Introduction: The Infrastructure of Emergency

Abstract

On July 16, 1979, the largest radiological disaster in United States history took place in New Mexico when the failure of a tailings dam at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock uranium mill led to the release of 1,100 tons of radioactive mill waste and 95 million gallons of highly acidic, highly radioactive liquid effluent into Pipeline Arroyo, from where it entered the Río Puerco. Following its course though the Navajo Nation, the irradiated river left radiotoxic sediments and radioactive groundwater in wells and aquifers across Dinétah. Built on land known to be geologically unsound and displaying large cracks as early as 1977, the dam was known by both the United Nuclear Corporation (UNC) and the state and federal agencies that had granted its construction license to be an unstable infrastructure on shaky ground (Brugge, deLemos, and Bui 2011). But this was Navajo ground, and the violence was slow, and the mill produced $200,000 in yellowcake per day, and so the risk of catastrophe was ignored until it was actualized—at which point it was essentially ignored again, overshadowed by the Three Mile Island release that had occurred four months earlier, which had been more spectacular and impacted mostly white settlers rather than Diné. Desultory cleanup efforts by first the UNC and then the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have left the area widely contaminated; as of January 2021, “groundwater migration is not under control” (EPA n.d.).1 The devastating health effects of long-term exposure to radiotoxins continue to impact the Navajo Nation, where they both compound and are compounded by the social and bodily harms of life lived under colonial occupation (Voyles 2015: 4). Thirty years later and 1,500 miles away, the most expensive inland