Four Corners Part Two - Spring Snow Turns To Dust - 2021

 

Four Corners Part Two - Spring Snow Turns To Dust

On Saturday May 22, 2021, it was time for me to start the long trek home to Simi Valley, California. Since the beginning of the health crisis in 2020, this was the first day of full operations on the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. By now, the 2018 coal-cinder sparked “416 Fire” was a fading memory. Up the Animas River Canyon, crews had replaced a 2020 washout of the tracks north of Cascade Station. As I watched, the venerable Engine 493 steamed on by. As with their other locomotives, the railroad had used downtime during the health crisis to convert that locomotive from coal fire to fuel oil.

Watch the Action - The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad 2021

The little helper engine had already chugged up alone. The two locomotives would connect 26-miles up the tracks at Cascade Station. From there to Silverton, the helper engine would then lead the way, adding traction on the long, steep grades. This type of “double header” may have coincided with the baseball term. For me, it was exciting to see rolling history making its way past our newly installed webcam.

Tearing myself away from the railroad activities, I connected my fifth wheel to my truck and proceeded forty miles south to Aztec, New Mexico. There, I had a loose appointment with Anthony, a certified RV refrigerator technician at Pop’s Truck and RV Center. Since they close as early as Noon on Saturdays, I planned to get there early. Once and for all, I hoped to have a live, qualified technician diagnose and fix my errant Dometic RV refrigerator. So far, my emergency repair had held, but I was still nervous about a possible second failure. Since it was Saturday, I had to pay time and one-half for the diagnosis and repair. About an hour after arrival, I departed Pop’s, but still sporting the temporary jumper-wire on my refrigerator. Anthony had diagnosed the blown thermo-fuse for me, but he did not have a spare in stock. That bit of education cost me $212.50.

As I departed for Goulding’s RV Park in Monument Valley, I looked back to the San Juan National Forest near Durango. The slopes glistened with snow from the recent storm, making the scene look more like winter than late May. When I reached Farmington, New Mexico, wind gusts and blowing sand buffeted my rig. As I passed west of Shiprock, New Mexico, a sand and dust storm was growing. Being unfamiliar with that particular route to Kayenta, Arizona I had to trust my GPS to guide me. Luckily, the delineated route was the correct one. With the gathering storm, it became difficult to see any landmarks or even road signs.

The 165-mile trip from Aztec, New Mexico to Monument Valley, Arizona was difficult. Lofted by strong winds, the entire desert landscape appeared to be moving to a new location. Most of my four-hour trip consisted of driving on a highway obscured by blowing sand and dust. Of all my Four Corners Region visits in the past twenty years, I had never seen or felt a dust storm of such size and intensity. Somehow, I made it with only some paint chipped off the hood of my truck. “Nothing that a little touch-up paint won’t fix”, I said to myself. Setting up my campsite at Goulding’s involved ingesting a lot of blowing dust, sand and dirt. By the time I finished and retreated inside, dust was in my eyes, nose, mouth and even my ears. It took hours to wash the fine grit from my mouth.

Looking down the canyon toward Monument Valley itself, I pitied the poor souls staying at the Monument Valley KOA Journey RV Park. All of Monument Valley became enveloped in a dust cloud that extended from ground level to atop the famed Mitten Buttes. The next day, the wind abated, and everything at Goulding’s looked normal again. The only evidence of the great dust storm was one worker who was patiently using a blower to remove dust and dirt off the walkways and building entrances. For campers arriving from the south, there was no sign of the intense storm I had endured less than a day before.

With a juxtaposition of such different realities in so short a time, I felt a kinship with the Spirit of the Ancients, who inhabit that sacred land.

This concludes Part Two of a Five-Part Article. To read Part Three, click HERE. To return to Part One, click HERE

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By James McGillis at 04:43 PM | Travel | Comments (0) | Link

Toxic and Nuclear-Contaminated Dust Plague UMTRA Superfund Site at Moab, Utah - 2011

 

Toxic and Nuclear-Contaminated Dust Plague UMTRA Superfund Site at Moab, Utah

   

On October 11, 2011, I drove from Moab, Utah to Grand Junction, Colorado. As I approached the Highway 191 Colorado River Bridge, I swung my camera to the left, and out the side window of my truck. Having refocused my digital camera, I started taking a series of “point and shoot” images. Most of my shots were of the Moab UMTRA nuclear cleanup site, better known as the Moab Pile.

