Cortez Journal
Saturday, April 15, 2000Uranium miners, families bring tales of pain to Washington
By Matt Kelley
Associated Press WriterWashington ---
Just like his father, Earl Saltwater Jr. got his first job 30 years ago in one of the uranium mines that dotted the arid mesas and canyons in and around the Navajo reservation.
Now Saltwater is worried the effects of radioactivity from those mines will kill him one day. Just like his father.
“They did experiment on us like guinea pigs. It makes me angry.” Saltwater said as he sat on the steps outside the U.S. House of Representatives. “I would have lived longer, but they gave me a shorter life on this earth.”
Saltwater was one of nine Navajo uranium miners and miners’ dependents in Washington last week to lobby for changes to a 1990 law compensating some of the Cold War’s domestic casualties. A bill passed by the Senate and pending in the House would make it easier for uranium miners and victims of fallout from open-air nuclear tests to get federal payments of up to $100,000.
The miners worked in shafts with few safety measures to dig out the uranium used in nuclear weapons and atomic power plants. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said he wrote the Senate-passed bill because “we should not add a bureaucratic nightmare to the burden of disease and ill health that these citizens are carrying.”
The proposal would expand the list of diseases and slash the amount of time a miner had to have spent working with uranium to be eligible for the compensation program. It would open the program to those who worked in open-pit uranium mines and uranium milling plants, as well as underground mines.
The bill also would streamline the application process and eliminate some of the barriers for American Indian miners, such as disqualification for smoking during religious ceremonies or refusal to recognize undocumented marriages to compensate miners’ widows.
Saltwater said he had to fight that bureaucracy for five years before his father got compensation in 1996, before he died. Saltwater carries a fading black-and-white photo of his father standing outside a uranium mine, holding a shovel and dressed jeans, a T-shirt and a miner’s helmet. That helmet was all the safety equipment he got, Saltwater said.
“It’s hard for anyone to be qualified” for compensation, Saltwater said. “That’s where it really hurts me a lot. My people are dying. My father died. My mother died.... Every single miner should be compensated for the injustice that has been done to us, regardless of our condition.”
Saltwater blames his current hearing loss, kidney disease, diabetes and breathing problems on his work in the uranium mine, though he only worked for about six months in 1968 and 1969. He said he was fired because he was sickened and started vomiting in the mine.
The mine had no bathroom facilities, so miners drank radioactive water and cleaned themselves with soft, doughy chunks or uranium ore after relieving themselves he said. “I worked almost like a slave” for $1.70 an hour, Saltwater said.
The Navajo group supports further changes to the law, including increasing the maximum payments to $200,000 and directly compensating miners’ families exposed to radiation themselves.
Gilbert Badoni of Shiprock, N.M., said he and his siblings played in uranium mine tailings and drank radioactive water during the decades his father worked in uranium mines in Colorado in the 1950s and ‘60s. Badoni said his father would come home covered in yellow uranium dust, which covered everything in their small home when their mother brushed it off the clothes.
He blames his lung problems and his siblings’ cancers on that exposure.
“The U.S. government has abused innocent women and children. They have abused my family,” Badonie said, choking back tears. “They have abused my Navajo people. That’s not right.”
As of last month, the government had paid more than $244 million in compensation to 3,302 people, including 1,523 uranium miners, according to the Justice Department office which oversees the payments. The program covers miners who worked in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and Washington state.
The bill pending in the House would extend the program to cover miners in North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Oregon and Texas.
The Navajo group sold 2,500 traditional Navajo meals of coffee, frybread and mutton stew to pay for their trip to Washington, said member Sarah Benally of Dolores, Colo.
Benally, whose uranium miner father died of a lung ailment but could not be compensated under the current law, has been lobbying Congress on the issue since the 1970s.
“People have to listen to us. If they don’t, we’ll keep coming back until something is done,” she said.