Deposits of ore, danger
Tribe seeks redress of illnesses tied to 'uranium homes'
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/362/nation/Deposits_of_ore_danger+.shtml
By Bill Papich, Globe Correspondent, 12/27/2000

AK SPRINGS, Ariz. - On sandstone-layered hills overlooking this Navajo community in northeast Arizona, chunks of blown-apart rock cover the ground and shelter the small lizards hiding from hawks in the desert sky.

Below the hills are Navajo homes made of the same rocks, but all the homes are abandoned. The Navajo call these structures ''uranium homes,'' because they are made of uranium-ore waste rock blasted from the hills.

>From the 1940s and into the 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission oversaw the uranium mining that fueled America's nuclear-weapons arsenal during the Cold War. But the agency did not tell the people that their newfound building material could emit dangerous radiation.

Now they know, said Phil Harrison of the Navajo Uranium Radiation Victims Committee, which is seeking federal compensation for relatives of uranium miners who are sick.

''A lot of families are dealing with various illnesses,'' Harrison said, pointing to a yellow-greenish spot on a rock in the wall of one home. ''They all think it came from their exposure, but nobody can prove it. Kids are sick, mentally retarded, disabled. We need to find out who else is sick besides the miners.''

The Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency learned of the danger in the late 1970s and began replacing some of the houses. But that effort fizzled in the 1980s and lay dormant until the mid-1990s. Since then, the poorly funded, undermanned effort has been unable to learn the severity of the problem, and no one is sure how many buildings or people are affected.

Still, the scope of the lingering effects from the mines, and from the homes made from the cast-off rocks, is potentially vast.

Navajo men worked unprotected in some 1,300 mines across the 27,000-square-mile Navajo reservation, which covers parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Miners who developed lung cancer have each received $100,000 in compensation through the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act, approved by Congress in 1990. President Clinton signed an executive order for an extra $50,000 per miner by July 2001.

But miners who suffer from other diseases do not qualify for compensation. The federal Indian Health Services agency, which administers health care on the reservation, does not recognize any link between disease and long-term residence in homes made of uranium-ore waste rock.

Until the Navajos realized the hazards of uranium ore, the rocks were considered a fringe benefit of the mines. The waste rocks were piled outside mine entryways, and the Navajos found that with a little chipping around the edges, these tan, relatively flat rocks made excellent building blocks. Miners often took rocks home after work, stockpiling them to use in building new homes.

In the Navajo Nation community of Teec Nos Pos, tribal member Carolyn Clark, 35, said her father built the uranium-ore house that she and her seven siblings grew up in. Her father was a uranium miner who committed suicide at 31, she said.

''I guess he had health problems, and he just decided to get it over with,'' Clark said. Now her daughter has cerebral palsy, which Clark believes may have something to do with the house.

Harrison's father, a uranium miner, died of lung cancer at 45. Harrison has kidney disease and awaits a transplant.

He recalls when his father, who toiled 20 years in the mines, came home from work and his mother shook out his clothes.

''Everything would be airborne,'' Harrison said. ''You eat with it, you drink with it. So practically everyone would be exposed.''

Sarah Benally, a member of the victims' committee, has a thyroid condition. As a child, she lived in a waste-rock house at Oak Springs and now believes that she and others who occupied the houses were harmed by near-constant radiation exposure and by inhaling and ingesting radioactive particles.

But the homes weren't the only threat, tribe members say. Navajo women cook bread in outdoor ovens, and an oven near Benally's house is made of uranium-ore waste rock that sheds particles when rocks crack from the heat.

''We didn't know these rocks were contaminated,'' Benally said, pointing to a wooden house with a foundation made from the rock.

The US Environmental Protection Agency has been conducting helicopter surveys of the area to measure radiation. Of the waste-rock structures currently used by Navajo families, the agency has so far identified two with dangerous radiation levels. One has 44 times the radiation considered acceptable by the EPA and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

''We're just at the tip of the iceberg,'' Derritch Watchman-Morre, executive director of the Navajo EPA, said of uranium homes she expects to be discovered.

''We want to remove the exposures, whether from waste-ore piles, homes, or foundations. But there's the [lack of] funding and convincing people there's a problem,'' said Watchman-Morre, whose office still uses typewriters.

The Navajo EPA receives funding from the EPA regional office in San Francisco. Watchman-Moore said the tribe hopes to get uranium mine areas listed as EPA Superfund sites, which would make them elegible for federal cleanups.

But the chance of a sparsely populated Navajo reservation area achieving Superfund status appears unlikely because Congress enacted the program with urban, industrial areas in mind.

''Potentially, we may list some of these sites on the Superfund,'' said Betsy Curnow, the EPA's regional manager for Superfund assessment, ''but this is a huge problem, a huge area, and we've got to make sure we're spending our money on the very worst problems out there.''

The legacy of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation is more than the destruction of the land and the health problems related to the mining, said Carol Markstrom, professor of child development and family studies at West Virginia University. She has identified post-traumatic stress syndrome among Navajos who not only have lost friends and relatives to poisoning from uranium mining but also lost their way of life.

For example, Markstrom said, areas that were used for gathering plants and herbs for healing ceremonies have been contaminated by uranium mine waste.

''It goes beyond contamination of your drinking water that could poison you or contamination of your livestock,'' she said. ''It's the fact that what is sacred is profaned, contaminated. What these people have here is a disaster.''