Indians Blame Mines for Water Loss : Environment: They insist shortage isn’t due only to drought. A coal pipeline is soaking up their springs and aquifer, Arizona tribal leaders say.

Hopi farmer Sam Shingoitewa remembers when the water in the wash running past his tiny village of Moenkopi used to flow deep enough to dive and swim in on hot summer days, and was always able to irrigate the desert cornfields.

But now dozens of Moenkopi farmers such as the 83-year-old Shingoitewa and hundreds of Hopis across the reservation say their water is disappearing. They point upstream 75 miles away and utter a one-word explanation that sounds like a curse: “Peabody.”

Joined by their neighbors, the Navajos, these longtime residents of northern Arizona’s mesa country insist their current water shortage is caused not by drought, but by the huge Peabody Coal Co. mines on Black Mesa. In particular, Peabody pumps 1.4 billion gallons of water annually out of the ancient aquifer under the reservation to transport coal through a 273-mile-long pipeline to a power plant on the Arizona-Nevada border.

Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr. is now in the middle of the dispute. Peabody, which has operated the coal slurry pipeline for two decades, wants a “life-of-mine” permit that would enable it to dramatically increase mining and to continue pumping water for the slurry for another 21 years. The Hopis are fighting the request in hopes that they can save their ground water, either by forcing Peabody to find other water sources or to replace the slurry with a rail line.

The Department’s Office of Surface Mining, which is in charge of Peabody’s request, prepared an environmental impact statement that found “no material damage” from mining to either Hopi springs or the aquifer. Hopi and Navajo leaders met last week with Lujan in Washington to present their case that the study did not adequately address the impact of the slurry.

“We know that our water table is lowering,” Shingoitewa said in an interview. “Of course some of it is because of present conditions, no rain and all that. But if they weren’t (running the slurry), there would be some water running down the wash right now.”

Peabody officials dispute the charge. “Over the last two years our data shows the average rainfall in northern Arizona has been less than 50% of normal,” said Edward Sullivan, Peabody’s Western Division vice president for legal and public affairs. “Over the last year it has been averaging less than 20% of normal. That accounts for a substantial diminution of the amount of water up there.”

Hopi Chairman Vernon Masayesva says Hopis are not asking that coal mining be stopped. Today, 70% of the tribe’s operating budget is fueled by the $9 million in coal royalties it receives from the company. Curtailing that income would spell doom to the tribe’s operations and unemployment to its 400 workers.

But he says his tribe wants an end to the use of the pure ground water to slurry an annual 5 million tons of coal around the Grand Canyon to the Mohave Generating Station near Laughlin, Nev., where it is burned to create electricity for customers of Southern California Edison Co. and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

The water from the slurry, the only such pipeline in the country, is separated from the coal and then used as cooling water at the power plant.

Other alternatives would be replacing water with a new methanol technology, or the pipeline itself with a railroad such as the one that delivers Black Mesa coal to the Navajo Generating Station near Page, Ariz.

The environmental impact statement, which took five years to complete, is the first ever prepared for the 64,858-acre Peabody Coal lease area on Black Mesa despite 20 years of strip mining and ground water pumping. It generated more than 1,000 negative responses from individuals, consultants and government agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, which said that the data collected is “‘insufficient” to support the conclusions that mining has no adverse impacts on water resources, air quality, and biological resources.

Masayesva said that the tribes hope that Lujan will order that mining continue on a conditional permit basis, as it has since 1985, but also reject the environmental impact study as unacceptable.

He says that hydrologists who have been studying the region for two years in preparation for a large Arizona Indian water rights case soon will have the best information ever assembled. The findings will support the Hopis’ case that caution is required now, he said.

“‘What’s happening here is the Hopi are simply dissatisfied with the conclusions drawn in a 5 1/2-year environmental study that was initiated because of them,” Peabody’s Sullivan charged. “They have been involved every step of the way with (the Office of Surface Mining) in conducting that study. Now that the time for conclusions has come around, miraculously there’s new evidence to suggest that all that research is insufficient. We just can’t buy that.”

Meanwhile, the Moenkopi Wash remains dry. Steve Blodgett, the Hopi Tribe’s reclamation specialist, recently walked along the wash in Blue Canyon, stepping on dry cracks where water used to percolate.

According to the Office of Surface Mining’s own water assessment, he said, water should be flowing here even in the hottest, driest months of the year. “Based upon what I’ve seen,” Blodgett said, “there’s a diminution in flow and this has nothing to do with the drought.”

Today through the village of Moenkopi, he said, the wash is a series of disconnected pools, “and that has never happened before.”