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Relocation is a loaded term
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There has been little noise made about the EPA's relocation of seven Navajo families living near the former Church Rock uranium mine in northwestern New Mexico. Scouring the Internet, I could only find one brief article in the Gallup Independent.
The news was brought to my attention last week, when Cally Carswell and I met with youth activists in Albuquerque on a reporting trip focusing on environmental justice.
"[The EPA] told families they had to move two to three weeks before they were moved," says Leona Morgan, a youth activist who grew up on the Navajo reservation. "They didn't know where, or if they were going to get a food stipend."
The families who were moved live nearest to the 97,000 cubic yards of contaminated top soil that General Electric and United Nuclear Corp. are spending $5 million to remove. The EPA's decision to relocate the families for five months to hotels in Gallup came as a surprise to other residents of the area, primarily because the decision seemed so haphazard, Morgan says.
"There was a lack of communication," says Nadine Padilla, a community organizer for the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment. "They tested for levels of pico-curies and chose to move people who were living at levels of 200 to 800. [As it turns out], two pico-curies is the safe level for humans."
The rest of the community, Padilla says, is wondering why they weren't moved as well, since the whole area has seen high levels of radiation. [See "Navajo Windfall," HCN's most recent article on the uranium industry's effect on the Navajo reservation].
The relocation has been difficult for the families, Morgan says, because they have to figure out how to keep their kids in school, feed their livestock back home or check on elderly relatives who live down the street but were not chosen for relocation.
Furthermore, the term relocation is a loaded one for American Indians, bringing up ancestral memories of forced relocation from their homelands to reservations hundreds of miles away. "The government didn't understand why the word was such a bad idea," Morgan says.
The entire process has alarmed the community.
"Children are waiting in line for the bus to go to school, and they're having to watch people in hazmat suits go by," Padilla says.
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Can we get a little clarification here? I assume that the people are living at levels where there inhalation and consumption were at 200 to 800 picocuries per year. Average consumption levels in the USA are .6 to 1.0 pCi/d (food and Water, which pencils out to 219 to 365 pCi/yr . I would expect that the exposure in Western New Mexico to uranium as well as radon is normally quite high compared to the rest of the United States, due to the fact that coal and uranium are naturally found in the area. We should also be aware that the dose a person receives is measured in rads and biological risk is measured in rems. When you say that the safe level for humans is 2, I have to ask 2 what? Exposure limits for drinking water are much higher than 2 pCi/L and inhalation is generally measured in mg per cubic meter.
Much effort and time is spent worrying about exposure to radiation from industrial processes, and much of the debate gets lost in common misconceptions and myths, which makes it difficult to weed the hysteria from cases that should make us sit up and pay attention. Which one of the 2 is this? Or is it something entirely different?