Stricken Navajo Uranium Miners Must Battle Federal Bureaucracy : Radiation: They clawed yellowcake out of the ground to fuel Cold War weapons; more than 400 of them died because of it.

George Tutt picked up a flat, yellowish rock as he climbed the rocky trail toward an abandoned uranium mine where Navajo Indians once labored with picks and shovels to fuel the nation’s nuclear arms program.

“This is yellowcake, uranium ore,” said Tutt, 68, a Navajo. “This is what we dug out of here. This is what we died for.”

The government never warned Tutt and the other miners about radiation that eventually was blamed for the deaths of about 400 Indians who worked the mines from 1948 through the early 1970s in this remote corner of the Navajo Nation.

Today the Indians say the bureaucrats are making it difficult to collect compensation even though Congress in 1990 authorized payments of $100,000 per miner when it finally acknowledged these domestic victims of the Cold War.

Stewart Udall, the former interior secretary who is attorney for many of the Navajos, says the required records of employment, medical history and marriage often are buried in archives and take months to recover. In other cases, the records just don’t exist.

White miners, ranchers and test-site workers who also are covered by the Radiation Exposure Act of 1990 have a far easier time getting payments than his Indian clients, Udall said.

“These people were sacrificed in the name of national defense,” Udall said from his law office in Santa Fe, N.M. “They’ve been treated as second-class citizens.”

The Justice Department official who oversees the program said she’s surprised at the criticism. Helene Goldberg contends the government has worked to help the Navajos recover 45-year-old reservation medical records and to process all claims quickly and fairly.

According to Justice Department records, 2,945 claims have been filed and 890 have been approved for payment. Of those, fewer than 200 were filed by Navajos and only 63 Navajo claims have been approved.

The act requires the government to compensate Navajo and non-Navajo miners as well as others who were exposed to radiation and fallout during above-ground nuclear testing in the West. The miners or their survivors get $100,000 each, people exposed to radiation at test sites get $75,000 and so-called “downwinders” exposed to fallout get $50,000.

“I don’t know why we haven’t received more claims (from Navajos), but we haven’t,” Goldberg said from her office in Washington, D.C.

When America went looking for uranium after World War II, the radioactive Mother Lode turned up in one of the country’s remotest spots.

Red Valley lies in the middle of the nation’s largest Indian reservation, which sprawls across an area larger than the state of West Virginia and includes parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

It’s a dry, rugged land of deep canyons and rock-strewn hills, where flat-topped mesas and rock spires rise dramatically from the rust-colored desert floor. There are few telephones or paved roads. Most of the older residents speak only Navajo.

The first of hundreds of mines was sunk in 1948. Drawn by wages of $1.25 an hour in what was basically a subsistence economy, an estimated 2,000 uneducated young Navajo shepherds and farmers came to the mines over the next 25 years.

What they didn’t know ended up killing them.

Most of the dead and ailing miners have lung cancer or other respiratory ailments. The diseases are linked to their exposure to high levels of radon, an odorless, invisible gas produced by the decay of radium in the yellowcake they handled so casually.

“Almost all of the men I worked with back in those years, they are all gone,” said Tutt, who has respiratory problems he blames on radiation. “They passed away years ago. The ones that are left are sick with it.”

Tutt worked in the mines from 1949 to 1961, except for the two years he served as an infantryman in Korea. Then he worked as a driver for the Indian Health Service until he retired in 1990.

He has applied for compensation, but has yet to collect.

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Tutt started his story in the Red Rock chapter house, the social and government center for this tiny community. The elderly residents who gather here for lunch each day are as gnarled and weather-beaten as the stunted pinon pines that dot the surrounding desert.

The men, almost all retired miners, dress in jeans, boots and work shirts. The women favor traditional Navajo dress: long, dark skirts and short velveteen jackets.

They are shy, soft-spoken and wary of outsiders.

But once Tutt, the chapter chairman, told his story, they came forward one by one to recount the arrival of the Atomic Age on the reservation.

The mines were blasted into the hills and canyons with dynamite, and the miners used picks, shovels and wheelbarrows to bring the ore to the surface and load it into waiting trucks.

Sometimes, Tutt said, miners would crawl on their bellies into newly blasted tunnels and drag the uranium ore out with their bare hands. They wore no protective clothing, and there was no ventilation.

