"No, I don't blame anybody," Ayers said. "It was the way we had to make a living around here."
Her son, Harry Archer, 59, worked for more than six years at the vanadium mine near Uravan, which was named after the minerals uranium and vanadium found in the canyon walls surrounding it.
Archer also worked briefly in the Uravan post office, until he says his skin broke out from uranium poisoning and he was forced to quit.
While he is thankful that he is healthy today, he thinks the radiation-related deaths in his family stemmed from "the times we lived in."
"We did the best we could, but people just didn't know . . . well, the government kind of knew, but that was just the times we lived in," Archer said. "It was just the way it was."
Some former Uravan residents, however, tell a different story. They are sick or have had family members die from what they allege were radioactive hazards in their town.
Twenty years after the Union Carbide uranium mill in Uravan closed in 1984, a group of 82 former Uravan residents and descendants of company employees is suing Union Carbide and its wholly owned subsidiary Umetco Minerals Corp., blaming the companies for a variety of suspected mining- and milling-related illnesses and genetic disorders.
The lawsuit, asking for unspecified monetary damages, was filed Jan. 23 in Denver federal court.
Although it may be difficult to prove so many years later, the lawsuit charges that "hazardous substances, both radioactive and nonradioactive, were spread throughout the town" and that plaintiffs died or suffered physical injury as a result of exposure to radioactive and nonradioactive hazardous substances released by Union Carbide's uranium mining and milling facilities in Montrose County.
Uranium is the main raw material for nuclear weapons and the key fuel for nuclear reactors. Found in ores throughout the southwestern United States, uranium contains ionizing radiation that can be a health hazard (in high enough doses) because it destroys living cells, according to the Maryland-based Institute for Environment and Energy Research.
People in the Uravan area grew up among radioactive hazards, but seem unfazed by it. They are proud of the community's rich history and fondly reminisce about the 1950s and '60s, growing up in the dusty mining town on the San Miguel River. Their homes were neat and tidy, complete with white picket fences around their yards. Union Carbide was a family company, they say, and treated its employees well.
Once a bustling community of more than 700 residents with its own post office, grade school and public swimming pool, Uravan was the economic engine powering Montrose County. The Union Carbide mill there employed about 250 people during its peak operations.
"It was like we were one big family within the walls of the canyon," said Jacque Blinn, 56, a Nucla resident who grew up in Uravan. "The kids climbed the hills and slid down the (uranium) tailings piles."
She said the first thing that came to mind when recalling Uravan was, "I wish I could have raised my kids there."
Anyone suing Union Carbide "is suing the wrong people. They bent over backwards for us," Blinn said. "Plus, you get about as much radioactivity from the sun in Telluride as we were getting in Uravan."
Attorney Rebecca Lorenz of Melat, Pressman & Higbie in Colorado Springs and a team of lawyers led by renowned personal injury attorney Gerry Spence of Spence, Moriarity & Shockey in Jackson, Wyo., are representing the plaintiffs suing Union Carbide. Lawyers at both firms refused to comment on the lawsuit, and none of the plaintiffs contacted by the Rocky Mountain News would discuss it.
A lawyer for Union Carbide also declined comment, saying the company hasn't been served the lawsuit yet.
The allegations
The complaint actually focuses on two uranium mining "ghost towns" southwest of Grand Junction - Uravan, which had modern homes and amenities, and Long Park, a mining camp of tents, shacks and no running water or electricity.
A few road maps still show Uravan on Colorado 141 northwest of Naturita, but Long Park is no more than a memory.
The communities were company towns, owned and operated for several decades by Union Carbide - a subsidiary of Midland, Mich.-based Dow Chemical Co. since their merger was finalized in 2001.
The lawsuit aims to prove that Union Carbide knew of the radioactive hazards in the towns and failed to adequately protect Uravan and Long Park miners, millers and their families from those hazards.
The examples of alleged negligence in the complaint are many and varied, including the charge that Union Carbide dumped liquid uranium wastes directly into the San Miguel River from 1936 to the mid-1950s. The company began putting liquid and solid wastes into containment ponds in the mid-1950s, the suit said, but those ponds were unlined - meaning the wastes could seep down into the soil and contaminate groundwater.
Because Union Carbide didn't supply water for Long Park, residents often drank water from the uranium mines, the suit said. And without electricity to run a refrigerator, Long Park residents sometimes stored their food in the mines, which were cool.
In Uravan, Union Carbide permitted employees to leave its mines and the mill without showering or changing clothes, the suit said. Workers' clothes were covered in uranium dust and were washed along with the family's clothing.
The suit describes dirt and dust kicked up by the ore trucks rumbling up and down Main Street spreading "hazardous substances, both radioactive and nonradioactive," to the nearby elementary school and the rest of the town.
