Liquid of life
Water haulers victims of water politics

John Lee Jr. makes the drive from Wide Ruins, Ariz. once a month to get water he says is better than what's available there. [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

By Kathy Helms
Diné Bureau

Chandler Whitman and B.T. Thomas empty water from 50 gallon drums into a water tank for their horses in Red Rock on Saturday. The brothers fill their barrels every other day at the Gallup water station to take to their animals, which they use for team roping competitions. "It would be a lot better," Whitman said of the proposed pipeline. "We'd use less gas not driving out here every other day. I think it would save a lot of people gas." [Photo by Brian Leddy/Independent]

WINDOW ROCK — The Intergovernmental Relations Committee of the Navajo Nation Council this week approved a memorandum of understanding between the Navajo Nation and the city of Gallup, thus hurtling one political football into the end zone.

But the game is far from over when it comes to settling Navajo claims to the San Juan River Basin and garnering funding support in Congress for the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project.

The everyday Navajo people, caught up in a water war that stretches from the desert Southwest to Washington, seem to have little voice in the final outcome.

Most are not acquainted with the political maneuvering required to bring water to their doorstep because they’re too busy trying to eke out a day-to-day existence in a Nation where unemployment stood at 48.6 percent in 2006. 

That factor, coupled with gas prices that have soared up to $3.49 a gallon on the reservation, make life doubly-tough for many of the 80,000 Navajo men, women and children who live within the proposed Navajo-Gallup pipeline service area and rely on water hauling to meet their basic needs.

The number crunchers at the U.S. Office of Management and Budget have said the estimated $714 million it will cost to bring water to these people is “too expensive.”

On Navajo, it’s a different world
While the majority may not know much about Washington politics, and for that matter, may not even speak English, what the Navajo people do know is sheep need water, cows need water, horses need water. And because livestock is a central part of Navajo existence, they get their drinks long before grandma and grandpa out in the hogan ever begin to worry about water for baths and washing clothes.

Though there is much dispute about the city of Gallup getting water from the Navajo settlement, the flip side of the coin is that if it weren’t for the water station near Bubany Lumber & Hardware Co., many of the Navajo people would be in dire straits.

On Saturday, Naomi and Priscilla Becenti loaded their water barrel on the back of a pickup and drove from Churchrock to the water station in Gallup. Though they live near the city limits, they still don’t have running water.

“We finally did get a cistern system because my mother is handicapped and she can’t haul the water,” Naomi said. “She’s only had it a year. She’s 87 years old.”

For 25 cents, you can drive away with 50 gallons of water, she said. “It runs for 25 seconds. My grandson had a watch and he timed it.”

Next, Leon Tsosie of Chinle pulled up to the hose. After feeding three quarters into the machine, his tank was nearly full. Tsosie was hauling water to an area south of Lupton. “I do this Wednesday night and then twice on the weekends. It’s for the sheep and horses and our drinking water,” he said.

“We’ve got a tank in the ground where we can just pump water into the house, so we’ve got to keep it full. I’ll probably haul two loads today.”

Lupton
John Leeper, director of the Water Management Branch of Navajo Water Resources Department, said Wednesday that it has been a bad summer for Lupton. “We’re working on an emergency drought well. There have been some real problems there over the last summer. Reclamation has some drought funding, and I think other programs are trying to respond to that particular problem.”

Jeff Roger of Mariano Lake hauls water from Gallup three times a week. Though he’s heard about bringing water from the San Juan, “I don’t know how feasible it’s going to be. I wouldn’t count on it,” he said. “Maybe after our time.”

Roger said there is water available for livestock at a windmill in Mariano Lake, “but when the wind goes down some of the year, it doesn’t have that much pump for the windmill to turn, so we rely on this water out here for drinking water. Other times we go to Crownpoint, but it’s kind of salty there. It’s better here for cooking and meals.”

Another plus is that the water continues to run throughout the winter, whereas at many of the windmills scattered across the Nation, the water often freezes solid. “A lot of people rely on it,” Roger said of the Gallup water.

The good thing about hauling water — even in the dead of winter — is that one is guaranteed to meet some of the most down-to-earth people in the world and likely gather ’round to discuss everything from rodeo to drought to grazing issues and herd reduction, to the finer points of shepherding.

And it’s not unusual to hear some of the Navajos wonder how much longer they would be without running water if some of the Washington politicos had to trade their stylish suits and power ties for well-worn pairs of Carhart overalls and waiting in line for two to three hours in sub-zero temperatures so they could haul a 55-gallon barrel of water back to their waiting families.

