Radioactive dust blows in on the wind and settles where vegetables grow, where children play in the garden. Thorium, in the bones. The mining company watches Dine children playing in radioactive water and does nothing. This event happened on 16 July 1979 in Navajo country. “Except for the bomb tests, Church Rock was probably the biggest single release of radioactive poisons on American soil. Ironically it occurred thirty-four years to the day after the first atomic test explosion at Trinity, New Mexico, not far away.” From Harvey Wasserman’s Killing Our Own (1983), in a section about corporate negligence/malice and radiation poisoning of Dine/Navajo communities affected by uranium mining. The event took place in Navajo Nation, very close to Gallup (New Mexico) near the Arizona border and a bit north of A:Shiwi (Zuni Pueblo) land, as the radioactive water washed across Navajo communities and immediately contaminated the streams and aquifers of the Petrified Forest site (of “National Park” fame). During and after the Church Rock event, the response from the corporate owners and managers of the uranium mine was disturbing, even by US standards. The Church Rock disaster also happened only 4 months after the infamous Three Mile Island radiation-poisoning disaster, but the cataclysm in Navajo country did not receive the same publicity (of course). Mining company surveyors, sampling the flood site, knew that Dine children played in the pools of radioactive water left behind by the flood, and the company did nothing and hid their observations. The same radioactive tailing pond was back up and running only 5 months later.
Here’s a statement from a Dine/Navajo resident, months after the Church Rock event, interviewed by a local paper in August 1980, as quoted by Wasserman: “Most of us can’t read, write or speak English. The signs do no good. If [neighbors] know we are from the Rio Puerco wash, they won’t shake our hands,” he added. “They think we have a high level of radiation. They ran from me. They are afraid of us. That’s why people look at us, that’s why no one comes to help us. It is wet now, but on days when it dries up, the wind will come along. The dust settles on the grass. The sheep eat it. We eat the sheep … We wonder what that does to our lives.”
The Three Mile Island disaster in Pennsylvania dominated the headlines that year. And coincidentally, as Wasserman also later mentions, “one of the [other] worst tailings problems” in US history unfolded in the Pittsburgh metro area, where radiation poisoning at Mississippi-Canonsburg was a result of the importing of uranium which had been extracted not far from Navajo Nation in the same Colorado Plateau ecoregion. To this day, over 550 uranium mine sites in Navajo Nation have gamma radiation levels at 2-times average background rates.
The breaking of a dam at the mine’s tailing pond unleashed, into Navajo country, over 1.3 short tons of uranium, 94 million gallons of sulfuric acid-laced tailing solution, and another 1,000 short tons of radioactive water laced with thorium 230, polonium, radium 222, and lead 210. Much of the water flowed into the Rio Puerco, poisoning Gallup, while radioactive material continue to seep deep into soil and find its way into Navajo land within Arizona borders. The company had the mine and the poisonous tailing pond back and operating within 5 months, as up to 80,000 gallons of contaminated water continued to seep into Navajo gardening water and the Rio Puerco every single day.
Apparently, the company’s consultants knew before it even began construction on the dam, that the structure was likely to break and unleash radioactive water. Even before the dam broke and unleashed the flood, local Dine living along the Rio Puerco were forced to consume water from, and water their gardens with, the river already polluted by radioactive isotopes.
Excerpt from Wasserman: Church Rock, New Mexico, would seem an improbable spot for a nuclear disaster. A dusty cluster of industrial machinery set in the arid mesas of the great Southwest […]. A deep gully leads from the mine site into the Rio Puerco, which once flowed only when fed by spring rains. Now it is wet year round, bolstered by water pumped from the mine shafts to keep them from flooding. That water flowing from the mine is laced with radioactive isotopes. […] The 350 families who water livestock in the Rio Puerco rely on their small herds to eke out a meager existence. Many are members of the Dine–Navajo Nation, with incomes in the range of two thousand dollars per year. […] Usable uranium is extracted from the sandstone in which it is usually found by grinding it fine and leaching it with sulfuric acid. The acid carries off the desired isotopes. But the leftover waste sands – “tailings” – still contain 85 percent of the ore’s original radioactivity, and 99.9 percent of its original volume. […] The dam at Church Rock burst sending eleven hundred tons of radioactive mill wastes and ninety million gallons of contaminated liquid pouring toward Arizona. The wall of water backed up sewers and lifted manhole covers in Gallup, twenty miles downstream, and caught people all along the river unawares. “There were no clouds, but all of a sudden the water came,” remembered Herbert Morgan of Manuelito, New Mexico. “I was wondering where it came from. Not for a few days were we told.” […] [A]long the way it [the flood] left residues of radioactive uranium, thorium, radium, and polonium, as well as traces of metals such as cadmium, aluminum, magnesium, manganese, molybdenum, nickel, selenium, sodium, vanadium, zinc, iron, lead and high concentrations of sulfates. The spill degraded the western Rio Puerco as a water source. It carried toxic metals already detectable at least seventy miles downstream. […] [End quote.]
Here’s how the mining company responded to Church Rock [also from Wasserman]:
The whole complex was owned by the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC), a Virginia-based firm with assets in the hundreds of millions of dollars and influence in the New Mexico state government. […] Even before the dam had been licensed “the company’s own consultant predicted that the soil under this dam was susceptible to extreme settling which was likely to cause [its] cracking and subsequent failure.” […] Cracks had developed in the dam the year it opened […]. UNC’s chief operating officer, J. David Hann, countered […]. The breach was “like many things you undertake,” Hann told the congressional hearing. “They have a risk, and we undertook this. There was a circumstance that was not foreseen at the time.” […] Ultimately, for the company, the accident would mean a loss of some revenue and bad publicity. For the people downstream life itself was at stake. […] More than eighteen months after the accident indications were strong that radiation and other pollutants had penetrated thirty feet into the earth. […] Furthermore when the spill overflowed the banks of the Rio Puerco, it left behind a series of pools. When ordered by the state to monitor them, UNC chose to look for their uranium content. But uranium was precisely what the company had been working to remove in the milling process. “It was a subterfuge on the company’s part,” said Dr. Jorge Winterer, an M.D. working with the Indian Health Service in Gallup at the time of the spill. “There were children up and down the river playing in those stagnant pools, and they were deadly poisonous. But UNC chose to monitor them for the element they knew was least likely to be there.” In fact the NRC’s William Dircks told the Udall hearing that those pools showed levels of radiation one hundred to five hundred times natural background. What UNC might have missed were substantial quantities of thorium 230 and radium 226. Both are alpha-emitters and are extremely dangerous if ingested or inhaled. […] Thorium 230, for example, has a half-life of eighty thousand years and is believed by some to be as toxic as plutonium. […] Thorium can become “trapped” in the body, making it “a permanent source of radiation” there, and thus doing untold damage to the human organism. [End quote.]
They let children play in highly-radioactive water and did nothing, because they didn’t want to deal with little bit of bad publicity.
Excerpt from Killing Our Own: The UNC mine and mill were back in operation in less than five months. The same pond was in use. […] Constant seepage – up to eighty thousand gallons of contaminated liquid per day – had become a mainstay. […] “If [neighbors] know we are from the Rio Puerco wash, they won’t shake our hands,” he added. “They think we have a high level of radiation. They ran from me. They are afraid of us. That’s why people look at us, that’s why no one comes to help us. … The dust settles on the grass. The sheep eat it. We eat the sheep … We wonder what that does to our lives.”
titsay
ellievsbear
areudirty
janainaart
annaxmalina
tangentwithtanner
discoholicmusic
origamiaround