"All of these situations exposed family members to elevated levels of radioactive and nonradioactive hazardous substances," the suit said. "Defendants failed to warn residents of the risks associated with these activities."
Burden of proof
The lawyers representing the former Uravan residents will have a tough job proving their case, said Lee Foreman, a defense attorney for John Ramsey in the Jon Benet Ramsey murder case and partner in the Denver firm Haddon, Morgan & Foreman.
The first debate will likely revolve around statute of limitations, he said.
"In most general terms, statute of limitations happens from when you first become aware that you've suffered injury," Foreman said. "The debate right at the start will be whether these facts were known or should have been known for some time."
If the facts were known for some time, he said, a statute of limitations argument against the lawsuit would stand. If not, "maybe a lawsuit can be brought . . . you can get around the statute of limitations," he said.
Foreman said the plaintiffs' lawyers also will have to prove that Union Carbide failed to act reasonably according to the standard at the time rather than what is known today.
"There are all kinds of things that nobody thought were bad for you and are now known to be bad for you," he said. "Look at asbestos."
If the materials the plaintiffs were exposed to were dangerous and the manner in which they were handled "didn't meet the standards of the time, then maybe they're negligent," Foreman said.
One of the most difficult things the Uravan lawyers will have to do, he said, is connect the dots to show that exposures to the materials caused the physical harm they are alleging.
In the lawyers' favor is the fact that Colorado is "a green state," meaning juries are more open to lawsuits alleging pollution or physical harm, Foreman said. But they have a lot of work ahead of them at any rate, he said.
"If they just filed this in January, it could take years before they're ready to go to trial."
Massive cleanup
Whether former Uravan residents love their little town or blame it for poisoning them, all they have left is their memories. Today, an empty 90-year-old boarding house and vacant recreation hall built in the 1930s stand as the only reminders of a town that once was the pride of Montrose County.
The two buildings are surrounded by fences with signs that warn of potential radioactive hazards.
In 20 years, the narrow canyon valley filled with a milling plant and related processing facilities, a general store, gas station, post office and more than 150 homes has been transformed into revegetated grasslands and contaminated-waste repository sites.
Uravan's downfall began when the bottom fell out of the uranium market in 1979, after a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania suffered a partial meltdown, quelling Americans' appetite for nuclear power.
The nation's focus turned to cleaning up its Cold War legacy. The state of Colorado sued Union Carbide and Umetco in 1983, seeking to recover damages from contamination created by mill operations. The mill was shut down in 1984.
Two years later, all of Uravan's residents were evacuated and most of the town's 260 buildings were removed. The most highly contaminated homes and commercial buildings were dismantled and disposed of in a specially lined waste holding cell.
The Environmental Protection Agency put Uravan on the Superfund National Priorities List in 1986, citing "contamination of the air, soil and groundwater" near the plant and the San Miguel River. Official cleanup of the 450-acre site began in 1987, and it's about 90 percent completed, according to Umetco Minerals.
"Even though it's gone, I can still see everything in my mind," said Roxanne DeFoe, 50, of Cooper Landing, Alaska. DeFoe was born in Uravan in 1954 but moved away in 1976, shortly after she married. She was in Nucla this month visiting her sister, Jacque Blinn.
DeFoe recalled greased-pig contests at Labor Day picnics, Christmas decoration competitions among Uravan's housewives and roller-skating parties at the recreation hall.
"Union Carbide built us a pool, and it was the only one around for miles and miles," she said. "Everyone from all over - Nucla, Naturita, Norwood - came to use our pool."
Now the only "pools" in what was once Uravan are the double-lined retention ponds built in the late 1980s to collect and clean up groundwater, and hillside and tailings "seepage," or surface water contamination.
As of May 2002, the ponds had contained and evaporated about 69 million gallons of hillside seepage that contained 5,500 tons of "contaminated compounds," according to a Umetco Minerals report submitted to the Colorado Department of Health.
Umetco, which is in charge of the Uravan cleanup, also has collected more than 240 million gallons of "contaminated liquids" from its groundwater extraction program.
The cleanup has cost Umetco and the federal government about $100 million so far, said -Rahe Junge, Umetco engineering geologist.
"The goal is to have the Uravan cleanup completed by the end of 2006," Junge said. "Right now, you can actually see the end in sight."
Picnics in the mine
During Union Carbide's operation of the Uravan uranium mill between 1936 and 1984, the company produced 42 million pounds of uranium oxide, commonly known as yellowcake, according to a report by Umetco.
Yellowcake, which sells for about $15.50 a pound these days, is the dusty yellow-red powder that results from the milling of uranium ore. It is the first step toward enriched uranium, used in nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants.
