Editor's Note: This is the first two parts of a four-part special investigation being reported by the Los Angeles Times. Parts three and four will follow on Tuesday and Wednesday. - sb/TO

Part I: Families spent years in radioactive homes, unaware of the danger.

Part II: Navajos quenched their thirst at watering holes that turned out to be toxic.

These are Parts I and II of a four-part series:     
Part III: Navajos' Desert Cleanup No More Than a Mirage    [
Part IV: Uranium Mining Firms Again Eyeing Navajo Land    [

Also see below:     
Part II: Blighted Homeland | Oases in Navajo Desert Contained "a Witch's Brew"    [

    Go to Original

    Blighted Homeland | A Peril That Dwelt Among the Navajos
    By Judy Pasternak
    The Los Angeles Times

    Sunday 19 November 2006

During the Cold War, uranium mines left contaminated waste scattered around the Indians. Homes built with the material silently pulsed with radiation. People developed cancer. And the US did little.

    Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967. They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent.

    For the most part, they were happy with the purchase. Their Navajo hogan was situated well, between a desert mesa and the trading-post road. The eight-sided dwelling proved stout and snug, with walls of stone and wood, and a green-shingle roof.

    The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. So three years after moving in, the Holidays jumped at the chance to get a real floor. A federally funded program would pay for installation if they bought the materials. The Holidays couldn't afford to, but the contractor, a friend of theirs, had an idea.

    He would use sand and crushed rock that had washed down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled.

    As promised, the 6-inch slab was so smooth that the Holidays could lay their mattresses directly on it and enjoy a good night's sleep.

    They didn't know their fine new floor was radioactive.

    Fifty years ago, cancer rates on the reservation were so low that a medical journal published an article titled "Cancer immunity in the Navajo."

    Back then, the contamination of the tribal homeland was just beginning. Mining companies were digging into one of the world's richest uranium deposits, in a reservation spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

    From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore were chiseled and blasted from the mountains and plains. The mines provided uranium for the Manhattan Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic bomb, and for the weapons stockpile built up during the arms race with the Soviet Union.

    Private companies operated the mines, but the US government was the sole customer. The boom lasted through the early '60s. As the Cold War threat gradually diminished over the next two decades, more than 1,000 mines and four processing mills on tribal land shut down.

    The companies often left behind radioactive waste piles and open tunnels and pits. Few bothered to fence the properties or post warning signs. Federal inspectors seldom intervened.

    Over the decades, Navajos inhaled radioactive dust from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce desert winds.

    They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit mines that filled with rain. They watered their herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the meat.

    Their children dug caves in piles of mill tailings and played in the spent mines.

    And like the Holidays, many lived in homes silently pulsing with radiation.

    Today, there is no talk of cancer immunity in the Navajos.

    The cancer death rate on the reservation - historically much lower than that of the general US population - doubled from the early 1970s to the late 1990s, according to Indian Health Service data. The overall US cancer death rate declined slightly over the same period.

    Though no definitive link has been established, researchers say exposure to mining byproducts in the soil, air and water almost certainly contributed to the increase in Navajo cancer mortality.

    The government has never conducted a comprehensive study of the health effects of uranium mining on the reservation. But individual scientists working on their own have documented sharply elevated cancer rates near old mines and mills. High concentrations of uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals have been found in one out of five drinking-water sources sampled.

    Particularly toxic were the "hot" houses built with radioactive debris.

    In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by blasting, were left unattended at old mines and mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces, floors and walls.

    Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for decades, unaware of the risks.

    Over the years, federal and tribal officials stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records show. The total number is unknown because authorities made no serious effort to learn the full extent of the problem or to warn all those potentially affected.

    After years of delay, they fixed or replaced about 20 radioactive houses and then walked away from the problem. Navajos continued to use mine waste as construction material, and the homes were passed down from one generation to the next.

    Not until 2000 did the Holidays learn that their hogan was dangerous. By then, the couple had raised three children and sheltered a host of other kin while the uranium decayed. The resulting alpha, beta and gamma rays were invisible; the radon gas was odorless. But the combination greatly increased the chance of developing fatal lung cancer, according to a radiation expert who sampled air in the hogan.

    "It brings chills when you're told that your house is like this," said Mary Holiday, now in her early 70s. "All the years that you've lived here," she said, her voice trailing off.

    Unsuspecting, she had gone about her chores in the Navajo way, clad in the customary velveteen blouse, long skirt, thick socks and dusty shoes. She chopped wood for the stove, cooked tortillas and brewed tea. She set up her loom to weave rugs under a juniper tree while the grandchildren played dress-up for hours inside the old hogan.

    By the time of the discovery that now torments her, she had lost her husband, Billy Boy, to lung cancer and congestive heart failure. He didn't smoke, but he'd worked in uranium mines by day and slept, unknowing, in the equivalent by night.

    Her grandnephew, too, would soon die of lung cancer, at age 42. He had neither smoked nor mined. But he had lived in the hogan for three years as a teenager.

    The dwellings in the Holiday family compound faced east toward dawn, in accordance with Navajo tradition. Behind them loomed the mesa, with a pale green uranium stain that started at the old mine and pointed down the cliff.

    "Where Is Our Guardian?"

    More than 180,000 people live scattered across the region bounded by the Navajos' four sacred peaks. More than a homeland, it is their holy land. The tribe's creation stories are set here, among the painted deserts, ponderosa highlands and layered sandstone cliffs.

    The US government appealed to both Navajo patriotism and self-interest when it asked the tribe to open its land to uranium exploration in the 1940s. The mining would aid the American war effort and provide jobs, federal officials said.

    Some of the mining companies were conglomerates like Kerr-McGee Corp. Some were small like A&B Mining, a Utah firm that was the last to mine the mesa near the Holidays' hogan.

    Early on, federal scientists knew that mine workers were at heightened risk for developing lung cancer and other serious respiratory diseases in 15 or 20 years. Many did, and eventually their plight drew wide attention. In 1990, Congress offered the former miners an apology and compensation of up to $150,000 each.

