{"id":46594,"date":"2025-03-17T15:41:58","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T22:41:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/?p=46594"},"modified":"2025-05-02T11:07:10","modified_gmt":"2025-05-02T18:07:10","slug":"poisoning-the-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/poisoning-the-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Poisoning the well"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This story<\/a> was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico<\/a>, a NMPBS partner.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
John Boomer and Maggie Billiman at the site of their former home, demolished as part of Homestake Mining Company\u2019s decision to hand over its old mill site and some 6,100 acres of land to the federal government. Michael Benanav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\n
Alicia Inez Guzm\u00e1n, Searchlight New Mexico<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Driving along a stretch of New Mexico Highway 605, just north of the tiny Village of Milan, it\u2019s easy to imagine that this area has always been no-man\u2019s-land. Little appears in the distance except for a smattering of homes and trees peppered by expanses of bone-dry scrub brush. But a hard second look reveals something else \u2014 vestiges of a mass departure. Sidewalks lead to nowhere, a dog house sits in the middle of a field next to a mound of cinder blocks, phone lines crisscross empty stretches of land and deserted propane tanks and mailboxes sit perched in front of nothing. Around the bend on one unpaved side road, a neighborhood watch sign stands sentinel where a neighborhood no longer exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Boomer and his partner, Maggie Billiman, roam around a peeling concrete pad, pointing out the location of their old bedroom, art studio and kitchen. As she stands in one corner of what was once a 7,200-square-foot warehouse-turned-home, Billiman describes how she and John would pray to the east as the sun came up behind Mount Taylor, one of four sacred mountains to the Navajo. Billiman then pulls up a sickly looking ear of purple corn that has sprouted in a cement crack, the product of an errant seed blown over from one of the garden beds the couple planted years earlier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDo you think it\u2019s safe to plant?\u201d Billiman asks Boomer, referring to the legacy of groundwater contamination caused by a colossal pile of uranium mill waste that still looms in the distance, which is the reason why the couple recently left. He shrugs. \u201cWe can try.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Hands
Maggie Billiman holds an ear of corn she picked from one of the cracks in the concrete floor of the couple\u2019s demolished home. Michael Benanav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This home site was once part of a cluster of five rural subdivisions interspersed with rich farm and ranchland. The Homestake Mining Company \u2014 famously known for gold mining in the Black Hills of South Dakota \u2014 took up residence here in 1958, to mill uranium. From that year until 1990, millions of tons of ore were prised from nearby mines and processed at Homestake, where the ore was ground into fine particles and leached with a solution that coaxed out pure uranium oxide, often called \u201cyellowcake.\u201d That uranium was then shipped off to help make America\u2019s Cold War fleet of nuclear weapons or to power nuclear reactors. The leftover slurry was piped into two unlined earthen pits, the largest the size of 50 football fields and filled with over 21 million tons<\/a> of uranium mill tailings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over time, the uranium tailings decayed into radon gas; meanwhile, radioactive contaminants seeped into four of the region\u2019s aquifers. Residents compiled a list of neighbors who died of cancer \u2014 they called it the Death Map. In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) predicted<\/a> that the probability of developing cancer was notably higher for residents who lived closest to the mill, especially if they drank the water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the intervening decades, Homestake attempted to hold its remaining contamination at bay rather than offer a long-term solution. That changed in 2020, when the company declared that a full cleanup of the groundwater was not feasible and instead embarked on a mass buyout and demolition of homes inside the rural subdivisions and beyond, Boomer and Billiman\u2019s included. Homestake\u2019s goal, ultimately, is to hand over 6,100 acres of land \u2014 almost twice the size of nearby Milan \u2014 to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of a special<\/a> federal program that takes over shuttered nuclear outfits when industry walks away. The deadline is 2035<\/a>. And if this site is anything like the majority of the DOE\u2019s other sites, the land will be rendered inaccessible to the public, with the company\u2019s guarantee that toxins will stay inside the massive contamination zone boundary for a thousand years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTalk about the myth of containment,\u201d says Christine Lowery, a commissioner in Cibola County. \u201cThe myth of reclamation as well,\u201d she adds. For Lowery, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna who lives in Paguate, one of its six villages \u2014 itself blighted by the Jackpile-Paguate Uranium Mine, one of the world\u2019s largest open pit uranium mines \u2014 the subtext is clear. \u201cWhat they should be saying is, \u2018We\u2019ve contaminated everything we can, and there\u2019s no way we can fix it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aerial
