public comments to determine what that remedy will
ultimately be. Two main options: 1. Haul the contaminated dregs
away from the homes but to the nearby mill site, or 2. Ship them
to Idaho. Not surprisingly, the Navajo president has expressed
favor for the second option, though it would cost responsible
parties an additional $250 million.
"The difficulty with Superfund law," says
Albuquerque-based activist Chris Shuey, "is it really doesn't
address issues that are ancillary to sites with hazardous
substances." The locals want roads redone so they don't have to go
by mining areas, but "the EPA says that doesn't have anything to
do with mining impacts." Since last month, Church Rock parents and
grandparents have been driving school-age children to the bus stop
so kids don't have to continue traversing old mine sites each
morning by foot. Nez recently met with the local school board to
request that school buses run directly to their homes, but has yet
to see a response. Earlier this month, the locals had to stop EPA
workers at the last minute from bulldozing the radioactive topsoil
off a particular area because it was a Navajo burial site.
Though legal battles between the local Navajo
Nation Chapter and a string of mining companies have been ongoing
for decades, this fall things are coming to a head. United Nuclear
Corporation and General Electric, which most recently held
responsibility for mining operations in the area, have agreed to a
settlement with the EPA in which they will spend an estimated $5
million on a preliminary cleanup project for one of 520 old mines
on Navajo land. The EPA intends to excavate all of them over the
next five years, which could cost anywhere from $43 million to
$290 million, depending on how far they export the waste.
When I visited Church Rock in 2007, locals told
me about a canyon that holds a makeshift landfill in which Church
Rock miners were instructed to bury mining machinery and washing
machines that had washed miners' clothing decades ago and could
not be decontaminated. The EPA did scrape off topsoil from half an
acre of the contaminated area around Nez's house in 2007, but this
much larger project has been a long time coming. Now that it's
finally beginning, it won't get any simpler. When testing for
radium, Nez told me, the farther down into the earth you go, "the
hotter it gets."
(Check back with Mother Jones for updates on
this story.)