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[Fwd: [Know_Nukes] (NYT) Navajo Miners Battle a Deadly Legacy ofYellow Dust]
Posted by a pro-nuker on the know_nukes list, so don't go yelling at me!
Norm
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Know_Nukes] (NYT) Navajo Miners Battle a Deadly Legacy of
Yellow Dust
Date: Sun, 18 May 2003 12:40:38 -0400
From: Nuke Bob <Know-Nukes@mensetmanus.net>
Reply-To: Know_Nukes@yahoogroups.com
To: Know_Nukes@yahoogroups.com
This was from the Social Science section. -NB
May 13, 2003
Navajo Miners Battle a Deadly Legacy of Yellow Dust
By BEN DAITZ, M.D.
ROWNPOINT, N.M. I drove west across an ocher sagebrush plain, past pinto ponies grazing next to a Pentecostal revival tent, past the ribbed, rutted dirt road that leads north to Chaco Canyon, the sacred, ancestral home of the Anasazi, the ancient ones.
I was on the eastern edge of the vast Navajo Reservation, heading toward Crownpoint, a Navajo community of almost 3,000 people astride the Continental Divide about 100 miles northwest of Albuquerque. It is the administrative and educational hub of the Eastern Navajo Agency and the site of the Indian Health Service Hospital.
The Crownpoint I.H.S. hospital serves more than 20,000 Navajo who live in small communities and isolated traditional hogans across the high desert of northwestern New Mexico. I was driving to the Crownpoint Hospital to meet my good friend John Fogarty, a medical officer in the Indian Health Service. The Navajo in these parts call John the uranium doctor.
The Diné (pronounced dee-NAY) or "the People," as the Navajo call themselves, have many stories about their origins. One says that as they emerged from the fourth world into the fifth and present world, they were given the choice of two yellow powders. One yellow powder was corn pollen, and that was the one they chose.
The other was the color of the dust that seems to give this land its golden hue, dust the color of yellowcake, the uranium oxide that fueled the nuclear age. So much yellowcake lies below the surface that a mining executive called this place the Saudi Arabia of uranium.
The Spirits said it had to be left alone. But from the late 1940's through the mid-80's, yellowcake was picked and shoveled and blasted and hauled in open-bed trucks, and then dried in mountainous piles at multiple sites in the American West. The Navajo, whose lands extend over western New Mexico, eastern Arizona and southern Utah, were at the epicenter of the uranium-mining boom, and thousands of Navajos worked in the mines. More than 1,000 abandoned mine shafts remain on Navajo land.
The consequences are measured today, decades after the mines closed, in continuing health problems and degraded land.
Under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990, people exposed to radiation through uranium mining and milling or through weapons testing are eligible for government compensation.
On that recent day, Dr. Fogarty and Dr. Bruce Strumminger were conducting a clinic for former Navajo uranium miners, most in their 70's and 80's. Dr. Strumminger, also a physician for the Indian Health Service, is medical director of the Radiation Exposure Screening Education Program at the health service hospital in Shiprock, N.M., 100 miles northwest of Crownpoint. He told me that four uranium miners' health clinics screened 3,000 to 4,000 miners in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.
More than 500 uranium miners died of lung cancer from 1950 to 1990. Hundreds more will die of lung cancer in the coming years, a study by the Public Health Service predicts. A majority of the deaths stemmed from exposure to radiation from the breakdown of uranium products. These so-called radon daughters attach to dust particles, and when workers inhale the dust, the particles lodge in their lungs, where they release high doses of radiation.
Navajo uranium miners run a risk of developing lung cancer that is 28 times as great as those Navajos not exposed to uranium, according to a study in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Thomas Desiderio was the first patient of the day. Mr. Desiderio, 75, handsome with short-cropped gray hair, wore jeans, a Western shirt and a big smile. His wife sat by his side in her wide pleated Navajo skirt, her hair coiled in a bun at her neck.
The Desiderios are accompanied by Trudy James, a caseworker with Dr. Strumminger's clinic, who is a patient's advocate and a translator. Like many Navajos in the Eastern Agency, the Desiderios do not speak English well, and the clinic doctors' questions are interpreted and reinterpreted in their complex sonorous language, which was used as a secret code in World War II.
The miners' compensation is determined by their health status and work histories, how long they worked underground and where. They fill out 22-page applications.
Mr. Desiderio tells us he worked off and on in the mines from 1953 to 1981 in a variety of jobs. Many miners worked in "dog holes," primitive tunnels with no ventilation that men crawled through to dig uranium ore by hand. "Mom-and-pop operations," Dr. Strumminger calls them.
The larger mines were frequently no better, with substandard ventilation, no face masks for workers and little or no information or education about the long-term health risks.
Mr. Desiderio's overall exposure has been calculated at 94 working-level months; 40 is the minimum for compensation. The physicians listened to his heart and lungs, working down his chest with dual stethoscopes. "How far can you walk without getting short of breath?" Dr. Fogarty asked.
