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The Migration of Heartache

Moab's tailings pile and the men who moved it

By Jen Jackson

Found in: | Inside | Politics |

Upon my arrival, every flat surface in Gary Hazen's small trailer is stacked with the remnants of his efforts: correspondence, newspaper clippings, government documents, reports, receipts from the thousands of letters he sent certified mail, and more. Everything is neatly organized and labeled. As he leafs through folders and envelopes, memories escape and flutter through air-conditioned currents. The collection is a testament to the lonely path of passion, patience and diligence Hazen walked for years.
"I wrote letters continually. Con-tin-u-al-ly," muses Hazen as photocopied missives spill through his fingers. "My friends kept telling me, ?It'll never happen. It'll never get moved. Just because you're telling them to do it, that doesn't mean it's going to get moved.' And I'd just say, ?Yes it will. You just watch. They'll move it because I'm telling them to.'"
He looks up from his files for a brief moment, peering through the cloud of collected history. His face erupts in a grin.
"I never once doubted that they'd move it."

On May 4 of this year, politicians and federal employees gathered on the slopes above the Colorado River near Moab to celebrate a new chapter in an old Moab story. Utah's Governor John Huntsman, representatives from the Utah congressional delegation and the state legislature, spokespeople from the departments of Energy and Environmental Quality, and U.S. Rep. Grace Napolitano of California were present. They traveled to this remote desert outpost to slap backs, give speeches, hand out commemorative coins, and eat cake. Yellow cake.
Somebody planning this event had a sense of humor.
The ceremony marked the official commencement of the Moab uranium tailings pile removal. Atlas Corporation operated a uranium processing plant here for decades, and though the mill has not been active for 25 years, the toxic residue of its labors still lingers.
But 16 million tons of contaminated soil is now on the move, via rail, to a disposal cell 30 miles north of Moab at Crescent Junction. Sixteen million tons of uranium waste will no longer sit 750 feet from the Colorado River's currents, leaching toxins into the Southwest's most important watercourse. Sixteen million tons of contaminants will no longer sit three miles outside of Moab, will no longer rest directly atop an active fault, will no longer stand sentinel at the entrance to Arches National Park.
The toxic legacy of Moab's heyday as "Uranium Capital of the World" is now being dismantled one shipping container at a time.
As officials spoke, the growl and rumble of machinery filled the air. Workers at the site wasted no time. Neither did the honorary speakers. They smiled, they spoke, they commemorated, they departed. Huntsman immediately went mountain biking. However, before he hopped in the saddle, he offered a few insightful words:
"That's what it takes to get the wheels of government to move," he said. "It takes people who care, who are passionate about their communities to get things going."
That is the story of the tailings pile. Before Huntsman or Napolitano were on the scene, before the Department of Energy took an interest, Moab residents were passionate and vocal. They named the hulking, toxic elephant in the valley. And they demanded its departure.
But at the May 4 ceremony, these Moabites were finally the quiet ones, the bystanders. Realizing a dream. Needing no recognition. Simply witnessing the culmination of their countless hours of service - to land and community - was enough.

"Going to the ceremony, I beamed," says Hazen. "I just was filled with myself. I thought, ?Gary, you made something happen here.'"
Back in the mid-80s - when his tailings-pile crusade was just beginning - Hazen was still a smoker. One day, upon opening his package of Drum Rolling Tobacco, he found a quote written on the backside of the wrapper:
Happy is he who dares to defend passionately that which he loves. - Ovidius
This became Hazen's inspiration, words that buoyed him through more than a decade of wrangling, writing, pleading, and acting as David to a Goliath-sized pile of uranium waste. Though he prevailed and the pile is currently on its way north - away from the Colorado River that he loves - Ovidius' words still hang on Hazen's wall. They serve as a reminder - of a contentious past, a hard-fought present, and an uncertain future.
Hazen first fell in love with the Colorado River in the late-70s while working at the Grand Canyon. In 1977 alone, he hiked more than 3,000 miles in the park.
"The only reason I did all that hiking was for the river at the bottom," he explains.
Then, after several Grand Canyon river trips, his life was altered for good. His existence became the Colorado. He heard about Moab, a small desert town right on the banks of his beloved river. He knew he needed to be there. A friend invited him to visit.
To get a sense for the Moab area upon arriving, Hazen hiked up the slope on the valley's east side near where the Colorado River exits the river canyon.
"The Grand Canyon saved my life. Then I came here, and it was a whole different story. I saw that tailings pile, and I was beside myself. How could this be? What's wrong with these people?" Hazen is immediately immersed in the visceral impact of his Moab introduction. "Atlas was in full-tilt boogie then. You couldn't even see the sun because of the inversion. I literally fell to my knees. I said, ?This can't be!' I just could not believe Atlas was there on the banks of the Colorado River."