Micky Byers-Watts, 49, of Mesa, Ariz., remembers how her family's clothes would turn yellow after being washed in their old, wringer-style washer with her father's work clothes.
"The water would come out just yellow from the yellowcake," Byers-Watts said. "None of us knew how bad it was, how poisonous it was. If we had, we would have done a lot of things differently."
She is not part of the Colorado lawsuit, but her father, Walter Byers Sr., worked at two different mines near Uravan when she was young.
She and her siblings have battled several illnesses, so she says she understands why uranium workers' descendants would file a lawsuit claiming physical ailments from exposure to radioactive hazards.
"I'm on disability and two of my siblings are on disability," said Byers-Watts, who has lupus and has survived cancer.
She recalls picnics in the uranium mine with her father.
Her father, who suffered from several lung ailments and cardiovascular problems before he died in 1994, came home from work only once every two weeks. Byers-Watts "tried to be with my dad as much as possible," she said. "I would take his lunch down to him in the mine."
She blames both the various companies her father worked for and the U.S. government for not warning uranium workers "how poisonous the stuff was."
"They didn't tell my dad (it was hazardous), or he wouldn't have brought me down in the mine with him."
Rich heritage
Standard Chemical Co. built Uravan - what was then called the Joe Jr. Camp - in 1909, and began processing radium from uranium ores in around 1912, according to historical documents.
Scientists first believed the element radium was a cure for diseases such as cancer - based on French scientist Marie Curie's work - but in the late 1920s discovered that people who worked with radium often developed cancer or other ailments. Curie herself died in 1934 from a radium-related illness that attacked her red blood cells. Radium is over a million times more radioactive than the same mass of uranium.
The mill produced radium until 1919, when the U.S. radium market collapsed because lower- cost radium began coming out of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire), according to Umetco documents. Miners then began to concentrate on vanadium, which is used to harden steel.
In 1928, Union Carbide purchased the Standard Chemical holdings through its subsidiary, the U.S. Vanadium Corp.
USVC established the town of Uravan in the 1930s to provide housing for its workers and their families and the company's focus turned to uranium.
The U.S. government built facilities at Uravan in 1943 to process uranium into "green sludge" for its secretive Manhattan Project, later revealed to be its production of materials for atomic bombs.
Union Carbide officially took over the Uravan milling and mining operations in the 1950s.
Radiant flowers
Estalee Silver, 83, lived in Uravan from 1953 to 1981, raising a family and substitute teaching at the grade school from time to time.
In her small apartment in a retirement community in Grand Junction recently, she happily pulled out a book she had put together about Uravan that included an extensive collection of old photos of the town.
She described Union Carbide as a company that took care of its employees and regularly monitored the radioactivity in Uravan.
She and her husband, Cletus Silver, who worked in the mill, even had a Geiger counter from Union Carbide in their house for a while. The constant noise coming from the Geiger counter's normal operations (not from radiation detection, she noted) drove her husband crazy, so they took it out.
The company also monitored the lawns in Uravan for radioactivity, she said.
"My yard was just fine, except the flower beds," Silver said.
"I had beautiful flowers," she added. "Really radiant."
Harry Archer's coffee shop in Naturita - the "Munch and Fun Pit Stop" - is the daily meeting place for a group of friends who've been getting together every morning (except Sundays) since the late 1970s to drink coffee and share stories.
Most of the folks in the coffee group now live in Nucla, but many of them lived in Uravan and worked in the mill there.
A friend dubbed them the "Nucla Mafia Club" sometime in the 1980s, said Harry's mother, Elva Ayers. "I'm not sure why they call us that," she admitted.
On a recent Friday morning, they teased each other about who was the grumpiest and who was going to have to pay for the coffee.
"We've lived with (the radioactive hazards) all our lives," said "mafia" member Leonard "Pat" Daniels, 87. "Look at me, I'm fine."
Daniels, who worked at the mill, said he doesn't think the full story about the effects of radiation exposure has been told yet. He has been part of ongoing research by the Saccamanno Institute in Grand Junction, which is studying uranium workers for radiation effects.
He is certain that uranium miners were affected by radiation hazards, but he isn't convinced that Uravan residents would have been exposed by simply living around uranium processing.
"Miners were known for not taking care of their health," Daniels said. "They smoked, they partied hardy. It was just the times."
Many of the people at the table that morning - almost all of them in their late 70s and 80s - "lived right under the (uranium) tailings pile," Daniels said.
"But don't turn out the lights," he said. "We might glow in the dark."
source: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/business/article/0,1299,DRMN_4_2689882,00.html 28feb04
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