BY MATTHEW D. LAPLANTE
The Salt Lake Tribune

First published Apr 23 2011

Ling Seager is dead.

So is Jim Sproul, who sat next to her in an office in the Utah National Guard’s Joint Language Training Center. And so is Chris Jensen, who sat beside Sproul.

Across from Seager sat Mike Chen; he survived a brain tumor. A few feet away was Mark Hepper; he’s dying.

Megan Cate, Scott Forman, Jackie Leedy, Andy Swatsenbarg — all of them worked in the same small office. All of them are sick. None of them knows why.

Utah National Guard leaders say it’s just a “weird coincidence” that so many people who worked in the same office at the center have died or become debilitatingly ill. Their investigation into environmental conditions at the facility, located at a sprawling industrial park in northern Utah, concluded that the office was safe for its workers — even as engineers continue to remove toxic chemicals from the ground surrounding the building in the middle of an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site.

Swatsenbarg, a career Army officer who fell ill in 2007, isn’t impressed with the military’s self-examination.

“So the National Guard checked itself out and says everything is fine? Well, that’s a big surprise,” he says. “I wonder if Procter & Gamble could get away with that. Or how about Dow Chemicals or DuPont?”

Swatsenbarg and other veterans of the language center say they simply want to know that a serious effort has been made to ascertain whether their sicknesses are linked to their service. And that, they say, will take an investigation from someone outside of the Guard.

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High Country News
By Jen Jackson

Here in the West, uranium mining continues its wobbly resurgence. In recent years, it has sputtered through the peaks and valleys of pricing to once again climb in importance and output. The graph-line of this revival seems to correspond with the vicissitudes of our love-hate relationship with fossil fuels.

In 2003, a time of cheap oil, there were only 321 uranium miners working in the West, producing 779 tons of uranium that year. In 2008, there were over 1,500, who produced about 1,500 tons. In 2006, the Pandora mine south of Moab, where I live, reopened with just 10 employees. This year, it has 57. Recently, however, it lost one. Hunter Diehl, a 28-year-old Moab man, died in the mine this May, crushed by rock falling from the mine’s ceiling. It was the first uranium mining death in the country since 1998, and the first since uranium’s fickle resurgence.

If uranium makes a strong comeback, what other such tragedies lie ahead? With the epic oil spill in the Gulf causing many to question our current energy policies and to begin viewing nuclear power in a more favorable light, the uranium industry’s slow resurgence may turn into another spike in growth. But at what cost?

With other extractive industries, we tend to see the tragedies boldly splashed across the front page of the newspaper — the massive oil spills, deaths on the natural gas rigs, or the dozens of coal miners killed in collapses and explosions. We can’t avoid a general awareness of some of the true costs of fossil fuels-based energy production. But many of the costs of nuclear power — beyond the Three Mile Island tragedy now fading in our memories — have been more insidious.

Cancer deaths do not occur suddenly, inside a mine. Instead, they happen slowly and at a remove from the time and place of exposure. The deaths occur at home or in the hospital, surrounded by grieving loved ones rather than reporters with TV cameras. The family mourns, but the nation goes on about its business; nobody makes speeches. Mining disasters are horrible, but uranium takes an even more deadly toll. And it’s not just the miners who are affected. It’s also the families that live near the mine or the mill.

South of the Pandora mine, in Monticello, Utah, a uranium-processing mill operated through World War II until 1960. Children at the time would play in the tailings piles and drink water from the millponds. People living in the shadow of the mill knew not to hang laundry on windy days because their linens would turn yellow from the mill’s dust. Now, 600 cases of cancer — a number that is growing each year — have been confirmed among current and former Monticello residents. The town has a population of just under 2,000. The Utah Department of Health has finally labeled what is occurring in Monticello as a cancer cluster that does not appear to be a random occurrence.

If 600 mine workers died in a single day, the nation would be abuzz. People would be outraged and collectively grieving. Instead, news of the Monticello cancer cluster hasn’t reached much beyond Utah’s borders.

Nor do most of uranium’s environmental impacts occur publicly, suddenly or explosively, as was the case with the massive BP spill in the Gulf. Rather, like cancer, the effects are slow and insidious. One doesn’t see uranium-covered aquatic life nearly paralyzed by the weight of its residue. We don’t witness death washing up on the Colorado River’s shores. Instead, uranium’s equivalent of the oil spill — the Atlas Mill’s uranium tailings site — accumulates over decades. Eventually, we find 16 million tons of still-radioactive uranium tailings piled up on the banks of the river, leaching tens of thousands of gallons of deadly soup into the life-giving river. But all of this happens beneath the horizon of our perceptions. It happens with the relentless force of erosion rather than the immediate shock of an earthquake.