The seeds of the Atlas uranium mill's dubious placement extend back before Hazen's birth to a time of different priorities and sensibilities. A time of different fears.
In 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission (precursor to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy) established a uranium buying station on the banks of the Colorado River near Moab. This was the beginning of the uranium boom that put Moab on the map as having the most millionaires per capita of any town in the nation. The AEC was stockpiling yellowcake uranium for wartime purposes. Yellowcake would save us from the Red Menace.
In 1952, "Uranium King" Charlie Steen struck the richest vein of uranium ore in American history just south of Moab. It became the now-famous Mi Vida Mine, ultimately worth more than $100 million. Having hit the mother lode, Steen immediately saw the need for a processing mill in the area. In 1956, he built the Uranium Reduction Company at the site of the buying station. URC operated the mill until 1962 when the Atlas Corporation bought the plant. The facility processed an average of 1,400 tons of uranium concentrate a day - ores trucked from more than 300 mines on the Colorado Plateau - until operations were put on standby in 1984. By then, the Atlas site held the fifth largest uranium tailings pile in the United States.
Over the decades, mill wastes were placed in an unlined pond within the Colorado River's floodplain. The slimy tailings - the consistency of toothpaste - contain a deadly mixture of radium, uranium, thorium, polonium, ammonia, molybdenum, selenium, arsenic, lead, mercury, and nitrates.
It is a recipe for grief and loss.
The pile sits a mere 10 to 20 feet above the aquifer. Cradled in the mess are 426 million gallons of toxic liquid, leaching 57,000 gallons a day into this underground basin which then spills into the Colorado. Near the tailings pile, the river experiences a 1,660 percent increase in uranium levels. Ammonia levels are 7.8 times the amount considered lethal to fish.
In one experiment, researchers placed caged fish in the waters just downstream from the mill site. The fish died immediately. They couldn't be pulled out of the toxic soup fast enough to be saved.
This is the water supply for 30 million people. And a major flood event could push the entire lethal mess downstream.
Yet, when Gary Hazen began speaking out about the tailings pile in 1986, there was no political will to move the pile. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission-approved plan was to cap it in place. He protested into a void and heard only echoes. He sent out thousands of letters to every federal agency, politician, water district, media outlet and research lab he could think of. In his voluminous collection of tailings pile documents sits a mere 30 letters of response, mostly to the effect of, "While we agree with your concerns, this isn't our problem."

In his letters, Hazen's tone is earnest. His parlance is not a scholarly one. He writes as a self-described hippie, hopelessly in love with the river. In a letter to Utah's governor, he wrote, "I would cut my hair, shine my shoes and wear a neck tie to take any position that allows the implementation of these federal laws."
Hazen was the cause's Everyman.
Meanwhile, Lance Christie acts as Moab's resident scientist and scholar. Currently, he has 105 different think-pieces in progress, all on different aspects of sustainability and environmental stewardship.
His full, white beard gives him the look of the mad scientist he might have been had a bedrock love of landscape not grounded him over the years. However, his omnipresent overalls give the impression of a farmer. Or a mechanic. Someone who knows the world in a tactile sense rather than an academic one.
Christie inhabits both realms of knowing. He is an expansive being - even as years and circumstance reduce his physical presence.
Like Hazen, Christie was an early advocate of the tailings pile's removal, but his inspiration flowed through different channels than Hazen's hopeless love of the river.
"It was a matter of opposing the stupidity and irrationality of the situation. That's always something that's motivated me." Christie smiles broadly at this. Countering inanity is his favorite pastime.
In 1989, he was named chair of the Atlas Mill Reclamation Task Force, an entity created by the Grand County Council. It was almost 20 years to the day from this appointment to the May 4 removal ceremony, (which Christie wryly refers to as "an anthropological adventure" replete with "hearts and flowers everywhere"). During those two decades, Christie was an invaluable source of information for everyone throwing their weight against the seemingly immovable pile. One county councilmember dubbed Christie "Grand County's Most Useful Citizen."
Christie looks back on the Atlas fight with a detached, philosophical air. He displays none of the blind passion of Hazen. He believes he has satisfied a moral obligation by working on the issue, and now other concerns require his attention.
At this point, he can even dig up the humor hiding in a heap of toxins.
Christie spent 20 years battling the scientifically unsupportable notion that capping the tailings in place was the best solution. He found the wrong-headedness of this mind-boggling.
"My theory was that we might as well all converge on Main Street and get really drunk and stoned and naked and burn the $11 million [proposed expenditure for capping the pile] in a bonfire that we dance around. It would do just as much good as putting the money towards capping the pile."