Ms. James translated the question and the reply. Mr. Desiderio said he could walk 30 miles in elk hunting season. His wife said he had to stop every 10 feet to catch his breath.
Mr. Desiderio has not yet qualified for the $150,000 compensation. Although his blood oxygen concentration is low, showing some lung damage, his last chest X-ray did not show enough chronic changes in his lungs to support his claim fully.
"Why is this taking so long?" Mr. Desiderio finally asked in broken English. "Why haven't we been paid?"
The doctors will order a special X-ray, to be read by a radiologist trained to interpret the subtle changes of pneumoconiosis, the chronic nonmalignant respiratory disease common to underground miners who inhale rock dust. The death rate among Navajo miners from respiratory diseases like pneumoconiosis and emphysema is also extremely high, about the same as the death rate from lung cancer.
The next patient, John James, 67, started mining underground in 1956 in Moab, Utah. Then he went to Ambrosia Lake, N.M., and on to the Homestake mine in Grants, N.M.
"We brought dust home on our clothes," he told the doctors. "We contaminated our families. I saw the yellowcake there. It looked like it was burning."
"He means glowing," said Ms. James, who is not related.
Mr. James is on home oxygen. He said that two weeks ago he coughed up some blood. Dr. Strumminger ordered a chest X-ray and drew an arterial blood gas to check the oxygen-carrying capacity. He said Mr. James's arterial blood gas result plus the chronic disease changes on his chest X-ray would probably qualify him for compensation.
The doctors saw six patients that morning. Most of the old miners drove at least 100 miles to get there, and they will keep returning for testing, betting that the sad chapter of their past will somehow compensate them for the present, before they die.
No one is mining uranium here now. But Dr. Fogarty and Dr. Strumminger are worried about plans to resume it.
Hydro Resources Inc., a subsidiary of Uranium Resources Inc. of Dallas, wants to begin a new mining effort in Crownpoint and nearby Church Rock using a process called in situ leach mining. In the process, a mixture of water, dissolved oxygen and sodium bicarbonate is pumped deep into underground uranium beds. The mixture dissolves uranium, and when the liquid is pumped back to the surface, the uranium can be removed, dried and processed.
The water for the leaching would come from the Westwater Canyon Aquifer under Crownpoint, the sole source of drinking water for Crownpoint and its surrounding area.
Hydro Resources plans to provide uranium for the nuclear power industry, create jobs and leave the aquifer safe for drinking.
But Dr. Fogarty and Dr. Strumminger are worried. Dr. Fogarty wrote his thesis for his master's in public health on the health risks of uranium mining. Underground mining led to lung disease, he said, but if leach mining pollutes the aquifer, a result may be widespread kidney disease.
"The Navajo are more vulnerable to the toxic kidney effects of uranium," he said, "because they already have three times the national rates of diabetes and kidney disease."
When he heard about the leaching plan, Mitchell Capitan, a former mining technician, became an opponent. Mr. Capitan is president of the Crownpoint chapter of the Eastern Navajo Agency, the Navajo equivalent of a mayor, and he founded Endaum, Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining.
"The aquifer right underneath us provides water for 15,000 people," he said, standing on an outcrop on the western edge of Crownpoint. He pointed to the leaching site and said:
"People come here from all over these parts, from 50 miles away, to truck this water back to their houses, to drink it, because it's the only pure supply. Their own water is bad contaminated."
Later, Mr. Capitan made his case to a gathering in the cafeteria of the Crownpoint elementary school. The cafeteria walls were painted with scenes of sheepherders and red rock mesas, with hawks floating above.
The occasion was the opening of the Water Is Life conference, sponsored by Endaum. A woman gently waving a sage incense bundle circulated through the audience. Old women in traditional velvet skirts and turquoise pendants and young Navajo men and women, about 100 people from all over the reservation, were there to talk about the future of water in their high desert environment.
The unemployment rate in the area is almost 70 percent, but there is little sentiment that mining jobs are worth the risk. Endaum has the support of all 31 chapters in the Eastern Navajo Agency Council, as well as the new president of the Navajo Nation, Joe Shirley Jr.
In alternating Navajo and English, Mr. Capitan explained how Endaum had obtained a moratorium against leach mining with the help of the Southwest Research and Information Center, an environmental advocacy group, and the New Mexico Environmental Law Center until a hearing has been completed before a judge for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The groups expect a decision soon.
Mr. Capitan stood under an Endaum banner. In Navajo and English, it said, "One Mind, One Voice, One Prayer, One People."
"This uranium impacts on our water, our air and our cultural identity," he said. "We've already had enough uranium."
Dr. Fogarty put it another way: "This decision should not come down to which hydrologist the N.R.C. believes. When you think about the history of uranium here, what it did to these people, the N.R.C. should support the people's health, first and foremost."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/health/13NAVA.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/13/health/13NAVA.html?pagewanted=print
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