    But pervasive environmental hazards remained.

    Starting in the late '50s, government scientists and inspectors had written memos and journal articles calling attention to the dangers posed by open mines and exposed tailings.

    But the warnings failed to spark vigorous action. Pleading lack of funds, officials at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian Health Service dodged responsibility, declining to study the health threats comprehensively, much less eliminate them.

    Navajo leaders tried sporadically to force federal action, usually without success. On occasion, they withheld information about uranium-related dangers from their own people, reasoning that there was no point stirring up fear if there was no money for a solution.

    Efforts to repair the environmental damage finally began in the 1980s but have been fitful and incomplete. Unable to agree on a thorough cleanup under the federal Superfund program, the tribe and the US government settled for half-measures.

    From 1984 through 1995, the Department of Energy spent $240 million to cover tailing piles at the old uranium mills as part of a nationwide program. Tailings are the fine sand left over when ore is ground up to extract uranium. They retain most of the radioactivity and give off large quantities of radon, an odorless, cancer-causing gas.

    But the tailings cleanup, though important, was limited to the mills. It did nothing to ease the hazards posed by the abandoned mines.

    Over the last decade, the tribe has used money from a federal mine-reclamation fund to seal entrances and fill pits at most of the old mines. But the cleanup was incomplete. At many of the sites, radioactive rubble lies along cliffs and on hillsides.

    Erosion compounds the problem. Desert winds constantly wear away the earthen caps at the mines, exposing chunks of radioactive ore. Gullies eat into buried pit mines, allowing rainwater to course through irradiated soil and contaminate groundwater.

    Now, with a renewed push for nuclear power driving up uranium prices, the mining industry wants to extract more from the still-vast Navajo reserve. Tribal leaders are resisting.

    By treaty and law, the United States is responsible for the tribe's welfare, Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. noted. But the government's response to the Cold War contamination has been half-hearted, he said.

    "It's an emergency that is not being treated like an emergency," he said. "Where is our guardian?"

    On Their Own

    In 1975, Joseph M. Hans Jr., an EPA radiation expert, was sent to inspect an abandoned uranium-processing plant in Cane Valley, on Navajo territory near the Arizona-Utah line.

    Vanadium Corp. of America had operated the plant and an adjacent pit mine in the 1950s. A successor company, Foote Mineral, closed everything down in 1969. Federal mining inspector Howard B. Nickelson reported that the local manager had assured him that "the area would be cleaned up. No final inspection is planned."

    But Foote left behind piles of tailings and mine rubble.

    When Hans arrived, Congress was weighing the proposal to cover tailings at closed uranium mills across the country. The EPA was assessing the scope of the task.

    As Hans worked, he noticed a small community of hand-built houses nearby. He began to worry that the residents might have used Foote's leftovers as construction material. A few months later, he and some EPA colleagues returned with hand-held radiation scanners, air samplers and other equipment.

    Berlinda Cly was 9 when the inspectors visited the home where she lived with her parents and eight siblings. "The meter went BEEEEP," she recalled.

    To Hans' dismay, at least 17 of 37 homes tested contained radioactive ore or tailings.

    Hans said he wrote to EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., recommending that the agency clean up the most contaminated homes or relocate the occupants. "You've got two risks - gamma radiation and you've got radon," he recalled. "It wasn't acceptable."

    His higher-ups said no.

    "I still felt uncomfortable," Hans said, so he urged the Indian Health Service to act. The response was the same.

    "Finally, we got the message," said Hans, now retired and living in Las Vegas. "We didn't have the money to go decontaminating sites."

    Still, he wanted to warn homeowners. Most spoke Navajo and were uncomfortable with English. So Hans went back with a translator.

    "All we could say is, 'You got a problem.'"

    He could offer no hope that the government would fix it.

    Just 200 miles from the reservation, in Grand Junction, Colo., residents faced the same situation. But there, the government was moving with urgency to eliminate the health risk posed by homes, schools and churches made with tailings from the Climax Uranium Co.

    State health authorities had armed themselves with research and demanded federal action. The local congressman, Democrat Wayne N. Aspinall, was chairman of the House Interior Committee. He held hearings and helped secure funds for a thorough cleanup, which ultimately cost more than $500 million.

    The Navajos had no such champion. Nor did they mobilize politically around the issue. In their small, widely scattered settlements, people were only vaguely aware of a radiation problem.

    In Grand Junction, canvassers went door to door, checking for contamination. Contractors replaced foundations and floors, uprooted trees and cleaned tainted soil. As a bonus, they upgraded substandard electrical systems.

    The Navajos were left on their own.

    Hans made one more try in 1977, two years after his first visit. He recommended that the Department of Energy clean or replace the nine most-contaminated houses in Cane Valley.

    More than a decade later, the department fixed three. Drawing a technical distinction, it passed over the other six for lack of proof that the building materials came from Foote Mineral's mill, as opposed to the mine.

    Juanita Jackson's house was one of those six. Despite Hans' warning, she stayed put, stringing beads for jewelry and weaving rugs until she died in 1992. She was 59. The cause was lung and breast cancer, her daughter said.

    Jesse Black, his wife and their eight children remained in their uranium house for 15 years. Black died of lung cancer in 2000 at age 78. A daughter was diagnosed with breast cancer at 27.

    Oscar Sloan, too, hung on in Cane Valley, raising three boys. One of them, Hoskey, now 54, says that both of his parents and his grandmother developed serious respiratory disease.

    "If given a different place to live, we would have, I guess," he said. "But it was the only dwelling we had."

    More Contamination

    Similar problems soon became evident in other parts of the reservation. In 1979, employees of the tribe's newly created environmental commission escorted a television crew to the hamlet of Oaksprings, Ariz., to interview former miners.

    In one house, a tribal staffer offhandedly stuck a Geiger counter against a wall. It screamed.