As early as the 1970s, Atlas was maneuvering for NRC approval of on-site reclamation. The idea, initially, was to dredge the Colorado and place the river sludge atop the pile. The NRC - whose mission statement is "to ensure adequate protection of the public health and safety . . . and the environment in the use of nuclear materials in the United States" - felt this to be an adequate reclamation solution. Of course, river mud would protect the landscape and its inhabitants from multiple decades' worth of accumulated toxins.
In response to new federal reclamation regulations, Atlas amended its plan in 1993. Though the new plan met none of the standards for tailings reclamation, the NRC again signed off on it. They issued a "Finding of No Significant Impact" (FONSI), despite the fact that the 110-foot-high pile sits in the floodplain of the Southwest's largest river, atop a fault system, adjacent to a town, a national park and a rare high-desert wetland. Public outcry - led by Christie's fact-finding and a strongly worded letter from the county council - spurred Senator Orrin Hatch to get involved. This, in turn, forced the NRC to withdraw the FONSI and conduct a full environmental review - the first time the agency was ever forced to revisit such a decision.
After years of analysis, the NRC again found that in-place reclamation was the proper solution. Christie was afforded a look at some of the raw data supporting this decision. River studies conducted for the environmental review actually showed that pollutants downriver from the pile were less significant than upstream.
"You can't add something to something and get less than something. The raw data was just bad," says Christie. "The quality of analysis was like if Grandpa asked his dimwitted grandson to go down to the water and bring a sample back - God only knows where the boy got it. And then Grandpa dumps the dubious sample in the bathtub, looks at the color of the water and says, ?Looks like 2.6 to me!'"
Needless to say, the community rallied anew to fight bad science. However, at this point, the battle was not confined to the laboratory; it had migrated to the halls of Congress.
Christie then astutely passed the ball - and a heap of data - to the county council.
"It took 16 years [from the FONSI] to battle them into submission to agree to move the pile," says Christie. He then utters a phrase in Latin, smiling at my quizzical look before elucidating its meaning.
"The moral of the story is, don't let the bastards grind you down. Instead, you grind the bastards down."
Christie may be the only man in Utah to know the Latin word for "bastard."
Bill Hedden has a unique perspective on the Atlas mill. He worked there. He also served on the county council during the peak of reclamation debate. And now he is executive director of Grand Canyon Trust, an environmental group that was a major player in the battle to move the mess.
As we sit on his Castle Valley property, in the shade of cottonwood trees he and his wife planted 30 years ago, it's hard to imagine him performing manual labor at the Atlas site. He is tall, slim, erudite, well-spoken, politically savvy - a big fish in the conservation community's pond.
Hedden worked two stints at Atlas, constructing additions to the mill. He was privy to human- and landscape-scale abuses: Navajos who were sent to work each day under large tanks leaking radioactive mud, men who applied fiberglass resin with bare hands and bathed it off their skin with acetone, contaminated sludge that was pumped directly onto the floodplain or into the river rather than the holding pond. He witnessed the precursors to loss.
"I knew what an exceptionally filthy mess it was, and to some extent, the way that the NRC tried to handle it by shoving everything under the rug . . . it just pissed me off from an honesty and fairness point of view," says Hedden, explaining his motivation to fight the battle. "It was a world of hostile, evil chemicals just getting dumped everywhere. When you know how many people who worked out there died really young of strange cancers . . . some part of [my fight] was on behalf of the people who got screwed there."
Hedden himself received a welding burn on his forehead during his time at Atlas. It quickly became infected and spread across his face. When he went to seek treatment, the physician immediately surmised that he worked at Atlas and suggested that Hedden quit.
Hedden did leave, but many other Moabites couldn't. Atlas was the economic driver in the county, providing the only decently paying jobs around. When the mill shut its doors in '84, Moab's unemployment rate hovered around 30 percent. Many families were forced to leave.
However, it was Atlas' demise that ultimately freed up the community - once beholden to its largest employer - to speak out and demand that it clean up its mess.
Hedden became involved once he was elected to the county council in 1992. He was aware of the work being done by residents such as Hazen and Christie at the time but was frustrated by the lack of forward movement. So, on behalf of the county council - and informed by Christie's Atlas Mill Reclamation Task Force - he wrote a letter to the NRC refuting their Finding of No Significant Impact. That's when the terms of the game began to change, when Senator Hatch stepped in, when the power of politics became evident.
"That was a definite inflection point in the curve. It was the first time that anything happened that changed the trajectory of the whole mess," recalls Hedden.
There was still a 16-year fight ahead, but at least politicians and federal agencies were finally listening.
Atlas declared bankruptcy in 1998, absolving them of any reclamation responsibility beyond the paltry $6.5 million bond they posted years earlier. This left the NRC - an agency with no funding or ability to clean up the tailings - responsible for the mess. That's when Hedden began traveling to Washington, D.C., testifying before Congress and lobbying for the Department of Energy - an agency with 23 prior tailings pile reclamations under its belt - to take over the site.
The issue had become much bigger than Moab. A handful of passionate locals had blossomed into a national campaign. Governors from downstream states were writing letters, downstream water districts - including California's powerful Metropolitan Water District - were weighing in, and a large congressional coalition organized around the issue.
In 1999, the Department of Energy officially took over the site. They prepared another environmental analysis. In 2005, the agency finally announced their recommendation to move the pile by train to Crescent Junction.
"On many occasions, I thought, ?Maybe we've done it,' and then it would slip away all over again," says Hedden of his 16-year crusade. "I often wondered if I'd live to see them start doing it. Now I wonder if I'll live to see it finished."
The project completion date is set for 2028. The estimated cost for reclamation sits at $1 billion. Groundwater cleanup has been in progress for six years now. And every day, two trains hauling 136 containers depart on the rail spur from the tailings pile, carrying metric tons of heartache now infused with hope.