“They used to blast in the mines,” recalled another former miner, Dan Benally. “Sometimes you would inhale all of that smoke and dust. Sometimes it was so strong it would knock you out and they had to drag you out of there.”

The miners weren’t the only ones exposed. Many of them brought their families to live in camps beside the mines.

Benally, 79, said his wife died of throat cancer in 1971 and he is convinced her illness was caused by exposure to the yellowcake.

“She never worked in the mine, but she washed my contaminated clothes,” he said.

Loretta Benally, not related to Dan Benally, said her father, John H. Lewis, worked for almost 20 years in uranium mines in Arizona, Utah and Colorado.

Her father is still alive, but her mother died three years ago from “respiratory distress pneumonia,” and she has two sisters who are unable to have children, Benally said.

“We just lived a few yards from the mine,” she said. “When they needed more uranium they would put that explosive in and you could see that yellow dust just a few yards from our house.”

Dan Benally said he, too, is sick from his years in the mines.

Like Tutt, he has trouble breathing and suffers chest pains. Benally pulls up a pantleg to show an angry red blotch on his calf that he said has been diagnosed as skin cancer.

He and Lewis are both awaiting word on their applications for compensation.

The Atomic Energy Commission, forerunner to the U.S. Energy Department, knew of the health risk as early as the late 1940s but did nothing about it, Udall said.

“The AEC, their industrial safety people, came out in 1948 and found there was a cheap, simple solution: ventilation,” Udall said. “They were thunderstruck when their Washington office told them to lay off, leave it to the state, to the mining companies.”

Modern uranium mines must be ventilated, must provide protective clothing for workers and must monitor miners for radiation exposure, said Phil Howard, assistant state mine inspector.

Udall, 73, is a former Arizona congressman who served as interior secretary in the 1960s under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. He played a key role in the passage of such landmark environmental laws as the Endangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968.

After returning to private law practice, he spent 15 years fighting in the courts and Congress for the miners’ compensation that he said is still being delayed.

Miners who apply for compensation must prove they worked in the mines for a specified period of time and suffer from either lung cancer or other specific respiratory diseases. Widows and other heirs must prove their relationship to the deceased miner and show that any other potential heir already is dead.

Some applicants have spent months digging their records out of fragmentary Indian Health Service files or government archives, Udall said. Then the records must be certified, sometimes through the Freedom of Information Act.

Even today, many Navajos are married in traditional ceremonies without paperwork. That’s been such a problem for the miners’ widows that the Navajo Nation Council passed a law this year allowing marriage licenses to be issued retroactively.

In contrast, whites who apply for compensation usually have easy access to their doctors’ records and other paperwork, Udall said.

Goldberg of the Justice Department said the rules have to be tight to prevent fraud. There has been no deliberate discrimination, she said.

“I do not believe we are insensitive,” Goldberg said. “We have tried very hard to make this an easy program.”

But Navajo President Peterson Zah said the documentation required by the Justice Department is difficult and often impossible to obtain.

“Our evidence was those miners, those families,” Zah said. “They have killed our evidence.”

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said he will propose changes in the law based on the testimony of miners and family members who appeared at a June 5 hearing he chaired in Shiprock, N.M.

He also promised to push for administrative changes in Justice Department regulations to make it easier for Navajos to qualify for compensation.

“The regulations were not written with an eye toward the realities of life on the reservation,” he said. “Some of the legal requirements . . . just don’t make sense in that cultural setting.”

Radiation Exposure Fund

The Radiation Exposure Act of 1990 created a trust fund to compensate people sickened by radiation, and the survivors of those who died of radiation-caused illness from exposure in the early days of the Atomic Age. In the first two years after the act was passed, Congress appropriated $200 million to provide compensation to three categories of people:

* Those living in southern Utah and Nevada and northern Arizona who were exposed to radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing and developed any of 13 types of cancer. They are eligible for payments of $50,000.

* Participants in nuclear tests at the test site in Nevada who developed the same types of cancer are eligible for payments of $75,000.

* Uranium miners, both Indian and non-Indian, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming who developed lung cancer or other respiratory diseases as a result of their exposure to radiation in uranium mines between 1947 and 1971. They are due $100,000.

Source: Associated Press