[E-rundbrief] Info 1118 - USA: Navajo, uranium cleanup

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 1118 - Bill Donovan (USA): Navajo families help 
create five-year uranium cleanup plan.

Bad Ischl, 30.5.2013

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

www.begegnungszentrum.at

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Navajo families help create five-year uranium cleanup plan

By Bill Donovan

Special to the Navajo Times

GALLUP, April 18, 2013

T he meeting room for the Uranium Contamination Stakeholder Workshop 
was packed with more than 200 tribal officials, federal 
representatives and Navajo families affected by uranium mining on the 
Navajo Reservation attending.

The meeting brought all of these people together for a two-day meeting 
to discuss ways to alleviate the affects of uranium mining on the 
Navajo Reservation over the next five years.

Back in 2006, various tribal and federal agencies dealing with 
remediating uranium mining on the reservation got together to set 
goals. The first five-year plan ended in 2012 with only some of these 
goals met and now the agencies are meeting again, this time with 
Navajo families involved, to set goals for a second five-year plan.

Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly opened up the workshop on Tuesday 
with a statement that the agencies "still have a long way ahead" to 
deal with a variety of problems stemming from the uranium mining on 
the reservation in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

The tribe still doesn't know, he said, how these mining operations and 
uranium milling operations affected the underground water systems, or 
the homes of Navajo families who lived within a quarter mile of these 
mills.

Hundreds of Navajo families also built their homes using material from 
the mining and mill operations. The tribe and the federal government 
are still in the process of tearing these homes down and relocating 
Navajo families into safer homes.

Federal and tribal agencies need to continue to clear up the site of 
the Church Rock, N.M. mill site as well as the Tuba City, Ariz. dump.

Nicole Moutoux, who heads the Superfund Program for the U.S. 
Environmental Protection Agency in San Francisco, agreed that the 
agencies did not meet their goal of cleaning up the Church Rock site 
in five years and that the agencies need to make it a priority to get 
it done during the next five years.

She said the group has a long road ahead since surveys have found that 
there are more than 400 sites on the reservation that exceed the 
average uranium levels.

"There are 36 sites that are more than 10 times the norm," she said.

Another speaker, Angela Ragin-Wilson, representative for Agency for 
Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, said more efforts are being 
made to track the effects of uranium exposure on the health of young 
Navajos as part of a birth cohort study.

This is a serious effort, she said, given the fact that "congenital 
anomalies are the leading cause of infant deaths on the Navajo 
Reservation."

Currently, she said, health agencies have limited data on the effects 
of uranium exposure on the health of Navajo children, who live close 
to the sites or in homes where some of the material was gathered at 
uranium or mill sites.

To correct this, her agency is in the process of recruiting 1,500 
Navajo mothers with the idea of monitoring their children to see how 
they develop.

Under the present program, the agency is monitoring children up to the 
age of two, but the plans now are to get more funding so they can be 
monitored up to the age of six.

Shelly, like several other speakers at the conference, pointed out 
that while tens of millions of dollars in federal funds have already 
been spent on remedial efforts, more - much more - is needed to 
complete the job.

The purpose of the workshop was to get input from the various agencies 
and the Navajo families on how to proceed in the future.

"Let's quit talking about it," said Shelly. "Let's get it done."

http://www.navajotimes.com/news/2013/0413/041813ura.php


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Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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