    By April 1980, the tribe had found 16 more Oaksprings houses with uranium. The tribal chairman, Peter MacDonald, called together representatives of Navajo agencies, the US Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service, and "directed that the homes be replaced immediately," recalled Harold Tso, then the Navajo environmental director. "We were to work together and get a plan."

    Tso cobbled together enough federal money to replace a handful of houses. The tribe evicted the other families in the spring of 1981. They were left to find shelter wherever they could.

    There was no money to dismantle the condemned structures. Many still stand, including the log cabin that Clifford Frank built in the early '60s for his family of eight. He mixed cement for the foundation with rocks from the uranium mine where he worked. Then he invited a Christian Reformed minister to bless the house.

    When the tribe padlocked the cabin years later, Frank was furious. But there was little he could do. Frank, a nonsmoker in his 50s, was in the Indian Health Service hospital in Shiprock, N.M., slowly succumbing to lung cancer.

    A Family in the Dark

    The Holidays had no inkling of a problem.

    Their hogan in Oljato had become the center of a bustling family compound. Dogs and chickens ran between an assortment of earthen and stucco dwellings. An array of aging trucks and cars sat in the dirt.

    By the late '70s, Mary and Billy Boy had moved out of the hogan and into a two-room house 15 feet away that they painted a bright teal blue.

    But the old place wasn't empty. Mary allowed her niece, Elsie Begay, to move in with her seven children after Elsie's marriage broke up in 1978.

    Elsie and her brood ate their meals on the floor. At night, they rolled out their sheepskins and went to sleep. After three years, they left for a smaller dwelling on the Holiday property.

    The hogan wasn't vacant long. Two of the Holidays' grown children, Daisy and Robert, returned to Oljato and moved in.

    Daisy had taken a husband. He'd grown up on the mesa where the old mine was. He turned the story of their courtship into family lore: He slipped one day while herding sheep, fell down the slope, found Daisy at the bottom and married her. The uranium stain on the cliff marked the path of his slide, he liked to quip.

    Robert had taken a bride. Mary was a witness, signing the marriage certificate the only way she knew how, by dipping her right thumb in ink and affixing her print.

    The two couples, and soon enough three children, lived together under the green-shingle roof. From the front door, they could watch the setting sun wash Monument Valley's spires of stone in red.

    Members of the family took jobs catering to tourists. The paved road that had first attracted Mary and Billy Boy to the hogan led to a historic lodge. They cleaned rooms there and tended the register at the grocery store next door. They guided visitors to the rock formations and sold turquoise and silver jewelry from plywood stands.

    In 1989, Elsie Begay's son Lewis died of a brain hemorrhage caused by a tumor. He was 25. The next year, Billy Boy died, suffering from lung cancer and other diseases. He was in his early 60s.

    During the 1990s, touches of modernity seeped into the compound. Daisy and her husband, Frank Haycock, bought a trailer and hooked it up to electricity. They even got a TV.

    Robert left the reservation to join his older brother, John, in Salt Lake City, lured by a good job installing air conditioners and heaters.

    But the hogan still had its uses. The Holidays stored cans of beans, sacks of flour, extra blankets and toys there, along with garden tools and blue plastic water barrels.

    The door was padlocked, but the children liked to stand on one another's shoulders and climb through the windows. They'd tear into the folded clothes and don them for long games of pretend.

    Once a month, Robert's family came down from Salt Lake for the weekend. There was only one place to stay: the hogan. Everyone took to calling it "the rabbit house" because one of the toddlers pronounced "Robert" that way.

    US "Lack of Interest"

    In 1981, 10 of the reservation's local governments, called chapters, asked the tribe to inspect houses for signs of uranium contamination. But "we had our old nemesis - money," Tso said. His appeals to federal agencies were met with "a real lack of interest."

    The prevailing attitude was expressed in a December 1986 memo by Charles A. Reaux, an Indian Health Service official stationed in the Navajo region. Ticking off mining-related hazards, he wrote: "Radon in homes is another significant but resource consuming endeavor."

    The tribe had surveyed 96 homes and found 37 with radon levels above the EPA's safety threshold, he wrote to his superiors. Many areas near abandoned mines had yet to be tested, including Monument Valley-Oljato, where the Holidays lived.

    But he recommended against getting involved because of the cost. The health service, he wrote, "should only monitor tribal efforts."

    Reaux offered his bosses the same advice for nearly all of the environmental problems confronting the Navajos: Keep your distance. "The true risk assessment of the radiation problems may never be performed due to the vast cost," he wrote.

    In a recent interview, Reaux, now a consultant in Las Vegas, said that if the same contaminants "were in the middle of Los Angeles, something would be done about it because there would be thousands of people living around them."

    But Navajo shepherds moving through the desert with their herds and the locals in their far-flung hogans were not numerous enough to warrant government action. "That's life," Reaux said.

    Cancer on the Rise

    Richard M. Auld Jr. arrived on the reservation in 1982, fresh from his residency in internal medicine at UC San Diego.

    He was posted to the Indian Health Service clinic in Shiprock, N.M., at the edge of the uranium belt. Over the next two years, he treated six cases of stomach cancer. Two of the patients were women, 18 and 20 years old.

    Auld thought this highly unusual. He won a two-year fellowship in gastroenterology at the Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation in La Jolla, to try to find an explanation. He worked with William S. Haubrich, a prominent gastrointestinal specialist.

    Their review of Indian Health Service medical charts showed that stomach cancer on the reservation had increased sharply in 1975 - which suggested, given cancer's latency period, that something had changed during the '50s. The increase kept up through the mid-'80s. Patients typically died within five months.

    The doctors' research ruled out hereditary factors, medications, alcohol and smoking as possible causes. But when the locations of cases were plotted on a map, they clustered around the sites of uranium mines and mills.

    They discovered that incidence of stomach cancer was 15 times the national average in some areas near uranium deposits and mills.

    And the disease was not limited to former miners. In two western parts of the reservation filled with old pit mines, stomach cancer was 200 times the US average for women ages 20 to 40.