Homestake Mining Company\u2019s large tailings pile appears like a berm in the distance. In front are Homestake\u2019s reverse-osmosis plant, along with collection and evaporation ponds. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In fact, the conditions necessary for contaminants to infiltrate a fifth aquifer in a single generation \u2014 not a thousand years \u2014 could already be in the making. The aquifer in question is the San Andres-Glorieta, so ancient that its limestone was forged from the same material as seashells before the era of the dinosaurs. It\u2019s also the last clean source of groundwater for Milan, the county seat of Grants, many private well owners and the Pueblo of Laguna, as well as the Pueblo of Acoma, one of the longest continually inhabited communities in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to regulators, the San Andres-Glorieta still meets standards for groundwater that is safe to use and drink. According to Homestake\u2019s own reports<\/a>, however, at least three uranium plumes are converging toward what Ann Maest, an aqueous geochemist with Buka Environmental, a Colorado-based firm, calls \u201ca bull\u2019s-eye of radioactive contamination.\u201d The potential target? A geological formation called a subcrop. Here, approximately 100 feet below the surface of the earth and three miles southwest of the Homestake site, this subcrop directly connects the San Andres-Glorieta with an overlying aquifer long known to transport contamination from two uranium mills including Homestake. In 2022, the company commissioned an independent firm to study<\/a> the geological feature. But according to a memo<\/a> sent to state and federal regulators and written by Maest the following year, the findings were \u201clight on interpretation\u201d and evaded answering the most important question of all: Have those contaminants reached the San Andres-Glorieta?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homestake\u2019s answer is no. In an email sent to Searchlight New Mexico, Brad Bingham, who manages the company\u2019s mine-closure effort, said that company analysis \u201cdemonstrates that the [San Andres-Glorieta] has not been impacted by the Homestake site.\u201d The company, he added, monitors wells both on- and off-site, and the data is made available in annual reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gauging the extent of groundwater plumes is notoriously difficult. Topography and geology shape how groundwater moves, and sampling can underestimate the full range of a plume, leaving gaps in the data, whether that\u2019s inadvertent or intentional. A 2022 ProPublica<\/a> investigation found that regulators had been lax in their oversight of the Homestake mill, its toxic footprint and the uranium industry as a whole. Over time, a dizzying array of state and federal agencies have each overseen a different aspect of the site\u2019s reclamation; in the past, those agencies haven\u2019t even agreed<\/a> on what that reclamation should look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, as uranium mining undergoes a national revival under initiatives that favor carbon-free nuclear energy, waste from the previous Cold War era of mining and milling endures. Homestake\u2019s remediation \u2014 which has gone on for 49 years \u2014 exemplifies this legacy. During that time, company reports say<\/a>, its collection wells have pumped out billions of gallons of contaminated water. Nearly one million pounds of uranium have been removed from the groundwater, too. Bingham says this represents 85 percent of the total uranium that was released into the environment. That\u2019s in addition to the removal of tens of thousands of pounds of selenium and over a million pounds of molybdenum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company has attempted to keep pollutants that have seeped into groundwater from migrating farther away from the source. But this so-called hydraulic barrier has only addressed the symptoms of the contamination, not the cause: the tailings piles, which the company declined to relocate into a lined repository nearby. That means that some groundwater contamination continues to spread beyond Homestake\u2019s site. The hydraulic barrier has another drawback \u2014 it has used \u201ca massive amount of freshwater from the San Andres-Glorieta aquifer to operate,\u201d says Laura Watchempino, a member of the Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE), a grassroots network of uranium-impacted communities working collectively to address the legacy of mining and milling on the health and environment of future generations. Watchempino is a former lawyer who also worked as a water quality specialist for the Pueblo of Acoma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flawed as the barrier is, critics are quick to emphasize that it has to remain in the face of the alternative \u2014 nothing at all. Still, as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) confirmed, any long-term remediation measures that Homestake operated, including this barrier, will come to a halt once the site is handed over to the federal government. In 2021, the New Mexico Environment Department<\/a> issued a clear warning on this point: Bringing an end to remediation activities, especially ones involving the hydraulic barrier, \u201ccould have dire consequences for the remaining potable water sources in the region.