{"id":64580,"date":"2019-11-01T19:50:20","date_gmt":"2019-11-02T01:50:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/family-members-of-navajo-uranium-miners-find-remnants-of-old-home-sites\/"},"modified":"2019-11-02T01:50:20","modified_gmt":"2019-11-02T01:50:20","slug":"family-members-of-navajo-uranium-miners-find-remnants-of-old-home-sites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/family-members-of-navajo-uranium-miners-find-remnants-of-old-home-sites\/","title":{"rendered":"Family members of Navajo uranium miners find remnants of old home sites"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Gilbert
Gilbert Badoni stands at the mining camp across the mesa from where Union Carbide processed uranium and vanadium near Slick Rock. Badoni said the mesas surrounding the camp still have visible radioactive tailings present.<\/span>Kathy Helms\/Gallup Independent via AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Gilbert Badoni\u2019s late uncle lost two young daughters to the river. They drowned the same day during the years the family lived at the mining camp up on the mesa when Badoni\u2019s father worked for Union Carbide.<\/p>\n

Although historical milling operations have contaminated the alluvial groundwater at Slick Rock West with benzene, manganese, molybdenum, nitrate, radium-226, radium-228, selenium, toluene and uranium, the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Office of Legacy Management said past milling operations have had \u201cno detectable effect\u201d on water quality of the Dolores River.<\/p>\n

Annie Henry and Gilbert Badoni used to live at the mining camp in Slick Rock, north of Dove Creek. They returned to the area in mid-October and found remnants of their former homes.<\/p>\n

Henry lived there with her late first husband, Woodrow John, and five of their six children. Their sixth child was still in her womb when John died. Later, she met her current husband, Sam Henry, in Shiprock, New Mexico. He also had worked at Slick Rock West, as well as Union Carbide\u2019s No. 7 Mine near Egnar.<\/p>\n

Annie and Woodrow John lived in a small wood-frame house near the top of the mesa. They bought their drinking water from the store.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the water that most of the people got was from about 5 miles out of Slick Rock, up on top of the hill at Disappointment Valley,\u201d Badoni said. \u201cThere was a well that you pumped at. Later on, it was found that it was contaminated. That was long after the people left.\u201d<\/p>\n

Badoni said first responders to the bombing of the Twin Towers in New York on Sept. 11 have already been compensated by the federal government. But many Cold War uranium workers, their families and downwinders are still waiting, with the deadline fast approaching to apply for federal benefits from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, and a set of amendments that still haven\u2019t made it to the floor of Congress.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn my father\u2019s deathbed, I was talking with him at his house and he told me if he had known that uranium was going to take his life, he wouldn\u2019t have worked in it,\u201d Badoni said.<\/p>\n

\"Annie
Annie Henry and Gilbert Badoni revisit the area where they used to live at the mining camp in Slick Rock. They found remnants of their former homes. Many Cold War uranium workers, their families and downwinders are still waiting, with the deadline fast approaching, to apply for federal benefits from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.<\/span>Kathy Helms\/Gallup Independent via AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

John worked in Naturita for several years and then got a job in Slick Rock. \u201cHe must have worked almost a year here until one day he collapsed in the cave,\u201d Annie Henry told Badoni, who translated. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t get well. Come to find out, it was lung cancer that took his life.\u201d Hundreds of people lived across from the mines and mill in tents, campers and wooden shacks. Badoni used to think the area was part of the Navajo Nation because there were so many Navajos living there, he said.<\/p>\n

Badoni held out a photograph of his family in 1960 at the mining camp. \u201cI don\u2019t know how long we lived here, probably a couple years or so. This dirt road down here going around the bend, there used to be a trailer court and a liquor store,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Orphelia Thomas, community liaison for Haven Home Health Care in Farmington, works with many former uranium miners and their families.<\/p>\n

Some of the wives have told her stories about living in the mining camps. \u201c\u2018We made our house out of whatever we could find, whatever was laying around,\u2019\u201d they told her.<\/p>\n

\u201cAn individual out in Tuba City, she has a picture of one of the houses and a picture of her husband and how he would dress going to work. A white shirt with the sleeves cut off, jeans and a hard hat was all he had to go to work in,\u201d Thomas said.<\/p>\n

A herd of sheep grazed in the field where Badoni and Henry searched for their home sites and recalled their loved ones walking to work at shift change, just as the sun was coming up over the dust-covered valley.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe lived right about here,\u201d Badoni said, turning over a piece of weathered wood with his tennis shoe.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a mine right there,\u201d he said, pointing in the direction of a metal building about half a mile away. \u201cYou can see all of those tailings pushed off. When the rain came through here, the rain would wash those tailings down. It goes down to a ravine and creates a good pool. All the kids from here would jump into that pool down there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"A
A transloading station once used by Union Carbide adjacent to the Dolores River in Southwest Colorado. Many Cold War uranium workers, their families and downwinders are still waiting, with the deadline fast approaching, to apply for federal benefits from the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.<\/span>Kathy Helms\/Gallup Independent via AP<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Badoni pointed out a rusted transloading station beside the road across from the river. \u201cSee that chute right there? They were bringing uranium down and dumping it down into that chute, and then the semi-trucks would go underneath it and they would empty it out and take it out of the valley, uncovered of course,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis whole valley was a lot of activity people living here, the kids playing, and trucks always coming out. They even brought in City Market because this whole place was booming,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of these Navajo men were in their prime wage-earning years. When they passed on, they were diagnosed with lung cancer or various types of lung ailments.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas looked around at items left behind by the families \u2013 tent rings, wood stoves, a broken iron skillet, dust pan and automobile parts.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s evidence all around that there\u2019s families that lived in this area,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Although the wives and children were exposed to radioactive materials, the U.S. Department of Labor \u201cdoesn\u2019t see that there\u2019s families that were involved,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Gilbert Badoni stands at the mining camp across the mesa from where Union Carbide processed uranium and vanadium near Slick Rock. Badoni said the mesas surrounding the camp still have visible radioactive tailings present.Kathy Helms\/Gallup Independent via AP Gilbert Badoni\u2019s late uncle lost two young daughters to the river. They drowned the same day during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":64581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[138],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-64580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64580"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=64580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}