    New evidence shows that gastric cancer rates rose 50% during the '90s among Indians in two New Mexico counties salted with Navajo uranium mines.

    "I don't know quite what to make of it. It's not what's happening regionally," said Charles Wiggins, director of the New Mexico Tumor Registry, who analyzed the data for the Los Angeles Times.

    Diet or bacterial infections could play a role, but so could an environmental insult, Wiggins said: "All three of those things are what I would want to look at."

    Uranium mining could be connected to reproductive cancers as well. In 1981, the tribe's health department reported a sharp increase in breast, ovarian and related cancers among teenage girls. Rates 17 times the national average were found.

    In 2001, Navajo graduate students and reservation elders asked scientists at Northern Arizona University to investigate whether the old uranium mines might explain the increase in cancers.

    Biologist Cheryl A. Dyer was intrigued but skeptical. "I didn't believe this for a long time," she said.

    Dyer specializes in the female reproductive system. She and a Navajo doctoral candidate, Stefanie Raymond-Whish, fed uranium-tainted water to mice. They discovered that uranium mimics the hormone estrogen, causing changes in reproductive tissue. Increased estrogen has been linked to breast and ovarian cancers.

    The findings "changed my research," Dyer said. "Now all I do is uranium." She has discovered that uranium speeds the growth of human breast cancer cells. "Instead of killing them," she said, "it makes them happy."

    Closer to the Truth

    A helicopter rumbled low and loud across the sky over Oljato in the late summer of 1997.

    Mary Holiday took little notice. She had heard that, under pressure from the tribe, the EPA was finally gathering data on potential radiation hazards throughout the reservation.

    She did not know the copter's onboard scanner had picked up high levels of radiation on her property.

    The helicopter was forgotten until 1999, when a filmmaker from Chicago showed up looking for Mary's niece, Elsie Begay.

    Elsie, it turned out, had been featured as a young girl in a silent movie from the 1950s set in Navajo country. She had never seen it. The man from Chicago, Jeff Spitz, had come into possession of a copy and was recording her reaction to it for a documentary.

    Someone mentioned the helicopter and the radiation sampling. Curious and a bit worried, Spitz called the EPA when he got home. He eventually pried a map from the agency. Unfurling it on his kitchen table, he studied the bright purple splotches marking high radiation. One of the largest and darkest spots was over the Holiday compound.

    "Look at this!" he blurted. "That's Elsie's house!"

    He got a message to her. She was concerned but unsure what it meant.

    Around the same time, Elsie's youngest son, Leonard, learned that he had lung cancer. He was 38.

    Leonard had been 16 when his mother sought refuge with her children in the Holidays' cozy hogan. He grew into a handsome man with a broad face, a dark mustache and glossy black hair. He took up carpentry and played drums at the Pentecostal church. He passed a note during services to a young woman named Sarah. She became his wife.

    After the children came along, Leonard installed a trailer at the Holiday compound. Their daughter was 7 and their son 12 when Leonard was diagnosed. He sought a second opinion; the doctor concurred. He got a third with the same result.

    "We were supposed to grow old together," said Sarah Begay. "He just started getting into his Bible. He told me not to tell nobody at all."

    A Tainted Home

    In January 2000, specialists from the Army Corps of Engineers showed up in Oljato to sample drinking water for the EPA. They were part of the same project that had sent the helicopter overhead.

    The leader, Glynn R. Alsup, was worried by what they were finding. One in five water sources tested was polluted with dangerous amounts of uranium and other mining byproducts.

    "Nobody could believe it was that bad," he said.

    Alsup briefed local officials and residents about his work, and offered to screen homes for radiation. At Oljato, he visited the Holiday compound and talked to Elsie Begay. He told her he had permission from the chapter to sample anything she wanted.

    She wanted a check of her aunt's hogan. She knew the history of its concrete floor.

    Alsup held a radiation detector up to an outside window. The needle jumped to the top of the scale.

    "I'd gotten readings that high at the entrance to uranium mines," recalled Alsup, now retired.

    Leonard and Sarah Begay heard his voice quaver as he circled the hogan, calling out numbers. Inside, emissions reached 1,000 microroentgens per hour, 75 to 100 times the radiation level deemed acceptable by the EPA.

    Leonard was losing weight. The pain was getting bad. A sudden suspicion struck him and his wife.

    Mary Holiday and Daisy Haycock were also on hand for the radiation readings. Daisy called her brother Robert in Salt Lake City to break the news about the "rabbit house."

    Reluctant to Act

    Navajo officials in the tribal capital of Window Rock, Ariz., did not like Alsup informing locals of the dangers he was uncovering. Alsup only wanted to help. But the tribe's environmental staff believed nothing good would come of it. There was no money to fix the problems.

    "It's just a fancy, nice-looking report that's going to sit on a shelf," Derrith Watchman-Moore, then the tribe's environmental director, remembered thinking. Frightened Navajos, she said, "would be coming to us: 'What are you going to do about it?' "

    The situation revived long-standing tensions. Despite years of appeals from the Navajos, the US government still had not committed to pay for a comprehensive cleanup of the reservation. Alsup's visit to the Holiday hogan was the last straw, as far as the tribal government was concerned.

    The Navajos demanded that the EPA pull Alsup off the reservation. He was gone within weeks, and the sampling ground to a halt.

    The hogan was left standing. Six months later, in June 2000, Elsie Begay wrote to the EPA to inquire about its fate. "The kids were still going in it," she recalled.

    "We recommend that people stay out of that hogan," Sean P. Hogan, an EPA official, wrote back after three more months had passed. "We also recommend that the hogan be removed from the area so that no one is exposed to those levels of radiation."

    But treading carefully after the blowup with Navajo officials, he added that the EPA would not take action unless the tribe asked.

    The Oljato chapter appealed to the tribal government, which in October 2000 authorized the EPA "to take the steps necessary to eliminate this risk."

    It was not until April 2001 that the EPA destroyed the place, along with a radioactive house miles away.

    The grand total of government demolitions still stands at two.

