Letters: Declare Gold King Mine a Superfund site

Seeing the Gold King Mine Aug. 6, 2015, the 70^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and the day after the Gold King Mine above Silverton, Colo., spewed a build up of toxic mining waters into the southwestern watershed – the Animas River to the San Juan River, that could finally be “seen” (thanks to the orange iron ore coloring) flowing through bucolic Durango, Colo.

My father was a self taught geological engineer, a gold miner. He passed away at the age of 52, in 1989, from lung cancer with brain metastasis. He died in Loomis, Calif., the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Gold Country.

I am a gold miner’s daughter. I moved to Durango, in 1985 and attended Fort Lewis College, on and off, when not skiing or roaming the San Juan mountains picking crystals from mining tailings piles. I managed to complete a geology 101 class while pondering the idea of working with my father in California as a geologist. The takeaway from that course was that what I had thought of mining from my experiences in the summers as a child with my father, panning for gold, or pulling shiny flakes off the walls in huge ventilated tunnels my father had set up (blown up) for claim holders all over the country, was that gold mining was a really destructive business.

In the late 1980s my father’s company, International Mineral Services, bid on, and did not “win” the Durango uranium mine tailings reclamation project (think Manhattan Project-uranium for the Hiroshima bomb). Right in downtown Durango, across from Smelter Mountain, upwind, I watched men dressed in full white HAZMAT suits walking around the denuded hill during the “clean up.” I also saw the old brick uranium smelter chimney stack being blown up, from just across the Animas River, near the coal fired Durango and Silverton narrow gauge train station.

As a college student I used to walk the railroad tracks for pieces of coal to toss into the fireplace on cold winter nights. I never thought too much about the fact that every time coal is burned it releases mercury, or about the historical use of gravel from the uranium tailings to build the sidewalks and basements of many homes in Durango, or knew what radon gas was.

I became a registered nurse in Durango, graduating in 1993. During a nursing clinical at the hospital in Shiprock, I was assigned to a pediatric unit. The pediatrician said we would see something closest to a third world medical experience as we could have in the U.S. He, the pediatrician, had myself and another nursing student go into a closet with a patient – a child of 1-2 years old. The child had hydranencephaly, which was fluid in place of where most of her brain should be. The closet was dark and he held up a flashlight to the child’s enlarged soft head to illuminate the fluid inside.

There were many children with what we were told had fetal alcohol syndrome, or other developmental disabilities and deformities without known cause.

I recently read the book called Downwind by Sarah Alisabeth Fox (2014). It documents the witnesses and the cancer cluster accounts from the atmospheric atomic weapons testing era near the Colorado Plateau blowing in from the Nevada Test Site. The book also shares the experiences of the northeast Arizona uranium miners (Navajo), their lung cancer clusters from exposure to the toxic dust-unprotected workers from sheer greed of the mining companies not wanting to provide protective gear or acknowledge there was a danger to them.

According to Fox, the miners would bring home the toxic dust to their families, and the small children would play in the dust as many families moved close to where the men were mining. I flashed to that moment in the Shiprock Hospital closet. It takes years to manifest cancer and genetic deformities and it is unable to be proven. Nursing school lectures never mentioned anything about environmental toxins, uranium, or the mining industries’ heavy use of mercury and cyanide.

Environmental pollution does not go away just because you can’t “see” it.

I lived in and out of Durango for nearly 10 years and landed in the Sierra Foothills in 1997, the other toxic area, the Sierra Nevada Gold Country. It’s 2016 and I have just finished chelating extremely high levels of mercury and lead, and because I was tested properly (functional medicine physicians recommend provoked urine testing). I had an opportunity to do something about it. In two years time I turned around a potential destiny of disability and cognitive dysfunction.

Many neurodegenerative diseases are from high toxic burdens that turn on genetic predisposition to these otherwise “rare” or “mystery” conditions, and inhibit our innate detoxification systems. If you are diagnosed, labeled, in the current medical system we stop asking the most important question. Why?

Epigenetics or how the environment turns on and off genes to adapt to this onslaught of foreign toxins is the new frontier in progressive medicine.

Today many of our children are being born not ever knowing what “normal” health feels like.

The following is a link from SierraFund.org (Sierra Nevada Toxic Mining Legacy 2008), it’s a starting outline of an honest look and plan of action for the reality and responsibility of some of what we’ve done to our beautiful earth, our toxic mining legacy.

We have to “see” it, have conversations about it, and take responsibility for improved testing of waters, soil, air, and our bodies, clean up what we can, and detox what we can, so we can protect ourselves, our children, and all life on this planet in the future.

Gold King Mine is SuperFund Site. Let’s declare it and get the aggressive resources needed to stop this invisible, otherwise never ending pollution at http://www.sierrafund.org/images/content/campaigns/pdf/Miningstoxiclegacy.pdf.

Liana Dicus
Bishop, Calif.

What is the value of water?

Benjamin Franklin said, “When the well’s dry, we know the value of water.”

