Whistleblower fuels neighbors' fears near polluted Nevada mine

YERINGTON - Peggy Pauly remembers when she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer four years ago.

"My doctor asked if I'd ever been exposed to radiation and I said, 'No,"' she said.

Now, she isn't so sure.

Up until a month ago, Pauly never worried much about the abandoned Anaconda copper mine next to her family's home of 10 years in the high desert's irrigated oasis of the Mason Valley, 55 miles southeast of Reno.

"The north end of the mine is my backyard, basically. We built our home here because this was the land we could afford," said Pauly, 55, the wife of a Baptist pastor and mother of daughters ages 8 and 9.

She knew of tests for arsenic, mercury and heavy metal contaminants in the groundwater at the mine covering nearly six square miles. And she noticed last spring when Atlantic Richfield Co., which is primarily responsible for cleanup, started providing free bottled water to neighbors as a precautionary measure.

But she had no reason to doubt Bureau of Land Management officials who said there was no evidence any toxins had gravitated off the mine site itself, or Nevada Division of Environmental Protection officials who said the high levels of uranium in nearby domestic wells most likely were naturally occurring.

Both agencies have resisted calls to make the mine a federal Superfund site.

"I'm a housewife, not a geologist," Pauly said. "My husband and I have never been pro-Superfund. In my naiveté, I thought we were being pretty well informed."

That started to change last month when she was mailed a newsletter from the BLM, NDEP and Environmental Protection Agency describing the "radiological hazards that warrant protection of workers in certain areas of the site" and the need to conduct an aerial survey "to determine where radiation may be both on and off site."

"That was scary to me," Pauly said.

Then she learned of a whistleblower complaint filed by the BLM's former project manager at the mine, Earle Dixon, who claims he was fired in October because he drew attention to alleged attempts by state and federal regulators to suppress information about health and safety risks.

She started asking questions, writing letters and making calls. And the more she learned, the madder she got.

"I'm finding that Arco and the state have known for a very long time that there is radiation there," Pauly said. "The monitoring well samples showed it was there in 1984 and they just sort of shrugged it off. Why didn't they follow up back then?"

"We used to drive through the pink dust and I wonder how much did my kids get exposed to that? Maybe we were stupid, I don't know. But we never even thought about maybe there was some sort of a danger."

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Local suspicions have abounded for years that Arco and state regulators weren't leveling with residents about potential risks at the mine. Anaconda produced an estimated 1.7 billion pounds of copper there from 1953-78, before selling the property to Arimetco International Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., which went bankrupt and abandoned the site in 2000.

Officials for Arco - now responsible for cleanup as past owner of the site - BLM and NDEP all deny there's been any attempt to hide potential dangers at the mine.

"We would never suppress data," NDEP spokeswoman Cindy Petterson said. "Maybe we haven't been as good about getting information out as people would have liked."

Environmentalists and neighboring tribes have expressed concerns repeatedly about delays in addressing contaminated dust and the possibility that uranium-laced water leaked through the oldest, unlined, evaporation ponds where copper was processed in sulfuric acid.

The concerns took on new significance a year ago with the discovery of decades-old Anaconda documents in archives at the University of Wyoming, including one that showed Anaconda was working on a deal in 1976 to produce yellowcake uranium at the site based on samples taken from evaporation ponds that showed high radiation levels.

Another Anaconda document made public last fall showed tests of monitoring wells at the mine in 1984 with uranium at up to 40 times the legal limits for public drinking water.

A third dated July 1979 surfaced three months ago. It said: "It now appears that the residue in the evaporation ponds is a problem because of radiological contamination."

New tests the past six months found soil samples at the mine with unusually high levels of radioactivity and concentrations of uranium in mine wells at up to 200 times drinking water standards.

Fears were fueled again last month when the Washington, D.C.-based Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed the whistleblower complaint on Dixon's behalf with the Labor Department, which is investigating.

Dixon reported in meticulous notes of more than 80 meetings and phone conversations the past year that BLM health and safety policies were not being followed and that workers at the site had been exposed to low levels of radioactivity.

He said BLM administrators eventually forbad him from talking to the media, and censored and edited his technical communications and memos.

Mick Harrison, one of Dixon's lawyers, sees many similarities between the Yerington mine and other Superfund sites where he's been involved in lawsuits across the country.

"What seems to be more blatant in this case is that they are trying to sweep it under the rug," Harrison said.

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Misty Stevens was one of about 20 locals who gathered at a meeting Pauly organized last week to compare notes about the mine.

"She reminds me of me back in 1998," said Stevens, 36, a member of the Yerington Paiute Tribe who believes her home is built on a foundation that includes dirt from contaminated mine tailings.

"I've been trying to get the community involved since then but I haven't seen any improvement at the mine," she said.

The tribe hired Stevens in 1998 as its environmental director and she worked temporarily for BLM at the mine site in 2001.

"I suspected all along that something was wrong and I was being lied to," she said.

"I was up there crawling all over the site, drinking the water, breathing the air, and nobody told us anything."

Now, in addition to her own aching joints, headaches and insomnia, Stevens worries about her 13-month-old son's respiratory problems.

"I spent $50 on locks for my cabinets and caps for the electrical plugs to keep my boy safe, but he may be living in a contaminated house."

She said Dixon was the first person she'd met in six years she felt she could trust to tell the truth about the mine.

"I think he was fired because he was too vocal, too honest. They don't want the public to know what is going on at that site. They have been trying to hush this up from day one."

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BLM officials dispute Dixon's claims.

"He was fired because he was not performing his duties appropriately," BLM spokeswoman Jo Simpson said. "Little progress was being made cleaning up the site."

Dan Cummings, a spokesman for Arco's parent company, British Petroleum, said government regulators are mostly to blame for cleanup delays.

"It took several years for the federal and state authorities to agree to a work plan. Now that we have a work plan, we have made good progress over the past couple of months," he said.

Craig Smith, BLM's new site manager at the mine, said Arco shares part of the blame because its early cleanup proposals didn't go far enough.

"The work plans I originally saw were inadequate," he said.

NDEP says work has accelerated since Dixon was fired. Water sampling of neighboring wells continues on a quarterly basis, air monitoring is scheduled to begin by February and additional soil tests are planned in the near future, Petterson said.

State health workers have "looked into allegations of incidents of disease" in the Yerington area but "have not been able to confirm any clusters," she said.

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Pauly admits she has no way to tell if her thyroid cancer is tied to radioactive contaminants from the mine.

"But what makes me angry is they (regulators) don't know either because they haven't done the testing," she said. She admits dust problems have diminished since steps were taken in recent years to cap the waste piles.

"But the first 10 years we lived here, that pink dust was so thick it was like a fog," she said.

Pauly said NDEP officials told her that people who live around the site are aware of the danger "and will just keep out."

"But I told them that I watch the news and a lot of adults - let alone children - don't have common sense. To me it's just ludicrous to take that approach if you've got this kind of a danger," Pauly said.

"It feels as a resident living right here that all they are doing is planning. I want them to test where we are living and where our children are outside digging in the dirt."

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On the Net:

Nevada Division of Environmental Protection Yerington Mine Site: http://ndep.nv.gov/yerington/minesite.htm

Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility: http://www.peer.org

U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Nevada: http://www.nv.blm.gov/