Three Laguna Pueblo villages edge the mine, and are home to about 1,800 people, who call themselves Kawaika. The Laguna Pueblo sits about 40 miles west of Albuquerque along Interstate-40, its settlements established in the 14th century near a beaver dam-created lake along the Rio San Jose, Lorenzo wrote in a 2006 article published by the Indigenous Environmental Network.
While the mine operated, blasting rattled and cracked walls in their adobe or rock and mortar houses and clouds of uranium-laden dust billowed into the air, drifting over villages where people dried venison and fruit outside. The arrival of an industry that only employed men upended a matrilineal culture in which duties split evenly between husbands and wives, Lorenzo’s research has also found, and triggered persistent problems with alcoholism, drug abuse, and family breakdowns. Families sold off livestock, left fields untended and missed traditional events and ceremonies to accommodate mine work schedules.
None of that has been set right since the mine closed, she said. Neither has the ground itself.
The Anaconda Copper Mining Company (which later merged with Atlantic Richfield, or ARCO) leased 7,868 acres beginning in 1953, and dug three open pits, moving 400 million tons of rock to produce 25 million tons of ore. When mining ceased, the company left literal holes in the ground, one about 625 feet deep, some lying just hundreds of feet from the village. Initial environmental reviews by federal agencies cautioned without cleanup the mine site would present a public health hazard, including increasing radiation-induced cancer deaths.
What should have happened, but didn’t, would have been to bury the leftover uranium-laden ore with clean soil deeply enough to protect nearby water sources from it and other contaminants found with the uranium, like chromium, cobalt, manganese, vanadium, and zinc. That work would have also preserved a Goldilocks-level of soil moisture: If soil is too dry or too wet, it releases radon, which is linked to lung cancer.
“From the plan that was proposed at the time, it didn’t seem like there was much attention to the thickness and the material in the cover,” said Chris Shuey, who co-authored comments criticizing the cleanup plan in 1985. “We said, ‘If you simply backfill the pits, eventually groundwater is going to recover through that material, and it would appear at the surface, and when it appears at the surface, it’s going to be contaminated.’ They said, ‘Well, that’s too expensive, that’s not part of the plan.’ … So I think we thought, at the time, it was a plan for failure.”
Documents from 1985 show researchers tracking uranium and arsenic from the Grants Mineral Belt as far downstream in the Rio Grande as Elephant Butte Reservoir, affecting drinking water and irrigation sources for roughly 200 miles through New Mexico.
In 1986, Atlantic Richfield negotiated a cash settlement with Laguna Pueblo for $45 million to complete the remediation work. The tribe was eager to address an unemployment rate that had soared above 80% following the mine’s closure, and so created the Laguna Construction Company to complete the remediation.
The company employed about 60 people, nearly all tribal members, many of them former mineworkers. They followed the plans and reclamation standards set by the BLM and BIA. The focus: remove risks from mine waste piles that contained traces of uranium by filling pits in the mine higher than the water table to prevent ponds from forming in them, contour waste piles to reduce erosion, and scatter native grass seeds.
Some remediation was better than nothing, at least for a while.
Today the mine is visible for miles, its surfaces shedding dust with tiny particles of uranium, small enough to inhale and damage the lungs.
“We will look back and say, you know, environmentally, that was really not the best plan for reclaiming the land, because what happened was, it rained, and a lot of the cover came undone, and contaminated the water that runs through the Pueblo,” Lorenzo said. “The design—which, you know, they did when there were no standards in existence, right?—was the best they could have, and now, we know that environmentally, it could have been better.”
The EPA-run Superfund program, established by Congress in 1980, was relatively new when the BLM and BIA plan was approved in 1985, Robinson said, and the plan was not evaluated on whether or not it met the EPA’s regulations for contaminants like uranium in the water. Further complicating cleanup is that mines aren’t covered by the Atomic Energy act, which oversees the cleanup of former uranium mill sites.
“This little glitch is a major defect that has resulted in all the uranium mines over the Navajo Nation and around the West being left as orphan mines,” Robinson said. Orphans are abandoned mines for which no financially responsible party can be found. “It’s a very unfortunate gap that’s been unable to be filled, so the Superfund remedy is the only remedy that’s been identified for the Navajo sites, as well as Jackpile.”
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who is a member of the Laguna Pueblo, testified in 2019 before Congress when she was a U.S. Representative about the health risks posed by the Jackpile Mine, and the need for more compensation for communities affected by cancer and other illnesses.
“At the Jackpile Mine, these poisons were dumped in an open pit without any lining to protect the ground and the groundwater because that was the standard at the time,” she told her congressional colleagues. “I know it’s difficult for us to comprehend this today. In fact, it’s been 45 years since cleanup of the uranium tailings began, and it’s still not done. That is a responsibility of the federal government.”
As Interior Secretary, she now oversees both the BLM and BIA. Her press office referred questions for this story to the EPA.
