Thread by @Spocks_Brian

On July 16, 1979, an earthen dam burst at a uranium mill in Church Rock, New Mexico, releasing 94 million gallons of radioactive waste into the Rio Puerco. For most people reading this, this is likely the first time they’ve ever heard of the event. 1/

https://twitter.com/karol/status/1133036130839011328

This spill released 1.36 tons of uranium into the river, which in the nearby town of Gallup was mostly used for sewage runoff and storm drainage. When the water rushed past the town that morning, it lifted manhole covers off of the ground and flooded the street 2/

And the water continued westward. And here’s a big part of why you’ve never heard of this incident before. The Church Rock mill and the city of Gallup are on the border of the Navajo Nation. The Puerco flows straight through the heart of the NN to reach the Colorado river /3

This also means it runs into the state of Arizona. This is one of the most impoverished areas in the country. It’s a reservation, that’s by design. On top of that, you have some pretty major challenges of infrastructure. Plenty of NN households don’t have power. /4

And that’s the case in 2019. Many homes are still not connected to the grid. They might have solar panels or gas generators, but they’re not going to hear emergency broadcasts on the tv or radio. Use of kerosine lamps for light is still pretty common. Never mind 40 years ago. /5

To put another complicating layer on top of that, the laws around the oversight of radioactive cleanup were written so that in NM and AZ, they were the individual states’ concerns. And what’s more, The states didn’t know how much was in their jurisdiction /6

This meant that the immediate response to the disaster was… nothing. Nothing at all. For days. People saw no rain, no clouds. And then a rushing wall of filthy water. /7

Finally, many days later, the Indian Health Service and the state of New Mexico started broadcasting warnings not to drink or touch or allow livestock to drink from the waters of the Rio Puerco. In English. /8

Despite the most dogged efforts of Christian Reformed and Catholic missionaries and boarding school teachers over the last century to destroy the languages and cultures of the Southwest, there are still many people on the NN who only speak Navajo. This was even truer in 1979 /9

Many days after the ineffective sign campaign, the United Nuclear Corporation finally acted and sent some employees to talk to residents on the NN about the danger. Due to location, most of UNC’s workers were Navajo anyway. /10

UNC then sent water in gallon jugs down river to the affected populace. How many jugs you ask? 600. For perspective, the number of people who lost access to clean water was 1700. This was agricultural, subsistence farming land. It required 30,000 gallons a DAY /11

600 gallons of water can be trasported in two pickup truck beds. The state and federal government continued to provide (a still inadequate amount of) water by truck for the next two years, then stopped. /12

Meanwhile, the tribal government requested that the state of New Mexico declare the affected zone a federal disaster area, in order to get national funds for the cleanup. Bruce King, the longest-serving governor in the state’s history, said no. /13

So what did cleanup look like? Well… UNC measured the uranium levels of the topsoil, determining that they only needed to remove three inches of sediment from the river bed. In 3 months they removed 3500 barrels of waste, or about 1% of what was spilled /14

Now, we haven’t gotten into the real problem. You see, the river wasn’t the main water source for residents and their livestock. The groundwater was. Note the past tense. The big issue for folks on the NN was the same factor that caused the dam breach in the first place. /15

The sand soaked the poisonous, acidic, irradiated water right up, and in no time, it leeched into the shallow aquifers that supplied most people with their well water, just as it had leeched into the unlined dam and formed cracks that UNC willfully and negligently ignored /16

The well water is still poisoned to this day. And it always will be as long as humans exist on this earth. Federal agencies told people they’d be fine still eating their livestock (that hadn’t already died off in massive quantities) as long as they weren’t doing so regularly /17

..and they didn’t eat the liver or kidneys. This was wrong, and wholly ignorant of the fact that people were eating their livestock regularly because THATS HOW LIVESTOCK WORKS. /18