Perhaps $714 million wouldn’t sound like a bad price if the politicians had to brave what the Navajos call an “in-law chaser” blowing snow into a virtual white-out at gusts up to 50 mph, just so their animals could drink — especially if they knew that the water they were hauling was going to freeze into ice before morning and they could count on the next day being a repeat performance.

Neswood Dan of Churchrock hauls water from Gallup every other day. Saturday morning he was filling up a 210 gallon tank. “I’ve been here this morning twice,” he said. “We’ve got a 500 gallon tank. I’ve already hauled two of those this morning. This (210 gallons) is for the sheep.”

Churchrock
Dan said he is really looking forward to a new waterline currently under construction in the Churchrock area. “It’s halfway through. Hopefully this winter they’ll have water out there,” he said.

Clarence Peterson Sr. from Iyanbito pulled up towing a 500 gallon tank. “I always get the water from here,” he said. He, too, hauls for the sheep and horses. “The water is running out there,” in Iyanbito, he said, “but it’s high.” It takes about $2 to fill the 500 tank in Gallup, so he hauls about every three or four days.

Leeper said that Iyanbito, which is located near Churchrock, has had water quality problems. “There are problems with iron and I’ve heard there are some problems with radionuclides over there but I don’t know the specifics.”

Regarding water from Mariano Lake, he said the quality of the groundwater there has been pretty good. “It’s just a question of the capacity and the yield. Mariano Lake’s water supply cannot sustain a large regional area.”

Franklin Sandoval, who lives north of Tohatchi and hauls from Gallup said he believes the Navajo-Gallup pipeline will benefit a lot of people. “We really don’t count on the services that our utility people out there provide,” he said.

“Every chance we get, when we come into Gallup here, we’ll get water. It helps us a lot, actually, rather than having to take water from a tank out there which provides water for like 500 families. A lot of the times we lose a lot of that water pressure simply because it’s not adequate enough,” he said.

“We get a good pressure of water right around springtime when there’s water from the mountains that runs off there. It’s a really reliable source in the springtime, but into summer, the water levels drop and you lose pressure. 

“When you first come out and fill up water on one of the local wells, it will take you 10 to 15 minutes. But then when you get toward the summer, it takes about maybe a half hour to 45 minutes,” Sandoval said.

“I see quite a bit of people that I know that live out north Tohatchi area that do come over here and use this water service. It’s a good feature. I guess it would really help us out also if we had something like this out there. We have to share wells.”

Wide Ruins
Taina Crawford and John Lee Jr. of Wide Ruins drove 110 miles Saturday just to haul water. “Where we’re located, a lot of places, they’re isolated. They don’t have any running water or they don’t even have electricity,” Crawford said. “Water is really important and we’re very thankful. We don’t misuse the water and we try not to abuse it.”

Though there are water wells in Wide Ruins, she said, some of them do not work. Then too, “Some people don’t like people coming to their area for water, so what they do is they throw in snakes or dead dogs. They try to poison the water so people can’t get clean water,” Crawford said.

In 1979, the “Churchrock Tailings Spill” dumped an estimated 94 million gallons of acidic wastewater from United Nuclear Corp.’s Churchrock Uranium Mill into the Rio Puerco. It was the largest release by volume of low-level radioactive waste in U.S. history.

“It poured all the way down through these arroyos, all the way down into Sanders area,” Crawford said. “People along that route started dying of cancer. There are a lot of people that are ill all along that area. My mother is one person who died of cancer, and there are a lot of others that are coming up. We never had that sickness. They never had things like that happen to these people,” she said.

Many of the residents take their sheep down to the Puerco for water. “When they bring their sheep up, they butcher that sheep and they eat that sheep and it’s inside that sheep, so they really have to be careful. A lot of them haul their own water and put it in their own water well for those sheep in order for them to grow up healthy because they came down with some sort of bizarre illness,” Crawford said.

Leeper said that though livestock still use the Puerco, the tailings spill makes it “a very unlikely source of municipal drinking water. It just raises a lot of concerns.”

Though Wide Ruins is in Arizona, “if you look at a map of the Navajo Nation, you can see that regionally, the Gallup Regional System could expand to the east and the Window Rock system could expand from the north to the south, so you can see reaching some of these projects from a couple different directions.

“If there is a settlement in Arizona and some of the Arizona projects get funded, we could see a regional Ganado project stretching out; we could see the Window Rock public water system stretching out. And the areas that don’t have good groundwater, hopefully, will be tied into the areas that have better groundwater, and hopefully we can keep those demands within some sustainable limits,” Leeper said.