After crossing the river, the highway swings south and then parallels the uranium mill tailing Superfund site. The Moab UMTRA site is a well-known emitter of nuclear radiation. Unknown to many in the area, it is also the largest dust-hazard in Grand County, Utah. Nowhere else will you find both nuclear and chemical waste exposed to the regional dust storms that now plague the Four Corners states.

If I remember correctly, the wind was relatively calm on October 11, 2011. Having studied the issue for years, little that I learn about the cleanup of the old Atlas Uranium Mill site surprises me. Still, I did not expect to see the event that unfolded right outside my window. There, on the top of the Moab Pile, a dust devil swirled and lifted a vortex of dust into the air.

  Watch the video "Moab Pile Nuclear Dust Devil"

As I drove closer, my camera angle came closer to the sun. As it did, it captured an image of finer dust particles expanding above the twister. If you watch the YouTube video, you will see one frame in which that larger dust cloud shows itself in shades of lavender and violet. Just because something is not visible to the unaided eye does not mean that it may not be there. The Carl Zeiss lens on my Sony camera sometimes picks up light in unexpected ways, especially when it involves new energy.

Dust rising up from the Moab Pile, only to dump on the nearby Colorado River and on Moab is a common occurrence. During both my August and October 2011 visits to Moab, I have photographed large amounts of radioactive dust escaping from the UMTRA site. If I remember correctly, the Department of Energy (DOE) should be setting reasonable safety standards for the cleanup. However, toxic, nuclear dust clouds continue to emanate from the Moab UMTRA site on a regular basis. Does DOE or Moab UMTRA care about that?

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By James McGillis at 12:19 AM | | Comments (0) | Link

Nuclear Dust Storm Hits Moab, Utah - 2011

 

Nuclear Dust Storm Hits Moab, Utah

     

From August 14 – 19, 2011 I was in my favorite town of Moab, Utah. With several of eight local Moablive.com webcams in need of service and one new webcam to install, I had a busy week in Moab. Other than two brief thunderstorms, it was either warm or hot during my entire visit. When I left Moab at 3:00 AM on Friday morning, it was 76 degrees. Each day, downtown temperatures topped one hundred degrees . At the Moab Rim Campark, away from all of the concrete and asphalt, it was a bit cooler . 

On Tuesday, I visited Andy Nettell, proprietor at the back of the Back of Beyond Bookstore. A month earlier, our bookstore webcam server had failed. Luckily, the spare unit that I sent to Andy via UPS plugged right in and has worked flawlessly ever since. Next time you visit the bookstore, visit Andy’s antiquarian section at the back of the store. There you will see a red light flashing on our live webcam.

After retrieving the broken server from the bookstore, I headed over to Best Western Canyonlands Inn, intent upon getting wireless service connected to their webcam. With help from the friendly staff at the hotel, I was able to bypass their log-in screen and reconnect the Moab Canyonlands Inn “Center and Main” webcam. The webcam is located above the Peace Tree Café, in the new Main St. Suites at Canyonlands Inn. Now that their webcam is working properly, you can watch vehicular and foot traffic any time in Downtown Moab. The best place to watch is on our website.

Next, I headed twelve miles north of town on U.S. Highway 191. My destination was Canyonlands Field, also known as the Moab Airport. There, at Redtail Aviation, we have a live webcam pointing out the window of their hanger. Its field of view includes the arrival/departure area for Great Lakes Airlines, as well as the parking area for visiting private jets. Mr. Chris Bracken, pilot and mechanic for Redtail Aviation was working in the hanger that afternoon. He offered moral support as I taped the webcam back on to its designated window. Using different types of tape, we are still baffled by why the camera will not stay firmly attached to the hanger window. Chris believes it is a combination of cool air from their swamp cooler and high heat on the outside of the window glass. After I left town, the camera fell from the window, but Chris got it back in business the next day.

Thursday, August 18 was my last day in Moab, and I had one new webcam to install. An associate broker at Arches Realty in Downtown Moab had asked me to come in. After quickly deciding on the best view, I began installation of their new webcam. Six hours later, I had the webcam tested and showing a great image of Moab and the Redrocks from their first story window. Alas, a year later, the company asked me to remove their webcam. The image below is the last surviving image from that webcam.

