PHOENIX — Navajo farmer Martha Curtis was planning to sell organic vegetables and melons to schools last summer when the Gold King Mine pollution drifting downstream from Colorado turned the San Juan River orange.
Fearing poisoned crops, the Navajos dried up irrigation ditches for three weeks.
Curtis and her husband, both retired in Upper Fruitland, N.M., lost everything on their 4 acres except for a few ears of corn that she still hasn’t had the heart to pick.
“It hurts,” Curtis said.
She was in Phoenix on Friday, Earth Day, attending a congressional field hearing. A Senate committee is looking into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s handling of last summer’s Colorado mine-waste spill that the agency’s own cleanup efforts caused.
Two U.S. senators and the Arizona congresswoman who represents the reservation said the agency bungled its response and owes the Navajos for it. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., called for a criminal investigation of the EPA.
Curtis figures she lost $10,000 — some on paid planting labor, the rest on lost corn, squash, watermelon, spuds and alfalfa that she counts on to augment her retirement. It’s unclear how much, or when, EPA might compensate her and other Navajo farmers.
“Ten thousand dollars is probably nothing to most people,” she said, “but it sure is to me.”
Now, she said, she’s leaving her fields bare this year for fear of renewed contamination when the river swells with snowmelt and stirs up the metals lying on the bottom.
5.5 MILLION GALLONS A DAY
The Senate Committee on Indian Affairs conducted the hearing on the EPA’s response.
Committee members complained that the agency had not adequately warned Navajos of the disaster that headed their way last August and has not done enough to reimburse them and ensure their safety since.
Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., the committee chairman, noted the irony in convening a hearing on Earth Day to explore the agency’s role in “one of the largest environmental catastrophes the region has seen.”
Gold King is an abandoned mine in the Rockies of southwestern Colorado. The EPA was working on a plan to clean up persistent toxic leakage from it and surrounding mines when the blowout sent 3 million gallons flooding into the Animas River.
The mine waste, created when water reacts with exposed metal ores, turned the Animas, and then the San Juan, orange.
An earth plug holding back tainted water at the mine breached when contractors working under EPA supervision dug into it without first conducting a water-pressure test to determine if it was safe.
Heavy metals ultimately flowed through the Navajo Nation waterway, where farms dried up over fears of lead and arsenic.
Utah environmental officials eventually noticed elevated metal counts in water samples where the San Juan enters Lake Powell, but not in dangerous concentrations.
The Gold King work was part of an effort to address 5.5 million gallons of contaminated mine waste that leak less dramatically from Colorado mines into the river every day, EPA officials said. The agency has proposed a Superfund designation that would help secure cleanup funding for 48 such mines.
MCCAIN: 'PEOPLE ... DESERVE BETTER ANSWERS'
Arizona's senior senator and the congresswoman who is challenging him for his seat this fall both used the hearing to chastise the EPA for its allegedly slow and negligent response to Navajo hardships.
McCain called on the Justice Department to investigate.
"Native people here in Arizona deserve better answers," McCain told an EPA official at the hearing in the Phoenix City Council chambers.
Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., called the EPA's lack of follow-through with farmer compensation and continuing assurances of clean water "outrageous," and asked the agency for support with a bill she introduced to ensure adequate reimbursement.
Navajo farmers remain nervous that this spring's snowmelt will stoke the metals deposited on the riverbed and again threaten their water supplies, Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye said at the hearing. Meanwhile, he said, EPA has only reimbursed the tribe for part of its damages and monitoring needs, and not for lost crops.
"The farmers and my people, they have not been compensated," he said.
Worse, Begaye said, routine mine waste runoff into the river system continues unabated. "Nothing, nothing, nothing has been done" about that, he said.
EPA Assistant Administrator Mathy Stanislaus defended his agency's Gold King response, saying it has spent $22 million on the disaster overall and $1.1 million specifically for agricultural aid such as trucked hay and water on the reservation. EPA also has allocated about $150,000 for farmer reimbursements so far and $465,000 for Navajo Nation water monitoring needs.
"We know how important rivers are to them," he said.
CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE?
McCain asked Stanislaus whether the EPA would recommend a criminal investigation. Stanislaus said it would not.
After the hearing, McCain said he believes a criminal probe by the Department of Justice is warranted to learn why the EPA monitors did not require the mine-cleanup contractors to perform a routine pressure test on the water massed behind the mine plug.
"Who's responsible for that?" he said.
He also argued that the EPA wrongly asked the Department of the Interior to perform an independent analysis of the disaster. He said the department and its Bureau of Reclamation had a role in mine cleanup and was not impartial.
The committee also invited Hopi Tribal Chairman Herman Honanie to testify about his tribe’s problems with the EPA. The Hopis were not affected by the mine spill, but have long complained of arsenic in their drinking water.
Honanie said he has grown tired of waiting for a cleaner water system after decades of discussions with EPA officials.
“I’m only getting older,” he said.