Some Navajo children were tested for radiation levels in Los Alamos, but there have never been any comprehensive, longitudinal study of the effects of radiation on the Navajo Nation, save for some medical testing on uranium miners conducted without their knowledge or consent. /19

See, this incident wasn’t just isolated or limited to the Rio Puerco. Decades of uranium mining and cut corners has led to thousands of contaminated wells, with clear, cold, odorless water, that will slowly, painfully, kill you if you drink it

Rates of specific cancers and juvenile cancers are much higher on the NN than most of the US. People have to drive upwards of 100 miles to have access to clean drinking water. Note the response of the reporter in this CBS Sunday Morning video /21

These human-interest-dispatches-from-hell usually try to keep the happiest, fluffiest doin on their stories, but after hearing the matter-of-fact resignation in Darlene Arviso’s voice, it ends on perhaps the gloomiest note in the history of CBS Sunday Morning pieces /22

And again, this was by design. The US government’s basic stance on indigenous people has always alternated between apathy and rabid hostility. No one cared that UNC cut corners because no one cared about the people who were affected by it. /23

And the media, which has always functioned as a tool of the American empire, has never cared to report on disasters like these, because native people are an inconvenience to the narrative that has been assigned to the American nation. And so, you’ve never heard this story. /24

I didn’t either. I grew up in Gallup, New Mexico. I could see Church Rock from my house. I saw people filling up containers on their pickups with water every weekend, but I didn’t know why they didn’t have water at home. I just assumed it was lack of plumbing in the desert. /25

The Rio Puerco, or as we called it “The Perky,,” ran right by the railroad and Route 66. There were always jokes about it being irradiated, but again, I had no idea where that came from. Not until I was researching it for a debate class in 2008, my senior year of high school /26

I grew up in the town where it happened! And I knew nothing about the spill. And neither did my friends. And we dove right by the Perky to get to school every day. /27

All this is to say, we *are* that backward ass country more concerned with the embarrassment of nuclear accident than its deadly ramifications. We’re just better at lying to ourselves about it. /28

This has gained some traction so, a post script. This is the United Nuclear warehouse just north of Gallup. By the end of the Reagan administration, UNC was done.

Was this because of decades of gross negligence, a burst dam and water contamination? Was it because UNC only managed to neutralize the sulfuric acid in the tailings? Was it because they didn’t address the leeching until 2 years after the spill? Of course not.

In a matter of coincidence, the writing appeared on the wall for American nuclear power just four months before the spill, when a much more public and much less environmentally consequential nuclear disaster occurred on Three Mile Island

Pair that with the Jane Fonda vehicle “The China Syndrome” which released a couple weeks earlier, and suddenly, the tide shifted tremendously against nuclear power.

The irony is of course that these reactors are pretty safe. But the perception of a very public non-event like 3MI helped put an end to the industry that caused irreparable damage that most of the country had no idea was happening.

Right now, coal and oil are on track to destroy a sizable portion of our species. Because of this, nuclear power is starting to get something of an appraisal, especially from the left. But it has to be clear that there are many steps to nuclear power beyond just the reactor

…and it’s easy to lose sight of that, or not have any image of it at all. If wind, solar and geothermal are not the only way, if we do need nuclear power to supplant fossil fuel, we need to understand what mining it again would mean for our nations most marginalized communities.

Speaking of fossil fuels, Native land and native sovereignty are under attack. Bears Ears and Chaco canyon are in danger of being destroyed by fracking interests. Keystone remains a threat, and DAPL has already leaked.

Much of this was the topic at the first annual Indigenous Peoples March back in January, but even then the topic was hijacked by white republicans. How does stuff like that happen? Well we started @TWOAPW to figure that out.

Also @Pasha_Spider drew my attention to this book by Judy Pasternak, published in 2010. I intend to read this asap

scribd.com/read/224436524…

wow damn. thanks @Hbomberguy for the retweet. No wonder my mentions are erupting at 4am again. You make great stuff and you're a big part of why we started @TWOAPW