Tackling trash
Navajo Times/Krista Allen A group of Tuba City residents tackled this illegal dumpsite last weekend, carting loads of trash to the transfer station.
Navajo Times/Krista Allen
A group of Tuba City residents tackled this illegal dumpsite last weekend, carting loads of trash to the transfer station.
Tuba City residents take garbage problem into their own hands
TUBA CITY
On a hot midmorning, a group of residents walk through a thicket of shrubs and weeds. Motorists glance at them as they zoom past in cars and in trucks, perhaps not curious about what they are doing to help save the planet.
The group for several hours Saturday picked up trash at an illegal dumpsite east of the old airport road, where people for an indefinite period of time had been dumping their waste materials such as appliances, electronic equipment, furniture et al.
Delores Wilson-Aguirre said the trash problem here seems to be worse around the beginning of each month. But Renae Yellowhorse, an environmentalist, said it’s every day.
“I just can’t stand it,” she said. “There are piles of couches, dryers, mattresses, and just trash. People drive right up to these places. It’s history for us and it’s also cultural space.”
Yellowhorse grew up here where many of the current Tónaneesdizí Local Governance officials and families of former naat’áanii live.
“They pass through here,” she said about the local lawmakers. “It’s bad.”
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Highway 264,
I-40, WB @ Winslow