    Where the Holidays had lived for decades, the wrecking crew wore moon suits and radiation badges for a single day's work.

    The US government gave Mary Holiday a corrugated-metal shed to compensate her for the loss of storage space.

    Uranium's Deadly Toll

    On Dec. 7, 2003, two days after his lung began bleeding profusely, Leonard Begay collapsed and was flown to University Medical Center in Tucson. "This patient lives in Monument Valley, UT, near the uranium mines," the attending physician noted in his records.

    Leonard knew what to expect. Sarah's father, a veteran of the mines, had died of lung cancer the month before.

    "He was aware that he was going," Sarah recalled. "He would talk to me: Take care of yourself. Stay in the Word. Take the kids to church."

    He kept hugging and kissing his family and asked his wife to lie beside him. Sarah said he instructed her "to build a house for the kids and then for the grandkids that he'll never see."

    On Dec. 19, he died at 2:50 a.m. He was 42.

    Sarah told her children that they all had something in common: She had lost her dad to uranium, and she was certain they had lost theirs to uranium too.

---

    Note on Sources

    The risk of lung cancer associated with the Holiday family hogan was calculated for The Times by radiation expert Andrew G. Sowder using Environmental Protection Agency models. Sowder, who took readings inside the home while on a research fellowship, said that someone who lived there for 10 years could be 32 times more likely to die of radon-induced lung cancer than someone exposed to the average US residential radon level.

    Internal documents of the EPA and Indian Health Service cited in this article were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Mine records came from the National Archives, the Bureau of Land Management and William L. Chenoweth, a former Atomic Energy Commission geologist.

 

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    Go to Original

    Part II: Blighted Homeland | Oases in Navajo Desert Contained "a Witch's Brew"
    By Judy Pasternak
    The Los Angeles Times

    Monday 20 November 2006

Rain-filled uranium pits provided drinking water for people and animals. Then a mysterious wasting illness emerged.

    In all her years of tending sheep in the western reaches of the Navajo range, Lois Neztsosie had never seen anything so odd.

    New lakes had appeared as if by magic in the arid scrublands. Instead of hunting for puddles in the sandstone, she could lead her 100 animals to drink their fill. She would quench her own thirst as well, parting the film on the water's surface with her hands and leaning down to swallow.

    Despite the abundant water, an unexpected blessing, her flock failed to thrive. The birthrate dropped, and the few new lambs that did appear had a hard time walking. Some were born without eyes.

    Lois' husband, David, wondered whether the sheepdogs were mating with their charges. A medicine man, he also suspected witchcraft. He tried to fight the spell by burning cedar and herbs and gathering the sheep around the fire to inhale the healing smoke.

    The livestock were not his only worry. A mysterious sickness was affecting the couple's two youngest daughters.

    Laura, born in 1970, had a weak right eye and was prone to stumbling. Arlinda came along the following year and developed ulcers in her corneas by age 5. A few years later, she was walking on the sides of her feet.

    At the Indian Health Service hospital, doctors were mystified. Experts concluded that both girls suffered from a rare genetic disorder.

    There was another possibility, but no one considered it until many years later.

    No one connected the children and the sheep.

    Tainted Oases

    In the mountains and mesas of the Navajo reservation, mining companies drilled tunnels in the sides of cliffs to extract uranium for the nation's nuclear weapons program during the Cold War. But in the red and ocher sands around Cameron, where deposits were shallow, the ore was blasted out of the plains, creating pits.

    As demand for uranium eased in the late 1950s, the US government allowed the companies to leave without filling in the craters. The pits collected snowmelt in the winter and runoff from summer torrents. The holes, some as deep as 130 feet, soon formed oases in the desert.

    Lois grew to depend on them as she ranged far from home, covering as much as 10 miles in a day. At dusk, she often camped for the night. She got in the habit of filling and refilling a small container with her drinking supply as she moved from one "lake" to the next, watering her herd.

    Every few weeks, the Neztsosies butchered one of the sheep. They ate each one down to the bones, which they sucked around the fire. They destroyed the lambs that could not walk.

    Deformed animals were showing up in other sections of Dine Bikeiyah, Home of the People, as Navajos call their homeland. In areas around old mines, lambs and cattle developed shaking limbs, yellow eyes and white patches on internal organs that were discovered after slaughter.

    Word of these strange developments did not reach the Neztsosies. Navajo families tend to live miles apart from one another. They prize their privacy. Local officials heard occasional complaints about damaged animals, but no one discerned a trend.

    Baffled Doctors

    Arlinda, nicknamed Linnie, had that "funny walk," as her family described it. At the Indian Health Service clinic in Tuba City, Ariz., doctors prescribed Vitamin A for her eyes and gave her goggles to wear. Classmates teased her, so she stopped using them.

    When she stopped taking her supplements, her Vitamin A levels remained normal - but her corneas did not improve.

    Laura had similar but milder symptoms and was small for her age. Her mother took her to the clinic too. "Go home," Laura said she was told. "There's nothing wrong with you."

    In truth, medical records show, the doctors were stumped. Something was affecting the girls' peripheral nervous systems, but what? Linnie and Laura were the youngest of nine children. None of their siblings or other relatives had experienced anything like this.

    Like many Navajo families, the Neztsosies led semi-nomadic lives. A rough-planked one-room shack served as home base for Lois' sheep-herding expeditions and David's long commutes to a sawmill in Flagstaff. There was no electricity. They got their drinking water from a well installed by the US Public Health Service.

    Around the time of the daughters' visits to the IHS clinic in the mid-1970s, the family's prospects were looking up. David had built a cinderblock house to replace the shack.

    Laura started thinking about her future. Perhaps she would manage a hotel or become a stewardess. "I could be well-dressed and serve people," she remembers thinking.

    In 1976, researchers from the University of New Mexico published an article in the journal Archives of Neurology. They had discovered a disabling illness that appeared to be hereditary. Corneal ulcers, muscular weakness and liver disease were among the symptoms.

