Pathways to exposure
Last in a series of personal accounts of Post-71 miners.

Strong winds carry misted water through the air and toward Hwy 605 at the Homestake mining site near Milan, NM on Wednesday. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

Chili Kicks on Route 66 restaurant owner Molly Chavez, a former uranium mine worker, reflects for a moment inside her Grants, NM business on the number of miners she knows who have died from illnesses believed to have been a result of radition exposure. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

GRANTS — Millie Chavez is somewhat of an enigma when it comes to radiation exposure. Just pick a pathway — she has been exposed.

Chavez was born in Springerville, Ariz., in 1946 and moved with her family to San Rafael in the early 1950s.

Unfortunately, the move wasn’t soon enough. Atomic testing at Nevada Test Site already had begun.

Both of Chavez’s sisters were compensated as downwinders. One sister has since died.

Her father was a watchman at Homestake, starting work soon after the mill first opened. He died of a massive heart attack. Her mother’s illnesses were similar to her own.

Chavez’s husband, Senovio, who is from San Mateo, spent 2 1/2 years at Kerr-McGee, Section 17, first as a laborer and then working his way below ground to become a uranium miner. Afterward, he spent nine years at United Nuclear-Church Rock Mine, and later hired on at Anaconda after the mill closed to help with cleanup.

He started getting sick back around 1972, he said, but “they passed me anyway to go back to work. They removed half my lung here — upper lobe.” Senovio was diagnosed with cancer about three to four years ago and now is undergoing treatment in Albuquerque.

He doesn’t know what type of cancer it is, he said. “It’s a long word.”

As a miller, Millie’s story is similar to that of other Post-71 uranium workers — hardly any safety equipment and no warning about the dangers of exposure to radiation. She operated a Bobcat and front-end loader, cleaning out ore spills, and brought her work clothes home to wash along with her husband’s.

“I worked in the basement where they used to load the ore.

There was always a lot of powder, a lot of dust in the air there. I was pretty much by myself. Every once in a while I’d have a helper,” she said. Neither of them had respirators.

“I operated the crusher there. I used to have to call the control office and tell him to shut down if we had a big ore spill. There was a lot of ore spilled onto the ground.

“I think I started getting sick right then. I never had asthma in my life, and I got diagnosed with asthma a little bit later when I was working there. Nothing ever changed. I still feel like I have some problems with my lungs. You can tell by the sound of my voice,” she said, coughing, her voice barely above a whisper.

After the mines shut down, Millie, Senovio and Cipriano Lucero went to work at Anaconda. “We were filtering. They called it ‘filtering tailings ponds.’ All of the waste went into those tailings ponds. They used this black piece of material — it was a plastic-like thing — and we were covering the tailings ponds.

“I was the foreman. Whatever the waste was in those things, after they dried up, we were down in there filtering them out. We were laying the plastic all the way across. I think we did, like, three tailings ponds. I don’t know why they were doing that. It must have cost them a lot of money to cover that up,” she said.

“I can’t remember what the name of the material was, but they called us seamers, because we used to have to make sure that it was done right, that there was no way that water could go in there after we got it done.” Lucero was a patcher, fixing rips in the plastic, and Senovio operated a loader.

“Sometimes you’d press the brake and bury yourself in the muck,” Senovio said. “You’d get stuck in it. It was in layers, the uranium, yellowcake — just layers.” He used to walk around in it, wearing only his street boots.

Millie said they called him one time because he was an equipment operator. “They told him, ‘Get rid of these gamma badges.’ He says, ‘Well, what do you want me to do?’ They told him to put them in the loader and go bury them. ... So those gamma badges are somewhere in the field over there where the former Anaconda is at,” she said.

“They didn’t check them (badges) very often. I worked there a year and I think they checked it once,” Millie said. Lucero said they checked his badges twice in three to four years.

After the mines and mills shut down, Millie moved on, selling burritos “because I couldn’t afford to pay my bills, and that was the only way I knew how to do it. There were no jobs here — everything was shutting down. They called me the ‘Tamale Lady’ and the ‘Burrito Lady,’” she said.

Cibola County began holding an annual chile contest each October and Millie won first place three years in a row with her famous red chile con carne. She and Senovio operated “Burrito Vans” off and on for the last 20 years, until about six months ago when Millie finally realized her dream of owing her own restaurant, “Chili Kicks on Route 66.”

She has translated her culinary skills into a shelf full of trophies. With a full-time business to run, she doesn’t have time for illness.

“I have diabetes and all these other things. They did tell me at one point that I had a spot on my lungs. I never really looked into that any. Maybe I should be going to the doctors, but I’m not about that. I have problems with my heart. I had a pretty hard heart attack and then I had some little heart attacks. They were able to do some work on that, stents and that sort of stuff,” she said.

“I know I’m having some kidney failure right now, by the way things have changed. I’ve got to go see about that. I’m experiencing a little bit of pain in the back of my kidney. I have a lot of blood clotting,” she said.

Millie believes that all their illnesses has to do with the contamination. “Even my children have a lot of health problems. My granddaughter has lupus. When she was just a little girl, she used to live out there right by Homestake.

Maybe the whole city of Grants is contaminated — I don’t know,” she said.

“Two of my sisters have lupus. One of them just got a settlement out of Washington. It was not the same thing — she didn’t work with the mines. It was the atomic-something, the downwinders sort of thing. So she got a settlement for that. My other sister, she passed away with lupus. They grew up in Springerville, Arizona. That might have had something to do with that, I don’t know. They were downwinders. But my granddaughter has lived here.

“I’m not saying it has anything to do with it, but I think it should be looked into. There’s another girl right here in town that lives around in the same area, and she has lupus. They both have a Factor 2 deficiency, which is thinning of the blood.

“They’re both about the same age. They’re like 21 now. But I know that my granddaughter was diagnosed when she was 14, and like I said, she spent a lot of time out at her grandfather’s ranch, which is out there too, by Homestake.

But even the animals don’t live out there, so there’s got to be something there. I believe there’s something there because the animals are not surviving,” Millie said.

“I figure as long as they don’t tell me they have to go in and operate, I’m not going to. I’m not looking for anything. If I’m breathing air every day, I’m fine,” she said.

“One time they told me I had a tumor in my brain. But the thing is, when I went back they told me that I didn’t have a tumor, that there was a little gap there. I had been diagnosed with brain cancer.

“It’s just that every time we go to the doctor, you’re afraid to let them even see you anymore, because they’re always finding something. I’m a hard-working woman and I think that when you stop and think about all these things, that’s when it gets you down.

“I don’t have time to get sick. But I know that I do have one thing for sure – that’s lung problems, and that’s what bothers me the most,” she said.