Since the 1950s, the water in Navajo country has been poisoned by uranium mining that fueled the nuclear industry and the making of atomic bombs for the U.S. military with coal mining and coal-fired power plants adding to the poisoning.
When the EPA recklessly attempted to address the abandoned Gold King Mine, things got worse.
On August 5, 2015, EPA personnel and workers for Environmental Restoration LLC caused a release of toxic wastewater when attempting to add a tap to the tailing pond for the Golf King mine because the local jurisdictions had refused Superfund money to cleanup the region’s derelict mines due to a fear of lost tourism.
Adding the tap destroyed the plug holding water trapped inside the mine which resulted in three million gallons of mine waste water and tailings that contained heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, and other toxic elements, such as arsenic into Cement Creek, spilling into a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado.
The local government of Silverton decided to accept Superfund money to fully remediate the mine after this accident.
As explained by Charmaine White Face of the Defenders of the Black Hills,
“In 2015 the Gold King Mine spill was a wake-up call to address dangers of abandoned mines, but there are currently more than 15,000 toxic uranium mines that remain abandoned throughout the US. For more than 50 years, many of these hazardous sites have been contaminating the land, air, water, and national monuments such as Mt. Rushmore and the Grand Canyon. Each one of these thousands of abandoned uranium mines is a potential Gold King mine disaster with the greater added threat of radioactive pollution. For the sake of our health, air, land, and water, we can’t let that happen.”
Just as it was in the past with the fossil fuel industry that was allowed to simply walk away from any damage it had done to the land and simply leave abandoned equipment behind, there is no comprehensive law requiring cleanup of abandoned uranium mines, 75% of which are on federal and Tribal lands.
Leona Morgan of Diné No Nukes points out,
“The United Nuclear Corporation mill tailings spill of 1979, north of Churchrock, New Mexico left an immense amount of radioactive contamination that down-streamers, today, are currently receiving in their drinking water. A mostly-Navajo community in Sanders, Arizona has been exposed to twice the legal limit allowable for uranium through their tap.”
At a recent protests in Washington, D.C. to raise awareness of past and ongoing contamination of water supplies in the west, it was pointed out,
“The delegation is warning of the toxic legacy caused by more than 15,000 AUMs nationwide, extreme water contamination, surface strip coal mining and power plants burning coal-laced with radioactive particles, radioactive waste from oil well drilling in the Bakken Oil Range, mill tailings, waste storage, and renewed mining threats to sacred places such as Mt. Taylor in New Mexico and Red Butte in Arizona.”
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“These uranium mines cause radioactive contamination, and as a result all the residents in their vicinity are becoming nuclear radiation victims. New Mexico and the federal government have provided little funding for widespread clean up and only occasionally are old mines remediated. The governments of New Mexico and the United States have a duty to clean up these radioactive mines and mills and, furthermore, to perform health studies to determine the effects of radioactive poisoning. The MASE and LACSE organizations oppose new uranium mining and demand legacy uranium mines to be cleaned up.”
Flint, Michigan is a city with lots of people, so it gets attention.
Navajo County is located in the northern part of Arizona, and contains parts of the Hopi Indian reservation, the Navajo Nation, and Fort Apache Indian Reservation.
Flint is a city with a population of 102,434, while Navajo County is a county, and so is much bigger than a city, with a population of 107,449.
Regardless of being a city or a county, the population being affected by the poisoned water is close in number.
A major consideration should be that the Navajo County is agrarian with lots of farms and ranches, so the water supply is important for more than just human consumption.
But it is out West in a state assumed to be just open space, and it has a majority Native American population.
And, let’s be honest with ourselves, we don’t really give much thought to the Native American population in this country.
Senator John McCain who should be looking out for the best interest of these Arizona residents sneaked a resolution into the last defense bill which gave land to Resolution Copper whose planned copper mining would poison waters that Apaches rely on and would desecrate the ceremonial grounds at Oak Flat.
So, while the country’s attention is on Flint, no one is paying much attention to Navajo County.
The Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act, introduced by Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva, has languished in Congress for two years.