    All four cases cited in the paper were Navajo children. Two were siblings. "This does not constitute proof that the disease is genetically determined, but it seems likely," wrote the authors.

    In the years to come, researchers would pronounce in more and more certain terms that the illness was purely hereditary. They called it "Navajo neuropathy." There was no cure.

    Another Family's Loss

    While the Neztsosie girls were baffling their doctors, the Nez family braced for another death.

    Leonard and Helen Nez lived most of the year at their sheep camp at the base of Tah-chee, a hill in the middle of the reservation.

    They too had dealt with a spate of disfigured livestock - a calf with a crooked leg, another diagnosed with cancer of the eye, a lamb born with three legs, "kind of like an omen," one of the Nez daughters recalls.

    Soon enough, the Nezes started losing children. First, in 1963, a stillbirth. Then, in 1969, daughter Dorinta and son Jerome died four months apart. In 1972, Claudia died. These three siblings had suffered from blurred vision, failing livers and limp muscles. None lived past a fourth birthday.

    Three more Nez children were displaying similar symptoms. At the Indian Health Service clinic in Chinle, perplexed staff members asked Helen whether she engaged in incest, consumed alcohol while pregnant or suffered from mental problems.

    No, she said, offended. None of these apply.

    The doctors urged her to stop having babies, she said.

    In the spring of 1978, the family's youngest, 2-year-old Euphemia, was in serious decline. By then, there was a name for the ailment. The IHS arranged for the child to undergo liver surgery in an Albuquerque hospital.

    The treatment team included Russell D. Snyder, a pediatric neurologist at the University of New Mexico. Snyder was one of the authors of the article suggesting a hereditary cause for Navajo neuropathy.

    But Helen, now 68, said Snyder expressed concern when she told him she lived near a uranium mine - an abandoned pit atop Tah-chee. Helen said he warned her that uranium was dangerous.

    Snyder declined to be interviewed. In notes on the Nez family that he wrote in 1990, after treating the siblings for years, he included this observation: "A uranium mine was within one mile of the home where all these children lived, and uranium tailings were closer."

    Until that conversation at the hospital, the Nez family had not considered the old mine a danger. Then Helen got to thinking: Their drinking water came from Tah-chee.

    On July 31, 1978, Euphemia died. She was the fourth Nez child to succumb to Navajo neuropathy.

    Unanswered Prayers

    In 1980, the IHS sent Laura and Linnie Neztsosie to be examined by Snyder. Linnie was 9, Laura 10.

    The girls spent two weeks at the hospital with their mother, and left feeling as bewildered as when they'd arrived.

    In a letter to the reservation doctor, Snyder considered whether "heavy metal intoxication" was the cause of their problems. But Snyder concluded that "by far the most likely possibility is a hereditary" disorder - perhaps "partial Navajo neuropathy."

    In 1983, the heath service sent Laura and Linnie back to Albuquerque and Snyder. In their referral letter, IHS physicians wondered whether the girls should be tested for lead, arsenic or thiamine - all known to cause neurological problems at high doses. There is no record that they were tested for these or any other toxic substances.

    By 1986, Linnie's fingers and toes tingled and tended to curl up like claws. It was becoming harder for her to walk, and her hands and feet were losing muscle tone.

    "Clinical dx: Navajo neuropathy ... Prognosis: Guarded. Progressive disability expected," wrote Stanley Johnsen, a pediatric neurologist who examined her in Phoenix.

    Then Laura began to have stinging and prickling sensations in her limbs.

    David Neztsosie took the medicine man's view: Bitterness between him and his wife must be affecting his daughters. He left the house and the marriage.

    For a year, Laura and her mother prayed. They tried traditional rituals and steamed inside a sweat lodge. The ceremonies, they hoped, would halt the strange sensation before it progressed.

    One morning, Laura had trouble getting out of bed. Her fingers and toes had stiffened into hooks, like her sister's. They would not unbend - and have not since.

    The older Neztsosie children chopped wood for the fire and cleaned the house when they were home from Indian boarding school, but the two youngest "couldn't help our mom," Laura recalled. "We used to crawl around on the floor, on the sandy floor."

    Disquieting Discovery

    In 1986, Donald W. Payne, an environmental health officer for the IHS, made a disquieting discovery.

    Payne, then on loan to the tribal government, agreed to help a National Park Service ranger work on his water sampling technique. They tested 48 water sources around a national monument near Cameron.

    What they found appalled them.

    Uranium levels in the water at Cameron were as high as 139 picocuries per liter in wells and up to 4,024 in abandoned pits like the ones where Lois Neztsosie watered her sheep and filled her drinking bottles.

    EPA rules permit no more than 20 picocuries per liter in drinking water.

    The water in many of the pits also had high concentrations of radium-226, a radioactive byproduct of uranium.

    Payne had never seen the pits before. "I was amazed by the sheer size of the things," he said.

    In reports to the tribal government, he wrote that "the Indian Health Service, as the primary public health providers for the Navajo people" should "make every effort" to warn residents not to drink from the shallow wells or let their livestock drink from the pits.

    The tribe, Payne wrote, "must mount a concerted program to restrict access of livestock to the heavily contaminated pits and impoundments."

    Charles A. Reaux, a regional IHS official, knew animals were not the only ones at risk; in a 1986 memo, he had written of "suspected human use" of the pit waters.

    Reaux was reluctant to commit his agency's resources to uranium-related health hazards because the cost seemed open-ended. But on reading Payne's findings, he recommended that the health service "get involved in determining if there are contaminated water sites in Cameron ... and other areas," adding that the IHS "may also have to support this effort financially."

    The suggestion died quietly.

    Neither the tribe nor the IHS mounted the educational campaign urged by Payne. Navajos who were drinking from the pits or watering their animals there had no reason to stop.

    Now retired and living in Maine, Payne says the government's inaction still bothers him.

    The IHS "should have told them, and they should have found the money to give them water that was safe to drink," he said. "You don't just stick your head in the sand."

