Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West Page 8
In the enthusiasm for the new coal slurry–pipeline technology, some questions often went unasked. “Where does the water come from to run the slurry pipeline?” I asked Lowell Hinkins. How much water does it take to transport five and a half million tons of coal a year?
“We take out 4,300 acre-feet a year.” That is roughly a billion gallons a year, drawn from an Ice Age aquifer called the Navajo aquifer, or “N” aquifer, beneath the Hopi-Navajo lands on Black Mesa. “And we pay a good rate for the water.”
He claimed not to know how much they paid, but later litigation showed that in the original leases, the Hopi got $1.67 per acre-foot and the Navajo got $5. In 1987, almost twenty years later, the Navajo renegotiated the price from $5 an acre-foot to $600 an acre-foot; the Hopi rate was reassessed to $427 an acre-foot. According to Marjane Ambler in Breaking the Iron Bonds, Peabody Coal was also required to pay $1,200 an acre-foot when it used more than 2,800 acre-feet in any one year. The water-table level had dropped from 10 to 70 feet in those Navajo and Hopi communities that use the same aquifer, making their wells and springs unusable. The groundwater level is projected to drop as much as 175 feet by the year 2032. During the public commentary section in the Black Mesa Environmental Impact Statement, from a hearing held in 1988, many people said the water levels were jeopardizing an entire culture. As Hopi resident Marilyn Masayevsa said, “The water is more valuable than the coal.” Her cousin Vernon Masayevsa, a former Hopi Tribal Council chairman, was so concerned about long-term effects on groundwater supply that he started the Black Mesa Water Trust to educate people about what pumping more than a billion gallons a year was doing to their life and livelihood.
By 2001 an intertribal group of young adult Hopi and Navajo established the Black Mesa Water Coalition to advocate for a move away from the region’s fossil-fuel economy and develop a green economy to replace it. Wahleah Johns, the coalition’s solar project manager, pointed out that the promised riches from the fossil-fuel development never materialized for the larger population. Millions of dollars in royalties didn’t change the 54 percent unemployment rate or alter the average income of $7,500 a year on the Navajo reservation.
The Hopi, who depended on the aquifer water for religious, cultural, and daily use, found that their springs were drying up. These are people who are in touch with climate change and have seen changes in their ecosystems and weather patterns. The Black Mesa slurry pipeline eventually came to represent some of the most profligate and indefensible water use in the world, even though the owners insist even now that the water they use comes from a totally different source than the Indians’ water supply.
“The pipeline water comes from a completely different place in the aquifer than the water the Indians use,” Hinkins told me. How is that? “There’s a layer of rock in between. Two different basins entirely.”
“Then why are the Navajo wells and Hopi springs going dry?” I was asking these questions in March 1990 after the slurry pipeline had been operating for more than twenty years, pumping out more than a billion gallons a year. Water holes on the reservation had turned to mud, Hopi springs were drying up, and the Navajo sheepherders had to drive more than twenty miles to a deep-water well at the Rocky Ridge School to haul drinking water. I went with Roberta Blackgoat to the school and watched Vicki help her seventy-four-year-old mother, using a hose and a nozzle something like a gas pump, fill a hundred-gallon barrel carried in the back of her pickup truck. The processes of desertification were already visible. Plants didn’t reseed. Wells didn’t recharge. Drought conditions were lasting longer. As groundwater levels lowered, rain clouds didn’t form and coalesce. The winters were shorter and the summers longer.
“No effect on their water,” Hinkins insisted. “We draw from a completely different section of the aquifer.” This was the stock answer of the slurry-pipeline company, repeated whenever the question of water was brought up. Theoretically, an impermeable layer of rock separated the water used for the slurry operation and the shallow water sources that the Indians used. It was an answer that seemed to belie the nature of both water and rock. The environmental impact statement accompanying the permit renewal application for Black Mesa mining omitted mention of any impact on water, except for the public comments.