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m 85 and it all started when I was 40\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sitting in his office on Uranium Avenue in Milan, surrounded by haphazard stacks of paper, binders and books, Larry Carver talks about the earliest years of his family\u2019s presence in the region. His uncle on his mother\u2019s side homesteaded a section of land when the area was nothing but rows of potatoes and carrots. \u201cSome of the best farmland in the valley,\u201d Carver says. His in-laws moved to Murray Acres, at the time a newly minted subdivision, in 1955. Carver followed in 1964 and bought five acres. His son and grandson are the third and fourth generations to live here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Homestake\u2019s Grants Reclamation Project, north of the Village of Milan. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Carver estimates that he is one of around 30 holdouts left in the five subdivisions; four of the families live in his own, Murray Acres. But few others have spent so much time fighting to hold the company accountable. \u201cI\u2019m 85 and it all started when I was 40,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1983, he was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit<\/a> filed against the company, which argued, among other claims, that contamination of the well water had \u201ccompletely destroyed the market value of the plaintiffs\u2019 properties.\u201d As part of the settlement, the company made small cash payments to residents and hooked them up to the municipal water system, which drew from the last clean source of water in the region, the San Andres-Glorieta. That year, the mill was designated a Superfund site, and in 1987 the company entered into a consent order<\/a> with the EPA to analyze radon levels in residents\u2019 homes, the product of uranium decaying from the tailings piles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The mill closed in 1990, less than a decade after the uranium industry went bust. Records from the county assessor\u2019s office show that Homestake quietly began buying a handful of homes in adjacent neighborhoods as early as 1996. (In 2001, Homestake Mining merged with the Canadian juggernaut, Barrick Gold, one of the world\u2019s largest gold mining companies.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEvery time someone dies or decides to move away, Homestake-Barrick Gold buys the property at a greatly reduced cost, which they can do because their ineffective groundwater remediation has devalued property many of us worked lifetimes to build,\u201d Candace Head-Dylla, a former resident, said in a 2017 letter<\/a> to the NRC.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"A
Michael Benavav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Abandoned home site near Milan. Michael Benavav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Aerial
The contours of one home\u2019s foundation and driveway. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In 2020, the company argued that it was no longer technically practical to clean up the groundwater to match its pre-mill days, Bingham wrote. So began the tangled regulatory process of applying for a less-stringent cleanup standard<\/a> through the NRC, which first required Homestake to show that such a standard wouldn\u2019t harm people or the environment. Homestake had to begin making what Bingham called \u201cgood faith offers\u201d on homes as part of its NRC application. According to Ron Linton, a project manager with the NRC, the company has \u201can obligation to secure the land needed to safely isolate the mill tailings,\u201d essentially clearing it of all human presence. Only then can the DOE move in as the contamination zone\u2019s long-term steward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Searchlight asked the DOE for comment, but the agency declined. According to Samah Shaiq, a former DOE spokesperson, the agency is not yet responsible for the site.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The NRC denied Homestake\u2019s application for the lower standard \u2014 the basis of the buyout \u2014 but the company remains steadfast in its desire to walk away. As part of those plans, Homestake has already scooped up approximately 455 of the estimated 523 properties that sit inside its proposed boundary, an expanse that\u2019s nearly as large as the most contaminated area of the Rocky Flats Plant, another of the more than 100 sites under the DOE\u2019s perpetual care, where thousands of plutonium bomb cores for the nation\u2019s nuclear arsenal were fabricated between 1952 and 1989. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much of Milan<\/a>, along with huge swaths of land west and north, including some five miles of Highway 605, sit within this massive pie-shaped chunk, a proposed boundary that is based on the company\u2019s groundwater modeling data. Inside are public water and electric lines, groundwater wells, septic systems and other, smaller roads, the fate of which have yet to be determined. Milan Elementary School sits only a mile away from the boundary\u2019s southernmost rim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Searchlight asked how fast those plumes are migrating, drawing on a Homestake-produced simulation that\u2019s meant to predict how contaminants move in groundwater aquifers at the site, the EPA declined to comment, because the simulation was still in draft form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Regulators, meanwhile, are plodding through the process of determining what final act of remediation they should require before allowing Homestake to hand off the site to the DOE. But prospects for that remedy depend on whether and when the company will receive a lower cleanup threshold. If a lower standard is settled on, that remedy, whatever it may be, will fall radically short of truly protecting groundwater, advocates believe. Adding to the uncertainty is a recent announcement that the Trump administration intends to cut<\/a> personnel