Beyond the admiration of personal acquaintances in town, Lance Christie receives no credit for his countless hours of painstaking research and writing on the Atlas issue. He fed facts to the Moab-born beast that ultimately conquered the NRC and the tailings pile. Yet corporate CEOs and federal agency heads were the ones who took the credit on May 4.
"My role was as holding the center together, acting as a lens that focused things. That's how I work," says Christie. "I'm not concerned with getting credit for anything. The goal is to leave the world better than you found it, not to get credit for leaving things better."
This is why Christie has 105 conservation think-pieces in the works. This is why Christie, in the face of seeming success, still keeps an eye on the tailings pile as the head of the Atlas Mill Reclamation Task Force. In the midst of a year that brought him the loss of his long-time canine companion, the passing of his wife of 33 years, and a bout with cancer, he hasn't ceased working.
Leaving the world a better place sustains him.
Though Bill Hedden was Moab's most public figure in the fight to move the tailings pile - the one who could throw around some political weight as a county commissioner, the one who could speak passionately about Atlas' environmental injustices from personal experience - he did not act in a vacuum. Well-worn paths of letter-writing and fact-finding lay waiting for Hedden's forward march.
Thanks to his powerful voice, small-town sentiments ultimately prevailed on the national political stage.
Gary Hazen wrote letters to all the downstream water districts before anyone else thought to get them involved. He wrote to the downriver governors and congresspersons. He wrote to national media outlets, encouraging them to cover this tragic tale. He forged the path all too early to receive credit for his walk.
But who's to say that Hazen's fervor didn't quietly pave the way for heavier-hitters to achieve future success? Who's to say that he wasn't essential to the outcome?
"When all the other people got involved, I was so relieved," he admits. "I was booted out, but it did not matter to me at all. That was my goal from the beginning."
And in this, the greater goal was achieved - the removal of the uranium tailings.
I know Hazen will be on his beloved river tomorrow. And as Ovidius predicted, he will be a happy man.

Jen Jackson writes from Moab, Utah, a place of accumulated heartaches and hopes.