After we had walked around and chatted about other water resource projects and he told me that his son, who works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, lives in Kayenta but can’t get permission to build a home, Lowell Hinkins finally admitted there was some connection between the slurry-pipeline draw and the water levels. “In 1985 there was an accident at the power plant in Laughlin. The pipeline and the plant had to shut down for six months.* After that the groundwater level did start to come up again.”
I asked if many visitors come to Black Mesa to see the pipeline and if there were any other operations like it. “People come from all over the world to see it,” he answered. “There’s nothing like it.” Alvin Jack, another worker at the pipeline office, added, “They might have built some others in Russia. And maybe in China.” In the twenty years since the Mohave plant and the slurry pipeline began operation in 1970, the Bechtel Corporation had sold the same coal technology to Russia and China, both countries with a lot of groundwater and a lot of coal. Black Mesa was the template. Bechtel needed the slurry line and the plant in Laughlin to show to new customers. During the Reagan administration of the 1980s, both Bechtel and Peabody Coal had former employees in important energy regulatory positions in Washington.
When I asked about the pipeline terminus in Laughlin, both Hinkins and his colleague corrected me, saying it was Bullhead City, Arizona, rather than Laughlin, Nevada. Supposedly, it is illegal to pump water out of Arizona. But the eighteen-inch coal-slurry pipeline carrying 1.2 billion gallons of water mixed with coal originated in Arizona and ended almost three hundred miles later in Nevada. It disgorged its cargo into huge ponds after the coal was “dewatered” in what would soon become famous as the most polluting coal plant in the country.
While the Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline gained a reputation for being the most profligate use of water in the West, the Mohave Generating Station gained distinction as being the most polluting coal-fired plant in the United States. Built before the Clean Air Act without antipollution devices, on some days during its thirty-five-year life, visitors at Hoover Dam and at Grand Canyon Park, hundreds of miles upstream, would get a soot-filled wind blowing in their faces. The polluting winds moved in a northeasterly direction, eventually obscuring views of the Grand Canyon with a scrim of white haze for more than two hundred days a year. (Kit Owens, the public relations director at the Four Corners plant in Farmington, told me in all seriousness that the pollution came from Los Angeles smog drifting over the mountains.)
SMOG IN THE GRAND CANYON
During one of my trips to visit the infrastructure of the West, I hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up, an eighteen-mile round-trip. I was with several friends, two of whom were experienced hikers and quickly left me behind. I had planned to go only partway, but the views and the geology were so exhilarating I kept going until I was at the bottom. “Vishnu Schist,” I was explaining to Anne Spraker about the basement rock formations of the canyon, almost a billion years old. Anne is a quiet and unassuming librarian, but she is also a cyclist who had once biked over the Rockies facing a headwind. In quiet but unmistakably urgent tones, she told me to take my feet out of the cool Colorado River, put on my sneakers, and turn myself around. “The nine miles up are the hard part,” she warned, “and we don’t want to be climbing out in the dark.” In the following seven hours of what I remember as torturous climbing, I took frequent rests, and as I gazed out over the astonishing multicolored canyons that the river had cut, revealing hundreds of millions of years of time, a question finally became larger than my fatigue: Why is there a white haze over everything?
I expected the remarkable layers of the canyon to be crystal clear. After all, it was a sunny day in March. And it was cold.
There had even been a light dusting of snow on the trail when we started at dawn. I remembered seeing deer hoof prints in the snow. We were hundreds of miles from the nearest city. How could there be something that looked like smog hovering over the Grand Canyon?
Less than a year later a coalition of environmental groups confirmed that indeed the Grand Canyon—America’s single greatest visitor attraction—was covered in smog for more than two hundred days a year. They sued Southern California Edison, Los Angeles Water and Power, Nevada Power, and the Phoenix utility called the Salt River Project—all owners of the Mohave Generating Station near Las Vegas. It had been built in 1969, before passage of the Clean Air Act, and had no scrubbers or antipollution devices of any kind. The prevailing winds blew the particulate matter and gases from burning coal—ash, carbon, mercury, selenium—in a northwesterly direction and put the Grand Canyon directly in the path of its pollution plume. The coal the Mohave plant was burning came from Black Mesa.
