Attorney energizes cleanup campaign

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Natives have learned how to get a slow-moving federal agency to pay more attention to the hundreds of abandoned uranium mines still poisoning their reservation: Hire a high-powered attorney.

It seems to be working for the Navajo Nation. Just weeks after retaining the services of the former federal prosecutor credited with sealing the government's case against Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, and one of Fortune Magazine's 25 people who shaped the business world in 2006, the tribe is already reporting gains with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

John Hueston, now a partner with the southern California law firm Irell & Manella, read about the Navajo Nation's tragic history with uranium mining in a series of articles the L.A. Times published last November. Having married a Navajo from the Navajo Mountain area, Hueston took particular interest.

Hueston called the tribe to offer his assistance. The tribe accepted, hiring him late last month to help it finish clean up the mess the mining industry left behind after removing millions of tons of uranium to fuel the country's nuclear arms race during the Cold War.

While the tribe has made progress, the going has been slow.

It wasn't until 1998, for example, that the Environmental Protection Agency got started on a comprehensive inventory of the all the mining activity that took place across the reservation's 27,000 square miles, according to Stephen Etsitty, executive director of the tribe's own Environmental Protection Agency. Slowed down by confidentiality disputes the tribe, said Etsitty, was worried about how much access third parties would have to the information the federal government collected the EPA hasn't even started evaluating the full environmental impact of that activity.

"That's the next step," Etsitty said.

And while the tribe has reclaimed 913 of the 1,032 uranium mines on the reservation with some of the fees its collected from coal mines operating on its land, there's only so much it can do with the money.

"The law that we're being funded under, we're not allowed to address chemical or radiation problems," said Gilbert Dayzie, a civil engineer with the tribe's Abandoned Mine Lands Reclamation program. "It allows us to address physical hazards ... things that will affect people immediately."

While that keeps people and livestock from wandering into abandoned mines or falling into old pits, it's done little to address environmental contaminants that can take years, even decades, to affect people. It was just last week that the Arizona Daily Sun out of Flagstaff reported a plume of radioactive water moving toward a pair of Hopi communities. In Crownpoint, the United Nuclear Corporation has been working at cleaning up another underground plume for over a decade and has only recently started studying contamination on the surface.

Even the sites the tribe has reclaimed using coal fees continue to pose a risk as heavy rains wear away the topsoil used to cover many of them up, according to Dayzie. While the damage gets repaired, the tribe is looking for a permanent solution.

"Just because they have been reclaimed doesn't mean they are necessarily complete in regard to human aspects," said David Taylor, a tribal attorney.

It's Hueston's job to push the EPA toward assessing all the sites on the reservation and where the companies who left the mess behind can't be tracked down or don't have the financial resources pay to clean them up for good.

Taylor believes Hueston is the right man for the job.

"He is an incredible energizer for situations just because of his reputation and his experience," he said. "I've seen it myself."

And it can't hurt that Hueston has never lost a case, or even a single count in any his trials.

The EPA seems to be paying attention. After a series of day-long meetings with agency representatives last week, Hueston said, the EPA has already agreed that some sites on the reservation pose a greater risk than it thought.

Taylor said it's now also seriously considering adding a site in the reservation's Western Agency to its Superfund list, an important step toward finding the funds for a thorough cleanup.