at the EPA by up to 65 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The future of the site seems all but predetermined: a wasteland in the truest sense, and a national sacrifice zone. The buyout, a prologue to this future, has fractured residents\u2019 lives in the present. Homestake subjected sellers to nondisclosure agreements \u2014 \u201cstandard business practice,\u201d in Bingham\u2019s words \u2014 but to some in the community, a mechanism for silencing dissent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homestake later ended that requirement based on community input, Bingham says. But according to Susan Gordon, MASE\u2019s coordinator, the company was also known to make ultimatums to residents. One of them? Sell now or lose your property to eminent domain, she recalls locals telling her. By Bingham\u2019s count, Homestake has already demolished 41 of those properties. And, as if to make the most of the current state of regulatory limbo, it has also rented two existing properties to local law enforcement officers, four to local community members and seven to its own employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Besides that, around fifteen families who sold their homes to Homestake rent their old properties back from the company, according to Bingham, who says the  number can fluctuate at any given time. The agreements, he adds, came at the request of sellers who wanted to \u201cdetermine their time of departure.\u201d But the answer is more complicated, Gordon believes: Residents couldn\u2019t find or afford comparable alternatives and families felt pressured to take buyouts that may not have been at market value while they sought other housing. Those owners-turned-renters are under strict leases with Homestake (one such lease is in effect for five years). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company proposed buying Larry Carver\u2019s home and then leasing it back to him as it had with others, Carver says, but the logic didn\u2019t compute. \u201cWhy should I sell it to you and you tell me what to do when I can already do what I want today?\u201d Then, in late February, Carver received a certified letter with an offer for his home and property based on a \u201cdrive-by appraisal.\u201d The company gave him 30 days to respond; Carver plans to consult a lawyer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n
\"Older
John Boomer. Michael Benanav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"A
Maggie Billiman. Michael Benanav\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

John Boomer, who moved into the neighborhood in early 2001, says he \u201cfelt kind of naive looking back.\u201d When he bought his home, EPA reports gave him the impression that the site would get cleaned up in a matter of years. But as time went on, he steadily lost faith in the company, which would \u201cfudge and mislead the public,\u201d he says. At one point, a clamp that held two pipes together disconnected on Homestake\u2019s property, sending 27,000 gallons of water about 200 yards away from Boomer\u2019s kitchen window. The NRC reported there was no risk to residents, but Boomer now characterizes the response as not only typical, but also \u201cdismissive of the public\u2019s concern and protective of the mining industry and the company.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2010, the EPA mapped the levels of radioactive contamination in the windblown sand that drifted onto his property, later releasing three different maps with contradictory information, he recalls. The original map showed higher levels of contamination, but in the second and third maps, he says, the background levels \u2014 or the thresholds for what would be considered safe \u2014 had been changed to make his land look less polluted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He finally decided to sell in 2022, but couldn\u2019t find anything that matched the property he had in Milan, an old warehouse he\u2019d spent years retrofitting into a home and art studio. He eventually settled on a place in San Rafael, a community 10 miles south, after a search that took almost seven months. The process exacted a toll on his physical and mental health, says Maggie Billiman, Boomer\u2019s partner. It took Homestake several more months after the move to pay the promised $2,500 for his water rights, he adds. The well was supposed to be plugged as part of the deal, but when he shows me the well, it\u2019s unclear whether the company has done anything at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been poisoned to the gills\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Grants Mining District stretches from the Pueblo of Laguna to Gallup, across almost 100 miles of western New Mexico\u2019s red bluffs. Uranium here and throughout the world is ancient even by cosmic standards. Billions of years ago, exploding stars sent the element into our solar system and eventually into Earth\u2019s crust. Around 1950, Paddy Martinez, a Navajo sheep herder, discovered the first commercially viable deposits in this region, just as the Cold War had started ratcheting up. Within five years, demand<\/a> went from zero to tens of millions of pounds per year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In time, more than 150 mines would be developed across this district and the greater San Mateo Creek Basin, and, today, there are a total of 261<\/a> former uranium mines statewide, making New Mexico the fourth-largest producer<\/a> of uranium globally, behind East Germany, the Athabasca Basin and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplied much of the uranium for the Manhattan Project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But with the uranium boom came a wave of devastation across