Designed and built before information about acid rain, or mercury, or arsenic released in burning coal, or the climatic effects of carbon gas in the atmosphere, the Mohave plant sent millions of tons of carbon and sulfur dioxide into the pristine air of the Southwest. Most people never saw the equally damaging environmental effects that came from extracting coal from lands that could not be reclaimed and groundwater that could not recharge from rainfall. In a desert climate there is not enough rainfall for seeds to germinate to reclaim the strip-mined land. Eight to ten inches of annual rain is not enough water to recharge the aquifer. A study done by the Ford Foundation for the National Academy of Sciences suggested that these lands be considered a National Sacrifice Area. The question remained: Whose sacrifice and for what reasons?
Today the Mohave plant no longer operates. It closed in 2006 after thirty-six years of operation. Las Vegas no longer gets any electricity from the plant, nor does Phoenix or Los Angeles. The operating utility owner, Southern California Edison, determined it was too costly to bring it up to current environmental standards. A visitor to Laughlin today sees the Mohave Generating Station behind a chain-link fence, wrapped in scaffolding and ready for demolition. By virtue of the Internet anyone can see a video of the demolition of its five-hundred-foot smokestack. The power plant, however, was on a bluff outside of Laughlin, so the gambling town is undisturbed by the closed power plant.
The Mohave plant should be seen as the cautionary story for Peabody Energy’s current extravagant claims for “clean coal” technologies. Many experts consider clean coal an oxymoron, and the insistence on its viability raises ongoing questions about the true costs of sustaining unsustainable cities within the global phenomenon of climate change.
Although Peabody says it has reclaimed thousands of acres of strip-mined land, this is not the scene from an airplane. The replanted acres are near roads, and they are replanted with oat grass, not an indigenous plant. The contours of the land have taken on unnatural forms. When seen from plateau overlooks, acres and acres of gray land stripped of topsoil and vegetation stretch to the horizon. Whole valleys and canyons have disappeared into the dragline buckets. Thousands of Anasazi archaeological ruins also disappeared into the slag piles.
Laughlin, like Las Vegas, is disconnected from the source of its growth. It is still considered one of those western miracles, brought into existence by individual ingenuity and sheer gambler’s luck. Another version holds that it is a by-product of the new cowboy and Indian wars, resource wars where the cowboys are now lawyers in expensive suits.
There is no better example of the cowboy lawyers than John Boyden. He had a background in Indian law before becoming the Hopi’s tribal lawyer in 1951. He understood that when it came to Indians, the law was plastic and could be shaped according to new needs and new industries. The water use for the slurry pipeline represented the first sale and marketing of Indian water rights. The removal of the Navajo from what were renamed Hopi lands marked the largest Indian removal of Indians since the 1880s. It was all done legally in what many called legal theft. Boyden was one of the few people who had the time, ambition, legal background, and corporate backing to go back into the tangled history of Indians and white settlers in northern Arizona and New Mexico to figure out how to finally separate the Hopi and Navajo from the mineral resources that lay beneath their lands.
According to legal definition, “An Indian reservation consists of land validly set apart for the use of Indians, under the superintendence of the government, which retains title to the lands.” In other words, the best place to determine use of resources beneath Indian lands is not with the Indians themselves, but in Washington, DC.
*The 1985 accident in Laughlin was so serious that six people died and another ten were seriously burned when a reheat pipe at the Laughlin plant exploded, releasing high-pressure superheated water into the plant’s control room with such force that it knocked down a wall and sealed the exit door shut. Later investigation showed that the plant was heating water at higher than recommended levels.