The death of the Pandora miner last month was sudden and tragic. Many in Moab are mourning Diehl’s loss. Yet perhaps we can take this tragedy as a shout in the darkness, alerting us to the otherwise whispery warnings that surround us amid this current uranium renaissance.

Jen Jackson is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She writes in Moab, Utah.

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ABC4.com
Reported by: Brent Hunsaker

MONTICELLO, Utah (ABC 4 News) – For nearly 20 years, Monticello was a Uranium boomtown. It started in I941 when the government opened a Uranium Mill in town to feed the Manhattan Project. The Vanadium Corporation of America mill produced the “yellowcake” that Robert Oppenheimer and his team would use to create the first atomic bombs.

The mill paid good wages and the workers felt patriotic. Fritz Pipkin remembers his dad working in the mill. “I feel like my father was a hero,” he said. “It was no different than the soldiers in Germany or Japan. They gave their lives to create this product that was used for the Manhattan project and the bombs that ended the war.”

Pipkin also remembers playing in the piles of radioactive tailings at the mill. “As kids we’d go on down the canyon right here and we’d camp out and drink from the water that came through the tailings ponds. Nobody knew of any danger. It’s a wonder kids in Monticello don’t glow in the dark from all the hours we spent down here on these tailings piles.”

Pipkin now has Leukemia. He is one of nearly 600 cases of cancer confirmed in current and former residents of Monticello. It is a number, they say, that is still climbing.

86-year-old Lee Wilkin is battling cancers in both her breasts and lungs. “It’s terrible how many people here have got cancer,” she said recalling that her mother and three sisters also have had their own battles with cancer. The family lived in the shadow of the Uranium mill. “You couldn’t hang clothes out when the wind was blowing … because they would turn yellow.“ Wilkin also worked at the mill for two years. She remembers a relative coming home for lunch still covered with yellow dust from the morning’s work. She said, “Anyone I’ve ever talked to that worked there was never warned about it.”

Pete Steele worked at the mill too. He remembers the day his doctor diagnosed him with Multiple Myeloma, “I says, ‘What’s next?’ And she says there is no next, you’re dead.”

After the mill closed in 1960, it would take another 40 years for the federal government to finish cleaning up the site. The tailings are now buried south of town. The pile has been capped and sealed and is monitored continuously.

Steele and Pipkin both serve on a town committee that is pushing the federal government to take full responsibility for the treatment of Monticello’s cancer patients. Steele said, “It’s not for me. I’ve already gone through it. There’s nothing that I can do to change anything. But If I can change it for somebody down the road then I’ll think that I’ve accomplished something.”

Armed with a study from the Utah Department of Health that shows a cancer cluster, the committee has received grants for both cancer education and screenings. And yet, paying for a screening is one thing, paying to treat what the screening finds is a much bigger commitment. “We feel like the government needs to stand up and take care of the people,” explains Pipkin. “They created the problem, they need to take care of the medical needs.”

On Friday cancer survivors will gather at the mill site to dedicate a memorial to those worked there during the 40’s and 50’s.

They will be called heroes of both World War II and then the Cold War. They never took up a weapon against an enemy, but they did produce the lethal material that made what remains today, the ultimate weapon.

And of some it will be said that they paid the ultimate price. “We have paid a heavy price. We really have,” said Wilkin. “And we’re still paying,” said Steele.

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Layton family: ‘We are heartbroken’

By Bob Mims, Erin Alberty and Jason Bergreen

The Salt Lake Tribune

A Layton family has lost its second daughter since toxic pesticide fumes apparently wafted into their home last weekend.

Rachel Toone, 15 months, died Tuesday at Primary Children’s Medical Center. Three days earlier her 4-year-old sister, Rebecca, died at Davis Hospital after she had begun struggling to breathe in the family’s home.

“We are heartbroken,” the Toone family wrote in a press statement announcing Rachel’s death. Rachel’s health deteriorated after heart failure early Monday, the family wrote.

Authorities suspect the toxic gas phosphine sickened the family. Investigators say the gas may have entered into the family’s home after an exterminator dropped Fumitoxin aluminum phosphide pellets in burrow holes in the lawn Friday to kill small rodents known as voles.

Rebecca Toone died Saturday after she grew sick in the family’s home. Her parents and siblings also were hospitalized with flu-like symptoms the same day. They were all discharged Sunday, but Rachel fell ill again later that day.

Meanwhile, a Sandy woman, Alice Pittman, said Wednesday that she now wonders if a September 2008 Fumitoxin application by the same exterminators – Bountiful-based Bugman Pest and Lawn – may be connected to the deaths of her two Basset hound puppies. She said the poison was applied in a rodent-infested pasture abutting her fence line.

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