A job she loved, a life of suffering
Grants woman’s love of mining outweighed by health impact

A heavy equipment operator wears only a ball-cap and a safety vest as protective equipment on Wednesday while moving dirt around at the Rio Algom mine north of Milan, NM. Signs attached to the fence surrounding the area state that the area is a radiation materials site. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

Second in a series of personal accounts of Post-71 miners.

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

GRANTS — Helen Gurule Savedra has spent most of her life in the dark. Now she’s legally blind. Still, if her health was good, she would go back to working in the uranium mines because she loved her job and the pay was good.

Savedra, 52, of Grants worked for Kerr-McGee Section 30 at Ambrosia Lake from 1974 until she was laid off in 1985.

She doesn’t know whether her blindness is attributable to working in the mine, but it did come along years before she was diagnosed with diabetes — a common complaint among uranium workers.

“I was in the dark all day. I used to work five days a week. We’d shower and go home and it was already dark. One day, I was helping my grandpa put a fence up and I passed out because I couldn’t handle the daylight. I was used to just being underground all day, so it was hard for me to see daylight, even on the weekends.”

Savedra, a former barrel racer, married at 15, had her first son at 17, and went to work for Kerr-McGee at 18 after leaving an abusive marriage. “He beat me so bad that one day I just got up and left and came back to Grants. My son was 2 weeks old,” she said. “I started working at Pizza Hut and then my aunt talked me into working at the mines.

“They gave you a probation period to see how long you were going to last. They put you in what they call the ‘piss ditch.’ They used to give you a shovel and you had to clean all the dirt from the ditches so the water would flow. There was a lot of contamination there that we weren’t aware of. All I had was gloves and my hands. We wore a helmet and safety glasses.”

Savedra worked in the ditch for about six months before receiving on-the-job training. “I learned how to do everything. I learned how to take supplies down from the cage, I learned how to use the belts, I learned how to run a motor.”

She worked as a utility miner, learning to drill and blast. “I used to run the slusher,” she said. “The last six years I had my own working place. I was a miner. Then I worked two years after that to help clean up.”

Savedra was petite, young and attractive, with long hair she had to pin up under her hat to keep it from getting caught in the machinery. She became a target for sexual harassment.

“Working with all these men, they thought, you know, I’m a lady, I’m there to — in other words, excuse my language, no disrespect – they treated these women like whores, like they had no business underground.

“A couple of times when I was going down in the cage, this guy patted me on the back in the wrong place. I turned around and I got my wrench — we used to carry our own equipment — and boom! I hit him on the mouth. I thought I was going to get fired.”

But her supervisor stuck up for her. “He said, ‘You know what? She’s here to work and to make a living just like you are. If you’re not going to respect her, you’re going to get your teeth knocked out again.’ So after awhile, after the guys got to know me, it was like, ‘Don’t touch her because she’ll punch you.’

“To this day, I see them in town and they respect me. They learned to respect me. I’m not saying there weren’t women that didn’t like to play around — there was. But I was one that didn’t like it. I was there to make a living,” Savedra said.

For years, she ran the slusher machine. “It’s a big old bucket that you put in the open stope spring and pull out the muck. Every day we used to drill and blast and then we’d have to get in there and, you know, you’d sniff all this smoke from the blasting.

“The motor man would come underneath you, because you were up top. He’d put a light on to let you know that he was down there. You’d have to slush that thing as fast as you could because the motor man was getting paid by pulling the muck, so they had to be fast. This was 1,700 feet underground,” she said.

A lot of times, the miner would be working above and she would be in the lower level doing the slushing. “Sometimes the grill would get plugged up and you’d have to blast. You’d have to call the miner to tell him that you had to blast because your chute was plugged up. Once you blasted, the muck would come down and you’d slush it out.”

They didn’t have any safety equipment, not even a mask, she said. “The vent bag that they had down there for air, half the time it would be torn. It wouldn’t be in our working place so we could breathe better. We were breathing the bad air.”

As a miner, she and her helper, who now ran the slusher as she had once done, worked alone. “That machine was heavy for me,” she said. She used to prop it a certain way to make it comfortable for her to drill. “Then I’d set it up for blasting. The only time we were able to blast was at noontime when everybody was at lunch.”

Everyone had a tag. If their tag didn’t show up at lunch break, “they would have to go looking for you,” she said. “They couldn’t blast. They had to make sure everybody was in the lunchroom.”

“When you were working underground it was dark, so you’d carry your light. If your light went out, you’d better stay there and have somebody come and pick you up because it was so dark you wouldn’t be able to find your way around.”

Savedra said she wasn’t afraid of being in the dark. “I was real brave. You know what? I’d go back today if I could, but my health is really bad.”

About 14 to 15 years ago she was diagnosed with diabetes. “I got amputated already for my leg, my toes. And then I went to the doctor — I was having problems with my lungs — and they told me that I already had the radon spots on my lungs.” That was about five years ago.

“Pretty soon I guess they’re going to put me on the breathing machine because I have a hard time breathing. Now I have a caretaker that comes and helps me and drives me around because I’m legally blind also.”

In addition, she has begun to experience kidney problems. “Just the other day I went to the doctor and he told me I was dropping protein — not bad enough to where I could go to dialysis, but they put me on all kinds of medication.

“I never got anything from Kerr-McGee, no compensation, no nothing. They told me when I was working at Kerr-McGee that I was going to be sterile from all the radiation. Well, I have a son that is 14, he was born in ‘93. He has a mental disorder problem and I wonder if that was coming from radiation.” There is no family history of mental disorders, she said.

Her son is in a residential treatment center in Las Cruces where he is being tested to see whether the disorder might be related to her years in the mine. “There are other people who have had kids that have a disorder problem,” she said. Their parents also worked in the mines and mills.

“We had to shower every day before we went home. We had our own trailer, the women. It was mandatory that we showered before we left. But we took our clothes home and washed them with our family’s clothes. We didn’t know that it was bad. We were contaminating our family and we weren’t even aware of it.

“I think if they reopen the mines, they’re just opening up the poisons. They need to be aware of what’s going to happen later down the line,” she said.

“When I was working for Kerr-McGee, I saw this ‘Keep Out’ sign and I saw this ladder going up. I heard a bunch of men talking and I heard the slusher going. I thought, ‘Why are there people up there if the Keep Out sign is there?’ I was curious and I climbed up. I found nothing but trash. There was nobody up there.

“I swear to God, to this day, I can still hear those voices. People say it was from when people died there. It might have been the spirits,” she said.

“But you know what, if I had my health, I would go back because I really loved my job. The money was good. When I was mining, I was on contract. You had to move fast – that’s where the money was. My checks were about $1,800 a month. It was something I had to do because I felt like, in my heart, I had a son to raise.

“Is it worth it? Look at my health.”