Before I left her office, an associate broker invited me to review all of the MoabLive.com webcams on her computer screen. On the screen we could see a thunderstorm raging at Canyonlands Field, about fifteen files north of our location. A quick glance at our several Spanish Valley webcams showed increased weather activity all around. The Slickrock had clouds, thunder storms cloaked the La Sal Range and the flag flew almost straight up near the Moab Rim. From our vantage point at the computer, we could see thunder storms coming and thunder storms blowing away. Looking at that spectacular sight, we were awed by the breadth and power of nature in and around Moab.

Approaching as it did, from the north; the storm first hit Canyonlands Field, and then moved on towards Moab. As the airport-thunderstorm collapsed, it sent a torrent of cold air south, along the Moab Rim and down the U.S. Highway 191 canyon. There, the venturi effect created by narrow canyon walls accelerated the wind. At the Potash Road, the canyon widens again, thus allowing the wind to fan out over the top and sides of the Moab UMTRA site. The rounded shape of the Moab Pile allowed a low pressure zone to develop over its top. Behaving like a giant airplane wing, wind gusts entering that low pressure zone launched tons of radioactive and toxic soils into the air.

The heavier particles (and presumably the heavier radio-nucleotides) quickly fell back to earth. With the UMTRA's direct adjacency to the Colorado River, I am sad to report that the river received a heavy dose of radioactive dust and chemical toxins, as released by the ensuing dust storm. It is always good to remember our downstream neighbors. In this case fourteen million American and Mexican citizens living downstream rely on the Colorado River for drinking water, manufacturing and crop irrigation. As sad as these facts may be, The Dust Storm of August 19, 2011 did not end there.

Writing later to a Moab friend, I said, “By the time I got to a gas station on the south side of town, a gale of dust and trash swept over me. When I arrived home at the Moab Rim RV Campark, farther south, I went down to the rail fence and took some pictures. From there, I could see wind ravaging the Moab Pile and sending tons of radioactive dust toward Downtown Moab.

From the pictures I took, it is obvious that the UMTRA site is highly vulnerable to winds streaming down-canyon past the Arches National Park entrance. Near that location, the canyon both narrows and deepens. The resultant squeezing of the air creates a venturi effect that is focused on to the northwest side of the pile. Since the UMTRA removal efforts expose more raw soil daily, it easily went airborne and precipitated out as dust throughout the City of Moab and the Spanish Valley.

Simultaneously, a similar, but larger dust storm was tearing up the land in Phoenix, Arizona and all of Maricopa County. Was that mere coincidence, or is there a definable connection between those two dust storms? Only if the DOE and the National Weather Service (NWS) cooperate and share data on such events will we begin to predict their occurrence. In this case, I suspect a weather front that stretched from Canyon Country, Utah to Tucson, Arizona. Perhaps someone of knowledge could check and correlate the timing of regional dust storms throughout the Four Corners Region.

Despite the absence of region-wide information sharing, any actions taken at the Moab UMTRA project on August 18, 2011 were inadequate. Transporting the Moab Pile by rail to Brendel and Crescent Junction, Utah appeared to be their focus. A distant second in importance is the physical integrity of the pile, as it exists today. A local resident told me that telephone complaints about UMTRA's dust bring a canned response from the contractor’s public relations office. Callers, who may be choking on UMTRA’s toxic dust, are told that ‘wind over a certain speed results in immediate suspension of grading and hauling at the site’.”

Even without coordinated dust storm alerts, UMTRA contractors can now monitor nine public webcams situated around Moab and the Spanish Valley. If they were to monitor only one screen provided me as the Moab Live Public Service Webcam Page, UMTRA contractors could see a windstorm coming long before they felt it. Greater Moab has many micro-environments and each has its own unique micro-weather. If Uranium King, Charles (Charlie) Steen (1919-2006) had foreseen the long-term threat that his company created, I doubt that he would have situated his Atlas Uranium Mill (now UMTRA) at its current location. With the ongoing threat from flooding and wind storms, old Cold War fears still haunt the area around his creation. 

The drill rig shown abandoned below the Moab Rim is of the type borrowed by Charlie Steen to make his Mi Vida Mine discovery. In fact it may be the exact same rig. In those days, and for many years thereafter, mining trucks and equipment were often abandoned around Moab. Those who brought this piece of Moab memorabilia to its current location carefully jacked it up on to several railroad ties, removed the wheels and drove away. Now, forty or more years after its derelict arrival, the machine slowly rusts away. At the rate of current decomposition, I estimate its half-life to be about 704 million years, which coincides nicely with the half-life of uranium-235 which it was used to discover. 