the greater Southwest, including in Indigenous communities like the Pueblo of Laguna, as well as the Navajo Nation, where there are more than 500 abandoned<\/a> uranium mines. Workers often lived near mines and mills and would bring yellowcake home on their clothes, exposing their families to harmful radioactive dust; water sources, meanwhile, have shown \u201celevated levels of radiation,\u201d according to the EPA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo Nation, a tailings dam breached on an early July morning in 1979, sending contaminated water into the Rio Puerco. Today, it constitutes the largest release<\/a> of nuclear materials in the U.S. worse even than the meltdown at Three Mile Island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Church Rock was among the eight mills that processed uranium ore in New Mexico. Others include Homestake and, in its immediate vicinity, Bluewater and two mills at Ambrosia Lake. Workers flocked here from across the state and nation during the booming 1960s and 1970s, with Homestake alone employing 1,500 people at its peak.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After graduating from high school and intermittently through his college years, Carver worked stints at all four of those mills before opening his own business, Carver Oil. At Homestake, he worked at a site where yellowcake was processed and packaged into barrels to go to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it would be enriched for use in nuclear weapons. He also worked in the tailings piles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carver now receives benefits for spots on his lungs from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), a program he qualified for because of his time working in the mills. Whether his illness was compounded by living near the mill tailings and by breathing excess radon, or by drinking the water \u2014 at least until the company connected residents to a clean source \u2014 is unknown. Studies have shown that chronic exposure to uranium through drinking water can cause kidney damage and cardiovascular disease<\/a>. When inhaled, uranium can lead to lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lung tissue. Studies<\/a> of uranium miners associate cumulative exposure to radon with higher rates of death by lung cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Aerial
Dirt roads lead to abandoned plots of land. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Maggie Billiman, who\u2019s from the Sawmill Chapter of the Navajo Nation, has advocated for RECA to cover people in New Mexico and parts of Arizona who lived downwind of atmospheric nuclear tests or who worked in mines after 1971, the current cutoff date. Last fall, she traveled with other Indigenous activists to Washington, D.C., as part of her efforts to expand RECA after struggling with various undiagnosed illnesses for years; several painful cysts that have yet to be biopsied were recently found on her liver and pancreas. Many doctor visits later, she\u2019s still pursuing a clear diagnosis and treatment plan. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But whether or how one gets sick can depend on biological sex, age when exposed and the pathway<\/a> a certain type of radioactive particle takes to enter the body. Proving that one\u2019s illness originated as a result of living near a mine or mill, as opposed to actually working in it, is nearly impossible, given that symptoms can take years to manifest \u2014 a lack of clear causation that is ultimately advantageous to polluters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Groundwater contamination from uranium mining was detected<\/a> as early as 1961. Even before that, the federal government was aware<\/a> that New Mexico\u2019s waterways were already showing signs of radioactive contamination from the burgeoning uranium extraction industry. It would take another 15 years for Homestake to begin a convoluted, if limited, remediation effort<\/a>: A series of collection wells would pull contaminated water out and treat it, then pump that water, along with clean water sourced from the San Andres-Glorieta, back into the subsurface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This hydraulic barrier has come to have two functions. First, it pushes highly irradiated uranium and other toxic waste back toward the tailings piles. Second, as the NMED described it, it acts as a \u201cplug in the bottom of a funnel that holds impacted groundwater from decades of mining and milling discharges in the [San Mateo Creek Basin].\u201d This has never been a perfect solution, nor does it appear to have been designed for permanency. But, without it, the picture looks grim. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homestake\u2019s hydraulic barrier has mostly kept the tailings contained, but at the high cost of precious clean water. Homestake estimates that it\u2019s used around 14 billion gallons since 1977 to operate this barrier, a number confirmed by the EPA. That\u2019s enough water to supply every resident of New Mexico for three months. NMED estimates that the company pumped nearly nine billion gallons from the San Andres-Glorieta between 2000 and 2015 alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On multiple occasions, the Pueblo of Acoma challenged the company\u2019s efforts to drill more wells for remediation purposes. According to a letter<\/a> sent to the EPA by tribal officials in 2021, this action was taken on the grounds that such drilling would threaten \u201csenior water users,\u201d including the tribe. \u201cThe United States did nothing,\u201d the letter said. (The U.S. has a federal trust responsibility to tribes that stems from historic treaties.