CHAPTER 5
GILDED AGE LAND GRABS
In the 1880s the great opportunities for great wealth in America lay in land development, mining, and opening public lands in the West to Anglo settlement. The conditions for success required political corruption, Wall Street speculation, and many wild moneymaking schemes, not so different from our own era, which some journalists have called the New Gilded Age.
Chester Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States, was an accidental president, but he was no stranger to turning public service into private wealth. One of the least studied of American presidents, his résumé included training as a lawyer; a rise to political prominence as a protégé of Senator Roscoe Conkling, the powerful Republican machine boss in New York; and his appointment as supervisor of the Port of New York, a patronage job that transformed him into a wealthy man. He became a vice presidential candidate only because the fractious Republican convention of 1880 could not come to agreement among the reformer delegates who wanted a government civil service and the patronage bosses. “To the victor belongs the spoils” was the motto of Conkling’s machine.
Though reformer John Garfield of Ohio was selected as the presidential candidate, Conkling won out on the choice of vice president. Chester Arthur, Chet to his friends, became the vice presidential candidate. Garfield quickly moved Arthur to the sidelines, where he intended to keep him. But destiny revealed another unfortunate outcome for Garfield. Four months after his presidential inauguration, Garfield was shot in a Washington, DC, railroad station, en route to give a speech in Massachusetts. (Conkling was accused of being implicated.) After lingering for two and a half months—the fatal blow was that his doctors did not wash their hands and he got a postwound infection—he died in September 1881. “So Chet Arthur is president,” marveled one senator at the improbability of Chester Arthur in the Oval Office.
In fact, Arthur did not rush to inhabit the Oval Office. He took over the presidency but refused to occupy the White House because it was lacking in elegance and not up to his Gilded Age standards of conspicuous wealth. He rented an opulent mansion at taxpayer expense and called in his New York decorator, Louis Tiffany, to remove all the furniture and undertake a thorough redecoration of the White House. The preexisting furnishings—some of which dated back to John Adams—were loaded into twenty-four wagons and sold at auction. (Jackie Kennedy retrieved some of them during her restoration project in the 1960s.) He ordered new china and glassware. He brought a French chef from Delmonico’s, one of New York’s famous restaurants, to supervise the kitchen, and he stocked the wine cellar with imported French wines. He entertained lavishly and often. The guests at his fourteen-course dinners were political bosses, wealthy industrialists, military men, lobbyists, and representatives of European royalty, one of whom was the American representative for King Leopold of Belgium.
Always a fastidious dresser, he had eighty-two suits hanging in his White House closet. After a luxurious vacation paid
for by the king of Belgium, President Arthur gave the United States the dubious distinction of becoming the first sovereign nation to give diplomatic recognition to the Congo Free State, King Leopold’s spurious claim to a huge chunk of Africa that was later renamed the Belgian Congo. Only decades later did the world learn that the Belgian Congo was Leopold’s private real estate deal from which he extracted millions in rubber and gold and enslaved or killed an estimated 6 million African laborers. As Adam Hochschild points out in King Leopold’s Ghost, the money did not go to the Belgium treasury, but went instead to the king’s personal bank accounts. The Belgian Congo was a fictitious country imposed on Africa by the king in order to extract a personal fortune.
In America a similar fever for land and mineral wealth gripped speculators as well as the compulsion to contain nomadic Natives onto fixed reservation lands and to remove them from lands that could be valuable for farming, ranching, or mining. Among Arthur’s dinner guests were investors who were willing to pay for access to public lands in the western territories. Oklahoma’s Indian Territory, for example, was especially prized. Arthur authorized the opening of five hundred thousand acres of Creek and Winnebago lands in Oklahoma to speculators, homesteaders, and ranchers. Although his act was declared illegal after Arthur was out of office, the displaced Winnebago and Creek Indians, removed to Oklahoma by treaty and guaranteed their lands “in perpetuity,” were overwhelmed by a flood of white settlers. They had no redress.