    Staff members of the tribe's environmental commission showed photos of the water-filled pits in Cameron and elsewhere to their director, Harold Tso, a radio-chemist

    Tso, now 68, said he was overwhelmed by other urgent problems, such as the piles of radioactive waste at old uranium-processing mills.

    "I wanted to get out there" to see the pits, he said, "but I never did."

    Focus on Genetics

    Medical research continued to focus on a genetic explanation for the mysterious wasting disease. In February 1990, the journal Neurology published an article on possible causes of Navajo neuropathy.

    "No common environmental factors (i.e., water source, heavy metal exposure, toxin exposure, family occupation) have been discovered," the report said.

    But the research team did not fully consider the possible role of uranium mining.

    Steve Helgerson, then senior epidemiologist at the IHS, designed the study and was one of the authors. In a recent interview, he said the scientists ruled out a water source as the cause of the illness because no single well supplied all the affected families. The researchers did not explore whether the various water sources shared common contaminants.

    Patients were screened for exposure to various heavy metals but not uranium. The scientists rejected "toxin exposure" as a possible cause because there was "no organized pesticide use out there," Helgerson said.

    The only time uranium came up, he said, was in regard to "family occupation." Someone wondered whether the fathers had been miners and whether uranium exposure might have affected their genes.

    That possibility was discarded because most of the mines were in the eastern part of the reservation, while Navajo neuropathy cases were five times more common in the west.

    Helgerson said it didn't occur to him that most of the mines in the east were tunnels, whereas those in the west were mostly open pits. He hadn't heard about Payne's water sampling.

    The research team's article noted the "familial pattern" among patients and concluded the most likely cause was "an inborn error" of metabolism.

    The disease's course was inexorable, the researchers reported. Those afflicted usually died of liver disease. In two dozen cases studied, the average age of death was 10.

    "I Didn't Know"

    In 1992, a form letter from a lawyer arrived at the Neztsosie household. Colorado attorney Cherie Daut was seeking clients among former uranium miners who were eligible for special federal payments for lung disease.

    Daut invited residents to the Tuba City chapter house, the Navajo equivalent of a town hall.

    By then, Laura had graduated from high school with a special-education diploma. Linnie's legs had worsened, and she often wept in pain. Lois put hot sand in a blue flour bag to soothe her youngest child's limbs until she fell asleep.

    The Neztsosies wondered whether the lawyer could help. Maybe she could push the IHS to offer more aggressive treatment.

    On the day of her visit to the chapter house, Daut recalled, Laura struggled toward her in leg braces followed by Linnie in a wheelchair. Laura slammed her frozen fingers on the table.

    "Please help me," she said.

    Daut was struck by the sisters' appearance. It brought to mind a photograph she had seen years before of a patient with Minamata disease - the result of mercury poisoning that struck residents of that Japanese city after a chemical company dumped wastewater in the bay. Babies born to sickened mothers had twisted, shriveled limbs.

    Daut told the sisters about her work. They got to talking about uranium and its impact on miners.

    The Neztsosies mentioned that mining had its benefits - the pits had brought them water. Daut thought of Minamata and began to wonder whether tainted water might have some connection to the crippled figures before her.

    Daut sought help from lawyers in Colorado Springs, Los Angeles and New York City with experience in environmental litigation. In 1995, she filed suit in tribal court against El Paso Natural Gas Corp. and a subsidiary, Rare Metals Corp., which had operated some of the pit mines in the Cameron area.

    The other lawyers recommended experts, including John F. Rosen, a professor of pediatrics and director of the lead clinic at the Children's Hospital at Montefiore in the Bronx.

    The sisters traveled to Montefiore, where genetic tests found none of the most common mutations leading to inherited neuropathies.

    In the fall of 1996 and spring of 1997, Rosen, toxicologist Paul Mushak and other scientists toured and tested the watering holes, which were still in use.

    The water in the pits had washed over heavy metals and radioactive elements, creating a poisonous soup. The scientists learned that Lois drank from the lakes while she was pregnant with Laura and, later, with Linnie.

    Mushak calculated that for each day in the desert that she drank 3 liters from the pits, she was exposed to uranium at levels nearly 100 times the federal maximum. The water contained high concentrations of lead, arsenic and cadmium.

    She also received a dose of radioactive alpha particles that was probably 10 times the safety threshold for pregnancy or more, wrote radiation expert Daniel N. Slatkin.

    When Lois drank from the pits, she pumped "a witch's brew" into her womb, Rosen said.

    Eating the meat of sheep that had watered at the pits provided another pathway for exposure. Lois had even used the water to make infant formula for the two sisters.

    "Dooshilbeehozindala!" Lois cried out in Navajo when she heard the news.

    "I didn't know!"

    Water Connection

    When the lawyers received the Indian Health Service registry of probable Navajo neuropathy cases, the list had 44 names. The oldest had been born in 1959, around the time the abandoned pit mines began filling with water.

    It was the first that Linnie and Laura knew of others like themselves.

    The legal team hired James W. Justice, a researcher at the University of Arizona and a former IHS epidemiologist, to interview the families of people on the list. He found relatives of 41. He wasn't told which were participating in the suit.

    Justice said a clear pattern emerged as he assembled the mundane details of their histories, habits and lifestyles: When mothers drank polluted water while pregnant, they bore children with Navajo neuropathy. When they were away from the old mines during their pregnancies, they bore healthy children.

    "In one case after another, it went back to water," Justice said.

    Lois Neztsosie, for example, had avoided the mines when she was pregnant with her older children because of the blasting. She spent another pregnancy housebound during a year of deep blizzards while a relative cared for the herd. The family's drinking water that season came from melted snow.

    It was the same for Helen Nez, Justice found. Six of her 10 children had developed Navajo neuropathy. Of the four healthy ones, she had been pregnant with two daughters before the family began drinking water that had flowed through the old pit mine atop Tah-chee. She had carried both healthy boys while living away from the mine.

    Unknown to Justice or the Nezes, a federal inspector independently documented that groundwater in the area had been contaminated by the Tah-chee mine.

