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Wind River
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE WIND RIVER ALLIANCE, JOLENE CATRONm SPEAKS OUT ABOUT WATER CONTAMINATION

"The uranium mill tailing site is at the confluence of two major rivers that flow through the area – the Big Wind River and the Little Wind River. There are schools in the area... The kids are being affected when they play in the river... There's no fencing; there's no warning. Everybody knows that there's this huge dangerous monster there, but nobody's done anything about it."

– Jolene Catron

My name is Jolene Catron. I am representing a nonprofit organization called Wind River Alliance. We are located on the Wind River Indian Reservation. I married into the Northern Arapaho tribe of the Wind River Indian Reservation. The reservation itself is about 2.2 million acres, about the size of Yellowstone National Park. It’s the third largest reservation in the U.S. It was originally the homeland set aside for the Eastern Shoshone people.

The Northern Arapahos were brought to the reservation in the late 1880s. They were the traditional enemies of the Shoshone people. The Shoshone are mountain people and the Arapahos are plains people. The Shoshone never said the Arapahos could stay there, it was the federal government. Contentiousness continues to this day. Today there’s over 7000 Arapaho, and about half as many Shoshone.

I moved to Wind River in 1997 and got involved with the water issues on the reservation working as a water rights specialist for the tribe. I am a founding member of the Wind River Alliance and now serve as the executive director. I’m here to speak about the issue of a mill tailing site located within the exterior boundaries of the reservation. It’s located on fee land within the reservation, and so it is a jurisdictional nightmare. The (Riverton) mill tailing site brought in the uranium from the middle of Wyoming and processed it there at the Susquehanna site. It’s an Uranium Mill Tailing Reclamation Act (UMTRA) site. It’s one of the most contaminated areas on the reservation today.

The Wind River Alliance had a small environmental justice grant from the EPA and did a community health study report. We looked at available data and water data and how it relates to community health, and brought that all together in a document. What I have in front of me is our EPA data study. To give you an idea of the issues that we’re facing at the UMTRA Site, the mill was built in 1958 to treat uranium ore and operated both acid and alkaline mill circuits to process the ore. The operation ceased in 1963. The tailings were stockpiled on 70 acres southeast of the mill tailing site. An additional 70 acres to the north and 50 acres to the southeast we are also contaminated from ore stockpiling. As we’ve heard, a lot of the time the effects of the wind, and it’s very windy up there, has a huge impact.

About 1.8 million cubic yards of contaminated material were removed in 1988-1989 by the Department of Energy (DOE). And to add insult to injury, a sulfur processing plant was built on top of the uranium mill tailing site. DOE went in and cleaned up most of it, but decided to leave in place a plume that was contaminated with Thorium-230. DOE decided to leave the thorium material in place in the saturated zone of the groundwater, because they said if they went in and took it out, it would cause more environmental harm, outweighing the significant health benefits, than removing the material. This is in 1988-1989. DOE came in and said they were going to implement some institutional controls, make sure a public drinking water line was installed, and leave the Thorium-230 in place and let it flush out naturally over 100 years, putting restrictions over the use of groundwater in this area. While this sounds good on paper, what we’re finding out is that there is surface water with elevated levels of radionucleides in the area.

One issue we deal with is the health of the watershed. The uranium mill tailing site is at the confluence of two major rivers that flow through the area – the Big Wind River and the Little Wind River. There are schools in the area – an elementary school and a high school. There’s another elementary school further upstream. The kids are being affected when they play in the river. There have been noted elevated radionuclides in Ox Bow Lake and on Little Wind River, where kids play during the summer. There’s no fencing; there’s no warning. Everybody knows that there’s this huge dangerous monster there, but nobody’s done anything about it.

The tribes have a little agency called the Wind River Environmental Quality Commission, and they have been doing a lot of EPA-funded testing of the area. They brought in an outside third party contractor to assess how well DOE cleaned up the mess, and it's been said that they didn’t do a good job of cleaning up the mess they created. So everybody knows that there’s this contamination plume. Everybody knows that there are elevated levels of cancer in the area. Everybody knows that the drinking water could be polluted with these radionuclides, but nobody knows what to do next. Wind River Alliance is not funded by the tribes; we are a nonprofit organization. It’s my job to start coming up with a plan on how can we be effective, how can we start doing some community outreach education, to show that there is a way to deal with this huge issue, that you don’t have to settle for contaminated drinking water.

In terms of the drinking water line, there were multiple agencies working on it: Indian Health Services (IHS) was responsible for capping off the individual private wells that everybody used in the area; Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was responsible for building the actual drinking water line; and DOE was a funder for this. There were cross-agency communication problems, so a few groundwater wells were left uncapped. They’re finding elevated levels of radionuclides in the drinking water line. Whether that comes from cross-contamination from the uncapped wells or seepage coming in from the water line, the radionuclides are seeping through, and nobody’s quite sure where that’s coming from.

I would like to thank Chris Peters (Seventh Generation Fund) for bringing me here to this summit to learn, to ask questions and network, and get some concrete ideas that I can bring back to my community. To let them know that we are thinking of ways to be effective, ways that we can help, and ways that Wind River Alliance can be a strong partner in this whole situation.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Wind River Alliance P.O. Box 8582 - Ethete, WY 82520, USA (307) 332-4238 - fax: (307) 332-0270 email: jolene@windriveralliance.org - www.windriveralliance.org