I have not read the Department of Energy’s (DOE) charter of the UMTRA Moab Project, but there must be something in there about using every reasonable and cost-effective method of protecting the Moab Pile from flooding downstream or blowing away in the wind. We know from previous studies that deep beneath the Moab Pile there is a large reservoir of contaminated water. In fact, the center of the pile is so wet that the latest Google Earth view of the UMTRA site shows a recently uncovered stream bed.

Water beneath the Moab Pile has only two places it can go. If allowed to, it will migrate downstream towards the Colorado River. In fact, a well-field along the riverside attempts to extract contaminated ground water and spread it atop the pile. As the water slowly dries on undisturbed parts of the pile, it forms a tough crust. With so much of the site under recent excavation, very little of the ground stays undisturbed for long. As a result, much of the UMTRA site is unprotected from another big “blow off”. 

The DOE should require the contractor to take immediate action to design and deploy a far larger array of sprinklers at the site. Ideally, an onsite reservoir would feed the sprinkler system, which could quickly cover the entire pile. With better weather monitoring and forecasting, the contractor could start deploying large volumes of sprinkled water ahead of the next dust storm, rather than afterwards, or as on August 18, 2011, “not at all”.  Whoever monitors the weather and calls for future halts in work at the site should be an employee of the NWS, not the DOE or the contractor. When danger lurks for the Moab Pile, no one should second-guess an early weather-shutdown, rather than a late one. In the current situation, shutting down “on time” is often too late.

Many in Moab grew up with or within the nuclear industry. Despite the toll it took on mine workers and processors, Moab is tolerant to the point of nostalgia about its ranching and mining past. That familiarity may breed complacency, which Moab can ill afford. Even if many residents consider a nuclear dust-bath to be an acceptable occurrence in town, most tourists and visitors do not. The only way to assure the safety of all in Moab is to take immediate measures to change the Moab UMTRA charter, making environmental protection at least as important as removal and transportation of contaminated material.

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Holbrook Basin, Arizona Water Creation Myth - 2011

 

 

Holbrook Basin, Arizona

Water Creation Myth 

 

A broad range of historical studies indicate that the aquifers of Northeastern Arizona may be over-subscribed. Still other studies predict long-term, persistent drought throughout the area. Sparse winter rains and the thunderstorms of summer are the only replenishment sources for aquifers in the Little Colorado River Basin. Most of the available moisture will either evaporate or runoff into the Colorado River. Long-term drought in the Four Corners states places stress on ecosystems throughout the High Southwest.

 

An easy way to gauge dryness in a desert environment is the frequency and intensity of regional dust storms. By that standard, the Four Corners states are now drier than at any time since the Great Disappearance, around 1300 CE. Even so, we are now on a fast-track to pump large amounts of water from these irreplaceable sources. A recent news report suggests that Passport Potash, Inc. plans an in-situ recovery (ISR), hydraulic-injection mine on their Twin Buttes Ranch property near Holbrook, Arizona. In March 2011, a Passport Potash mining engineer told the press that Passport Potash, Inc. hopes to pump up to 2000 gallons per minute from wells within the Holbrook Basin aquifer.

 

At first, 2000 gallons per minute does not sound like a large amount of water. However, pumping at that rate for one full year would produce over one billion gallons of water. One billion gallons equals over 3000 acre feet of water. If each three-person household used one quarter of an acre foot per year, Passport Potash water requirements would be equivalent to over 38,000 domestic water users. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Navajo County, of which the City of Holbrook is the county seat, had a 2016 population of 110,026. Thus, if Passport Potash reaches full production, it alone will pump water equal to one third of all domestic water use within Navajo County.

 

Through their creation myth, the Hopi people tell us that all water is both sacred and connected. In what could be a lapse of ancestral memory, the Hopi new lands trust appears to have granted eighteen sections of their Holbrook Basin water rights to Passport Potash. If the southern aquifers of the Holbrook Basin are pumped dry, it will be only a matter of time before the drought worsens in both Navajo and Hopi reservations. The elders within the Hopi new lands trust might want to check their pre ancestral memories regarding drought and its consequences. For decades, scientists have known that around 1300 CE, drought brought an end to Pre-Puebloan cultures within the Colorado River Basin. The Hopi creation myth was founded in fact, not fantasy. If they have the fortitude to retain, rather than to sell their hard-won water rights, the Hopi people may yet avoid watching their ancient and venerable culture dry up and blow away.

