FROM: Margaret.Anthony@posttimes.com

TO: David.Dain@posttimes.com

SUBJ: FILING [hed] After the Flood, the Poison

DATE: November 15

[dateline] Las Vegas, NV

Drought, the handoff in water authority from local boards to the federal government, and the Hoover Dam disaster have combined to expose thousands of Las Vegas residents to mercury poisoning. Faced with a desperate shortage, the city has been drinking tainted water from closed gold mines, full of toxic metals.

[subhed] Ashley Moore

The effects have been most drastic for children like Ashley Moore. Ashley is lively one minute, sullen the next. Although she is nine years old she still has difficulty reading, and when after great struggle she does manage to string together a sentence, often she cannot process what she’s just read. Sometimes her mouth hurts so much she can’t chew, and sometimes the skin on her hands and nose becomes irritated and cracked.

In other words, according to Ashley’s fourth-grade teacher Luicka Meier, she shows the signs of severe, chronic mercury poisoning. Meier has had no medical training, but she says she has grown all too familiar with these symptoms in the last two years. That’s how long it’s been since she first volunteered to teach at the school set up in Las Vegas for the children of Hoover refugees, a row of portable classrooms in what was once the parking lot of the Imperial Palace casino. “Half my kids have the learning disabilities or the bleeding gums,” she says. “It seems like all of them have the mood swings, although at this point I’ve almost forgotten what normal kids’ moods are like.”

Ashley’s parents were among the thousands who evacuated small towns below Hoover Dam when the news came that Glen Canyon Dam had failed. They lost most of what they owned in the flood, including identity papers and visas. Congress debated issuing emergency documents, but powerful members of the Immigration Reform Caucus blocked the measures, citing dangers of identity and migrant fraud. As a result they and many others are trapped in the hotels of the Las Vegas Strip, now a more or less permanent refugee city. Often they don’t have enough money for food; they certainly don’t have enough to buy bottled water, even though they know it is probably their tap water that makes Ashley sick.

[subhed] Water from Toxic Lakes

As the Post Times has reported before (see “Pits of Death,” December 30) the closing of major gold mines in the northern part of Nevada curtailed Las Vegas’s water supply even before it lost Lake Mead. Those mines were giant open-pit operations, and when they closed naturally they left behind giant open pits.

The companies that ran the mines once used pumps to keep their holes from filling with groundwater. When mining operations stopped, so did the pumps. The holes filled, sucking water from the aquifer for hundreds of square miles and evaporating it from their vast surfaces. The flow of the Humboldt — the longest river entirely within Nevada and a supplementary source of Las Vegas drinking water — dropped 60 percent in a single year.

Three years of epic drought later, with the level of Lake Mead falling to dangerous levels and the city facing severe shortages, the Las Vegas Valley Water District (LVVWD) launched a hasty effort to extend its northern pipelines to the new, immense, sinkhole lakes of the former mine pits.

When the pipelines were finished, however, tests by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) revealed the water they carried to be loaded with toxic metals, especially mercury, the residue of decades of processing ore.

The EPA sued, and LVVWD agreed to build three new water-purification plants at a total cost of $223 million.

In the meantime the West had a wet winter. Las Vegas was able to shut off the unsafe pipelines while work on the plants progressed.

[subhed] Construction Delays

Six months into construction Congress passed the Western Water Management Act, creating the federal Water Management Agency (WMA) to replace local boards like the LVVWD. Capital projects were supposed to continue without interruption during the switch, but in fact uncertainty about bond authority alone delayed work on the filtration plants for two years.

When construction did start again it was plagued with further delays. For the first few years of the WMA, appropriators badly underestimated the cost of absorbing so many hitherto independent water conservancy districts, forcing the Agency to raid its capital-improvement budget to meet one-time transition costs. Each interruption led to additional delays and costs as crews had to be rehired and equipment reordered or re-leased. The plants that were to be built in two years for $223 million took nearly seven years and $1.1 billion.

[subhed] A Time of Emergency

In the midst of these delays, the Hoover Dam fell. In desperation, local WMA administrators applied for and got an emergency waiver from the EPA to open the pipeline spigots. For four years Las Vegas was in the unusual position of having a water supply EPA-certified as safe to drink even though its levels of dissolved mercury sometimes tested as high as 15 parts per billion (ppb). The EPA maximum safe level is 2 ppb.

[subhed] Poor and Vulnerable

Two of the purification plants are now complete. The third is projected to come online within six months. And in most of the city, mercury levels are finally within safe limits.

But according to Rae Fossella, a lawyer who works on environmental justice issues for the American Council on Water Security, the schools are now full of children whose developing brains and bodies were harmed by years of mercury exposure. Mercury levels in Strip hotels far exceeded those in the rest of the area before the filtration plants started to run, and continue to be unsafe today.

“I don’t want to point fingers without proof,” he says, “but once again, we see toxic materials disproportionately harming our poorest and most vulnerable citizens.”

Even those refugees who can scrape together enough money for bottled drinking water can be exposed if they wash their dishes in tap water or take steamy showers in it. Mercury is readily absorbed through the skin and the lining of the lungs.