What is the value of water? After all it comes in the form of rain and snow from Mother Nature. We tend to think of water as a public resource, free from market forces. That’s the way it should be until the end of time.

Throughout the southwest, water is being bought and sold at auctions in multimillion-dollar deals. We will see more and more water privatization in the future. There are national water development and investment companies quietly capitalizing on the new gold (water). You can invest in water on the New York stock exchange such as Aqua America (WTR). Water becomes more valuable as it becomes scarcer, just like gold.

A recent study conducted by the University of California-Irvine and researchers from NASA have found how much groundwater people in the west, Colorado River basin, are using during the current drought. The findings are shocking!

Since 2004, the Colorado River basin has lost 17 trillion gallons or 53 million-acre feet of water, enough to supply more than 50 million homes for a year. The Colorado River basin supplies water to 4 million acres of farmland and 40 million people in seven states.

Unlike 2014, when the large Urban areas with the worst drought were either in Colorado, Texas, or New Mexico, and in 2015/2016 they are all in California. In California, more than 58 percent of the state is in “Exceptional drought” stage. That means there is widespread crop and pasture losses, shortages of water in reservoirs, steams and wells.

You may think that California is far away from Navajo land and doesn’t affect you. More than 50 percent of the U.S. fruits, vegetables and nuts come from California. It is also the top dairy-producing state in the country. So it does affect you. The drought cost California $2.2 billion and put thousands of agricultural workers out of a job in 2015.

The western states have been sucking more water from Lake Mead than can be replenished by the already depleted Colorado River. Lake Mead drop 14 feet in 2014 to 1,106.1 feet and dropped another 17 feet in 2015 to 1,088.6 feet, perilously close to 1,075 feet, forcing the federal government to step in to enforce a reduction of 400,000 acre-feet drawn from Lake Mead per year.

So what is the value of water?

If you are a member of the Navajo Nation, then it’s free according to the latest agreement approved for Navajo Generating Station. If you are a member of another Arizona tribe, it is $25 per unit (1 acre foot). If you are an investor, it is $29 a share on the stock market. If you are Palo Verde Power plant, it is $300 per unit. If you are a major developer or utility company it may be as high as $125,000 per unit.

With the rejection of SB-2109, the Navajo Nation made Congress and the State of Arizona take notice that the Navajo Nation is a power player in water rights and will not stand idly by as the rest of the world gobbles up their share of water.

Navajo Nation needs to go back and present their version of the agreement, asking for more than 34,000 acre feet per year of water. How much is 34,000 acre feet of water? That would be about 8.5 times the capacity of Wheatfield Lake. We need to insist on banking hundreds of thousands of acre-feet of water for future use.

Now we have the Navajo Nation Water Rights with the State of Utah looming and inching closer to settlement. Once again the agreement being passed around at the chapters says the Navajo Nation will get 81,500 acre-feet per year.  In comparison, Lake Powell at full capacity has 24,322,000 acre-feet. So what is being proposed is the Navajo Nation will get 0.0034 percent of the capacity of Lake Powell. Once again the water rights attorney and commissioners have failed to protect the interest of the Navajo people and more importantly protecting our future generations.

Ask your Council delegate(s), the president, the attorney and commissioners what is the value of water, what are the factors. Ask what is their plan of action to protect water for generations to come. Ask what their vision is for the future guarantee of water rights and long-term water storage.

Gary B.  Louis
Flagstaff, Ariz.

‘We have the authority to create a healthy environment’

It is generally accepted that many things in life are out of our control. However, that is not true. What is generally accepted is often wrong. In fact, we as a quasi-sovereign nation within a nation are in control of most aspects of our lives. We just lack the will and action to take control. The amount of control we have over our lives come from two sources: the Diyin Dine’e as fundamental law and the federal government’s self-determination law and policies.

We have the authority and should create a healthy environment on the Navajo Nation for children and ourselves by creating laws, policies, and practices that move our people towards healthy outcomes. That means creating access to fitness opportunities, creating access to healthy food and beverages, reducing exposure to toxins, improving diet and exercise, and modeling healthy behavior. What are we waiting for?

There is no white savior coming to our rescue. Just like Bruce Lee said, “The best help is self-help.”

We need comprehensive food and health law and policy reform to save ourselves. Just like we do away with tribal programs that are no longer needed, we can start new ones that are needed, like a department of food security or a Navajo Nation wellness department that provides chapters with guidance on health and wellness initiatives.

Our schools should be serving Navajo raised beef, mutton and NAPI products, reservation stores should be stocking and promoting traditional Navajo foods, and our institutions should be serving healthy Navajo food. I know our schools comply with state and federal guidelines but that is not saying much because school food contributes to childhood obesity.

Everything that seems out of our control is actually within our control. Next time you see some Navajo kids, ask yourself if they deserve better. Then ask yourself how you can change that.

Matthew Tafoya
Fort Defiance, Ariz.