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All this has taken a toll. While the San Andres-Glorieta aquifer is \u201chighly productive,\u201d an NMED document<\/a> from 2020 stated, water levels have \u201cdropped significantly through the years,\u201d with Homestake having \u201cplayed a significant role in mining groundwater\u201d from the aquifer. In some places, water well levels have fallen by 50 feet<\/a>, and at least one spring has run dry. In a water-strapped state like New Mexico, mining and milling activities, along with the municipal development that arrived with extraction, profoundly depleted the aquifer, according to a 2023 study<\/a> by the United States Geological Survey (USGS). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two organizations, Blue Water Valley Downstream Alliance and MASE, first flagged what they saw as Homestake\u2019s overuse of the San Andres-Glorieta at a key NMED permit renewal hearing in 2014. Fast forward to the beginning of 2024, when the company discontinued its use of groundwater from the San Andres-Glorieta. Now, Homestake only relies on treated water from its own reverse-osmosis treatment plant to keep up the hydraulic barrier, according to the EPA.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Sunflowers
A sign hanging from a barbed-wire fence cautions passersby about radioactive materials. Nadav Soroker\/Searchlight New Mexico.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to visualize such an underground fortification \u2014 on maps, it looks like a cashew-shaped moat that wraps around the west and south sides of the large tailings pile \u2014 or the timescale needed for its maintenance. In 1982, Homestake said it would \u201crequire operation for a considerable amount of time.\u201d In response, NMED declared<\/a> that Homestake had to commit to operating the system until it \u201ccan be demonstrated that contaminants in the groundwater will not exceed New Mexico Water Quality Control Commission standards off Homestake\u2019s property in the foreseeable future.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Advocates believe that means forever. If barrier maintenance is stopped, experts contend that highly contaminated groundwater will migrate southward and downward and eventually make its way to the subcrop, an entry point into the San Andres-Glorieta, municipal supply wells for Milan and Grants and eventually the R\u00edo San Jos\u00e9. \u201cThis signals a bleak future for the stream system and for future generations,\u201d Laura Watchempino warns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bluewater\u2019s plume is coming from the northwest; Homestake\u2019s plumes from the northeast. Models show that all are converging, like a Venn diagram, in a location where groundwater flows toward the subcrop. On one side, the hydraulic barrier is warding off some of that pollution, but when it stops operation completely, those contaminants will very likely infiltrate the San Andres-Glorieta, according to NMED<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the past, it\u2019s been difficult to discern what contaminants belong to what polluter, especially when they mingle, as is the case here. But in 2019, the USGS published the findings of a study<\/a> that \u201cfingerprinted\u201d such mine and mill contaminants to show their point of origin. According to that study\u2019s author, Johanna Blake, Homestake has a fingerprint that sets it apart from other regional polluters, meaning that it could be possible to more precisely apportion responsibility to the company and apply the same technology to groundwater contamination in the region. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homestake, for its part, says it has over more than 100 groundwater monitoring wells where the lion\u2019s share of its contamination is concentrated. These show a spectrum of concentrations of uranium \u2014 from well below the drinking water standard to extremely high \u2014 closest to the unlined tailings piles. By comparison, only three have been installed in the subcrop area. Conspicuously, no water quality samples have been collected or reported there, Maest pointed out in her 2023 memo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been poisoned to the gills,\u201d says Christine Lowery, the Cibola county commissioner. \u201cThe question is: How do we recover and live with contamination?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This story was originally published at <\/em>Searchlight New Mexico<\/a>, a NMPBS partner.<\/em> Searchlight New Mexico is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that seeks to empower New Mexicans to demand honest and effective public policy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This story was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico, a NMPBS partner. Driving along a stretch of New Mexico Highway 605, just north of the tiny Village of Milan, it\u2019s easy to imagine that this area has always been no-man\u2019s-land. Little appears in the distance except for a smattering of homes and trees peppered by…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":46596,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10906],"tags":[10907],"class_list":["post-46594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-partner-stories","tag-partner-stories"],"yoast_head":"\nPoisoning the well - New Mexico In Focus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.newmexicopbs.org\/productions\/newmexicoinfocus\/poisoning-the-well\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Poisoning the well - New Mexico In Focus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This story was originally published at Searchlight New Mexico, a NMPBS partner. 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