 

Potential potash producers now lure the Hopi, Navajo, Zuni and other tribes with prospects of employment. Touting well-paying jobs and generations of employment for local citizens, they predict that ISR mines will still produce potash and jobs a century from now. One hundred years of operations at the proposed Holbrook Basin mines would require 100,000,000,000 gallons of water. Does anyone seriously believe that the Holbrook Basin aquifers hold one hundred billion gallons of water, free for the taking?

 

I wonder what has happened to the Arizona State and federal agencies who are stakeholders in the Little Colorado River Basin. Other than the mining authorities, I could find no published position statement on behalf of any agency. Do the Department of Interior, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Geological Survey have no opinion at all regarding this issue? Unless someone or some agency steps in and demands a region-wide approach to water use planning, continued depletion of the Little Colorado River aquifers is a near certainty.

Author's Note: Article updated 9/2/2017

 

Read Chapter One – The Little Colorado River Basin

Read Chapter Two – Holbrook, Arizona Basin - Potash

Read Chapter Four - Colorado River Watershed At Risk

Read Comment - Holbrook Basin Potash, Sinkholes and 'Nutjob Math'

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By James McGillis at 12:02 AM | Environment | Comments (0) | Link

Cleanup of UMTRA Moab Nuclear Site is Now On Flood-Watch - 2011

 

 

Cleanup of UMTRA Moab Nuclear Site is Now On Flood-Watch 

During the Cold War years, the UMTRA project languished for lack of sufficient funding.

 

During heavy rain, the Moab Wash channels water toward the Moab Pile and the Colorado River. An aerial photo on the current UMTRA website shows the wash running toward the site. Both then and now, a subterranean stream passes under the site. As it does so, it carries hazardous materials to the Colorado River. Today, pumps near the river lift much of that contaminated water to the surface. Sprinklers then distribute it across the tailings, where it evaporates into the atmosphere.

 

By 2006, new studies showed a high potential for massive flooding along the Upper Colorado River. What had previously been called a ‘1000-year flood’ might occur once in 300 years. The new 300-year flood might also be three times larger than the old 1000-year flood. Sediments from ancient floods along the river proved that a large spring flood could sweep much of the Moab Pile downstream. If so, its radioactive poisons would flow toward the Lower Colorado Basin. Suddenly, the prospect of Los Angeles and Phoenix becoming “ghost cities” seemed plausible.

 

During the George W. Bush administration, cleanup funds for the Moab Pile were sparse. At the time, the U.S. was fighting wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Unwilling to add further to the federal deficit, many Cold War era cleanups languished. Conventional wisdom said, “If a large flood is so rare, the odds are that it will not happen here in our lifetimes.” 

 

Soon after President Obama took office, his administration funded cleanup of the Moab Pile. Then, as the economy faltered, the project received additional federal stimulus money. In April 2009, the first trainload of contaminated soil departed for a disposal site near Crescent Junction, Utah. By late 2010, larger waste containers and a second train each day promised even faster removal of the Moab Pile.

 

In 2025, when UMTRA concludes its work, the long-running environmental disaster known as the Moab Pile will be gone. With almost fifteen years to go, I wonder what might happen if a 300-year flood hits the site prior to complete removal.  When asked that question, an UMTRA manager explained to me that flood protection at the site was already complete. Most of that work focused on sandbagging where the Moab Wash meets the river on the northern edge of the Moab Pile. As a temporary stopgap, workers had sandbagged to protect the well field adjacent to the Colorado River. That small project protected against a normal spring flood, but would do nothing to stop the potential ravages of a 300-year flood event.

 

Once the removal and transport work began, conventional wisdom reestablished itself. The current prevailing attitude at the UMTRA project is that, ‘If we don't think about it, everything will be OK’. Removal and disposal of material continues, but will that effort ‘beat the clock’ against a 300-year flood event? Statistically, there is a five percent chance that a 300-year flood event will occur before UMTRA concludes. Even so, federal regulators and the private contractor continue to ignore the potential for flood damage at the UMTRA site.

 

In recent years, large dust storms have become common occurrences in the Four Corners. The prospect of a regional dust storm rapidly melting heavy snowpack on the Colorado Plateau is real. In preparation for such an event, both UMTRA and its regulators should reassess the risk of flood damage at the site. A one-in-twenty chance that a flood will send any part of the Moab Pile downstream is too high a risk to take. The livelihood of fourteen million downstream residents may depend on protecting the Moab Pile during its removal.

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By James McGillis at 12:49 PM | Environment | Comments (0) | Link