Part 85, page 280

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

EDITOR'S NOTE -- Ever since the fated day when a curious yellow rock, found in a canyon, turned out to be uranium, the lifestyle of Grants, N.M., has been boom and bust. Now it's boom again -- as never before. But like every silverlined cloud, there's a dark side too.

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By ROBERT LOCKE Associated Press Writer GRANTS, N.M. (AP) -- Once upon a time this town called itself the carrot center of the nation, a modest boast, and its 2,000 people led the typically modest lives of tillers of the soil. Then one day in 1950 a Navajo shepherd named Paddy Martinez, wandering through nearby Poison Canyon, picked up some peculiar yellow rocks and brought them into town. Over the next decade the population leaped to 10,274 and Grants's agricultural face underwent profound change. But like many another boom, it ended as quickly as it began. The government, sole buyer of uranium in the early 1960s, found itself overstocked. Almost overnight, nearly a fourth of the town's population moved away and many who didn't, looked back fondly on the old carrot days. Now, once again, Grants has become one of the boomingest towns in the nation. The resurgence began about 1967, cautiously at first, when private firms began buying uranium against the day nuclear reactors would produce significant amounts of electricity. Then in 1974 the price of New Mexico's milled uranium jumped from less than $8 a pound to one recent contract of $41.50 a pound. "I think it's just great," said Larry Baca. Last year Baca, 19, was pumping gas for $2 an hour. Now he makes $15 an hour in a mine. Half of all the uranium known to exist in the United States is in a 100-mile strip of west-central New Mexico. Near the center of the strip is Grants. Once again the Grants population is booming -- as of now about 12,000 and climbing -- and once again the city is experiencing wrenching growth.

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City Manager Anthony Vasilakis remains confident the boom can be contained. "Here's what we'll do," he said. "We'll get some state money somewhere along in there. Then the feds will come along and we'll be able to match some of theirs, and we'll build these basic lines -- the collector lines and the water lines -- some of that. "Then the subdivider will come along, and he'll pay for every damned thing he does -- every water line, every sewer line, streets, curbs, gutters, everything. So they give us a turn-key job of property that's completely developed, with people living on it and paying taxes. Then you have the money to move a little bit farther." Meanwhile, housing remains a critical problem. The brakes were applied to construction when Gas Co. of New Mexico placed a moratorium on new natural gas hookups in the area. The company said the Federal Power Commission had limited its allocation of interstate gas for New Mexico, the nation's fourth largest producer of natural gas. The moratorium is only now being lifted after six months. At nearby San Mateo, population 300, house trailers hide behind centuries-old adobe homes. At the Spanish-Indian village of Bibo, trailers are scattered helter-skelter inside wooden corrals or stand alone on concrete foundations. At the Laguna Indian Pueblo they appear in anachronistic contrast with earth-colored homes, whitewashed missions and wooden outhouses. Not surprisingly, some who are prospering by the uranium boom also have mixed feelings about its effect on a way of life. "I didn't feel too bad about the uranium when it was far [guess: from] here," said Arthur Candelaria. [guess: "I] now that it's right at our doorste[guess: p], [guess: I] 't like it too good." Candelaria, 40, said [guess: his] family dates back to the ori[guess: ginal] [guess: settlers] of [guess: north] of

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of changes. And it'll get worse. It's going to ruin the whole town." On the other hand, Oracio S. Marquez, who has lived in San Mateo nearly all his 59 years, sees some benefit. "We used to make a living out of farming and ranching and that's about all we knew," he said. "I used to go outside the town and work part of the year, then come back and stay five or six months at home. Now there's several uranium companies out here and we all work for them. One group that surely has more money are the natives of the area whose ancestry dates back even further. About half the New Mexico uranium production is on Indian land (with about 25 per cent on private land and the remainder about evenly divided between state and federal land). Tourists still leave Interstate 40 to photograph the scenic pueblo, but from the highway you can't see the television antennas that sprout from nearly every adobe roof. The Laguna Indian Reservation -- Laguna Pueblo (3,500 people) -- may be on the verge of middle class. At Paguate, one of five outvillages of Laguna Pueblo, an old Indian man stood beside a pinon fence he built 50 years ago and contemplated the gigantic gash in the earth that is the Jackpile mine. He didn't, he said, object to the mine. Instead he seemed awed by its grand proportions. He tried to explain its depth and breadth and the huge machines that take great bites of the earth. He repeated the story of Paddy Martinez and wondered "if that old Navajo's still alive somewhere." He was sorry to hear that the man who discovered the uranium died in 1968. The old man said there's plenty of money in Paguate now. His sister had a new room added to her house and "a lot of people just bought a bunch of houses to rent and then they moved off to Albuquerque." "They get a lot of money from that

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mine, my people do." Roland Johnson, Laguna's governor, said there's very little opposition to the mine, "but there is a concern. The Pueblos revere earth, and for many people it is, in their eyes, criminal for us to be abusing Mother Earth as we are." Another concern, throughout the New Mexico uranium belt, is even more ominous. It is summed up in a warning sign posted near the door to the Laguna tribal office: "If you have rocks, sand or mining waste from the Jackpile-Paguate mine or the arroyos below the mine, please contact the governor's office. This material may be radioactive and hazardous to use as building material." Much of the opposition to the uranium industry revolves around the issue of radioactivity. The tailings left by the mines and mills around Grants contain radium, which produces as it decomposes a radioactive gas called radon. Some research has associated radon with cancer. The mining companies say the tailings pose no danger because they are kept behind fences on private property. Environmental groups want the tailings buried or in some way removed completely from the environment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has not taken a public position. The state planning officer, Dr. Grace Olivarez, has estimated that by 1990 the tailings piles could contain 220 million tons -- "enough to cover Albuquerque to a depth of 22 inches." And, she added, there are no state or federal regulations governing the disposal of uranium tailings. The danger of radiation is debated almost endlessly, but not in Grants. "We don't get too excited about it," said Jean Fisher, director of the Grants Chamber of Commerce. "It just doesn't seem to bother us. Maybe that's because we're prosperous and we like it."

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