There are toxic water wells in the Navajo Nation. And even though there's a six-year-old federal report describing the danger, very little has been done about it. KUNM spoke with reporter Jerry Redfern at "Capital and Main," who traveled to the reservation and spoke with people who rely on these water sources.
"There's a series of unplugged old wells that generally spew water, but it's often very contaminated water, and part of that is because some of these wells were originally oil wells from up to a century ago that have been partially plugged to try to keep the oil and other things out, but allow water to flow out," Redfern said. "So people are using these wells, sometimes for domestic use, but primarily for livestock, for cattle, for sheep, for goats, and a little bit for irrigation as well."
Some of these wells yield safe water, but many of them produce water with unsafe levels of naturally occurring elements or contaminants from oil production.
"A senior hydrologist with the Navajo Nation had spent years just sort of tallying these wells across the eastern reaches of the Navajo Nation, knowing that some of them, they're laden with salts and stuff, but they're not necessarily awful, but that others truly are very, toxic and spewing large amounts of arsenic or benzene or, you know, other dangerous chemicals," Redfern said. "And then he had a curious interaction with the environment national Environmental Protection Agency, and told them about this, and they were quite surprised to hear it. And then that's what launched that survey in 2018."
The EPA study’s results were published in 2019 but after that, essentially nothing happened.
"These all would have come about in the first place because of a long history of the United States meddling in Navajo Nation affairs to bring oil and gas development to the Navajo Nation, but beyond that, there is this overriding treaty obligation to deal with large scale environmental problems on the nation. And that just hasn't happened," he said "They published it, such as they did, in 2019 but essentially, as I wrote in the story, nothing has happened since."
The wells fall under the oversight of several federal agencies.
"The lead agency would be the Environmental Protection Agency, since we're talking about polluted waters, but the Bureau of Land Management often would have a role to play as well, since it deals with oil and gas issues, and they often take the lead on those sorts of things on the federal side," Redfern said. "And then the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is sort of the main intermediary between tribes and the federal government, may also play a role. So there's an awful lot of federal possibilities there."
The wells are mostly around Shiprock, with a handful elsewhere in the New Mexico part of the Navajo Nation, and a few in Utah. Local government in the Navajo Nation has posted information about the wells, but many who still use the water are unaware.
"I was told that the Navajo Nation's own Environmental Protection Agency, working with the federal EPA, posted some signs in chapter houses noting that certain wells were highly contaminated and probably shouldn't be used. And they sent me photos of some of those signs," he says. "But people I talked with who live on the Navajo Nation and live in those areas, said they'd never heard anything about it until I contacted them and asked them about this.
The effects these waters have had on people and livestock as well as the natural environment are unclear.
"It would take scientific studies to go back and check and see who's been going to these wells and giving that water to whom or to what, and then tracking that over time. And of course, nothing like that has happened. What we can tell is that the chemical loads of some of these chemicals in the water are known to cause, say, cancers, in the case of benzene, or to make people and or livestock very sick in terms of various sulfites and sulfates that are they're found in this water, at the levels that they found it.," he said. "And I want to be clear, it's not every well that has the super contaminated pollution issues, but it's enough of them to be very concerning. I think."
You can find Jerry Redfern's article, "On the Navajo Nation, the list of mystery wells continues to grow" at KUNM.org.