    Four other families joined the Neztsosie sisters' suit against El Paso. The Nezes were not among them because El Paso had not mined at Tah-chee.

    Cedar and Theresa, the two oldest surviving Nez children with Navajo neuropathy, felt trapped and angry. Each had the same hooked toes and fingers as the two Neztsosie sisters.

    Theresa was so determined to walk without leg braces that she sought treatment from a chiropractor in Gallup, N.M., enduring a painful hour's drive each way. Cedar lectured his alcoholic brother, telling him that he should be grateful that his body functioned and shouldn't abuse it with drink.

    In 1996, Theresa died, followed by Cedar a year later.

    In all, Helen and Leonard Nez lost six children to Navajo neuropathy.

    Dwindling Hope

    With the lawsuit dragging on, Linnie was losing hope. Rosen had found her a place in an off-reservation rehabilitation center in Colorado, but she yearned to return home. By this point, she wore diapers. "Mom can't handle you no more," Laura told her.

    Then Linnie broke a Navajo taboo. She told Laura: "I just wanna die."

    Laura remembers replying: "Linnie, don't say that. I don't want you to think that way."

    In June 2000, the telephone rang in the middle of the night, and an older Neztsosie sister, Nora, answered. She told Laura that Linnie, just shy of 30, was gone. They held each other and cried.

    El Paso had fought all the way to the US Supreme Court in a successful effort to have the case moved from tribal to federal courts, where the nuclear industry enjoyed partial protection from liability. The federal court appointed a mediator.

    Within a few months of Linnie's death, El Paso agreed to pay a total of $500,000 to the four families without admitting liability, tribal court documents show.

    Justice presented his findings at a conference of the Public Health Service Commissioned Officers Assn. in 2001. Yet the view that Navajo neuropathy was purely inherited continued to have its adherents.

    It did seem logical. There were multiple cases within families. The syndrome had appeared suddenly, the way a "founder effect" disease might.

    A "founder effect" begins with one person who develops a genetic mutation in a nondominant gene. That person passes it on to his or her children, who pass it on to theirs. Because the gene is recessive, the trait does not surface unless two descendants have children together, usually generations later.

    A team from Tufts University and another from Columbia University examined three genes that might cause the disease. But they reached a dead end each time.

    Then the Columbia group found that liver tissue from three Navajo neuropathy patients showed reduced levels of mitochondrial DNA, a condition that can lead to progressive organ damage.

    This year, in the September issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, the Columbia group announced a breakthrough. An Italian scientist had found a previously unknown mutation in a recessive gene that caused mitochondrial disease of the brain and liver.

    Testing DNA samples from six Navajo neuropathy patients, Columbia neurology professor Salvatore DiMauro and his colleagues found the same mutation.

    Still, some aspects of Navajo neuropathy do not fit the genetic theory - or suggest that heredity is only one factor.

    For one thing, Italians with the genetic mutation suffered liver disease, but not the curled hands or loss of sensation seen among Navajos.

    After Navajo neuropathy appeared in 1959, reported new cases increased through the 1960s, '70s and '80s, then tapered off in the 1990s and have all but disappeared - an arc that mirrors Navajos' exposure to contaminated water from pit mines.

    The increase in cases occurred while the mines were being abandoned and were filling with water. The drop-off roughly coincided with the filling-in of the pits by the tribal government.

    If the illness was exclusively hereditary, "there should be more, not fewer, cases as the years go on," and then the numbers should level off, said Richard I. Kelley, a pediatric neurologist at Johns Hopkins University who has identified "founder effect" diseases among the Amish.

    DiMauro said it was possible that, as with many diseases, a combination of genetic and environmental factors was responsible. "There are still things to be explained," he said.

    Kelley said his review of the scientific literature and medical reports from the Neztsosies' lawsuit "has left me convinced that this is an environmental disease."

    Even if a genetic mutation turns out to play a role, "the mine exposure is a unique stress," he said. "The disease may not be manifest except under those conditions."

    A True Survivor

    Laura Neztsosie, now 36, is the oldest surviving patient from the Indian Health Service registry.

    She and her mother live in two-stoplight Tuba City (population 8,000). Laura drinks protein shakes and takes a periodic table of vitamins, as recommended by Rosen. Her mother dresses her every morning. Nearly blind in one eye, she flips her Bible open with one gnarled hand to find her favorite verses, highlighted in pink.

    She also cares deeply about the healing ceremonies held under the wide dark skies outside town. Lois parks her truck close so Laura can watch the dancing from the front seat.

    Later, at home, Lois lights a pipe packed with dried mint and mountain flower and holds it to Laura's lips. Lois waves the sacred smoke toward her daughter.

    After years of firelight and kerosene lamps, they have electricity. Treated water runs from kitchen and bathroom taps.

    But old habits hang on. One day, on her way to visit Linnie's grave on the sagebrush plain, Lois pulled over at a familiar spot. While Laura waited in the truck, the mother walked a short way from the dirt road and lifted boards that had been placed over a natural watering hole to keep coyotes away. Lois was thirsty and didn't hesitate. She leaned down and drank deeply from the spring.

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    Navajo Neuropathy

    Navajo neuropathy, a disease of the peripheral nervous system, has been found in Navajo children.

    Onset: Usually within the first year of life.

    Symptoms: Corneal ulcers, muscle weakness, short stature, delayed walking, failure to thrive, recurring infections, claw-like extremities, loss of sensation, liver disease.

    Life Expectancy: Forty percent of patients die in their teens. One study put the average age of death at 10.

    Cause: Unknown. A recent study linked the disorder to a gene mutation. Other research suggests that exposure to environmental toxins plays a role.

    Cure: None.

    Incidence of the Disease

    Neuropathy appeared on the Navajo reservation in 1959. Its rise and decline mirror the Navajos' exposure to contaminated water.

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    Sources: Archives of Neurology, Journal of Pediatrics, Pediatric Research and other medical journals.

    Times researcher Mark Madden contributed to this report.