Church Rock, July Sixteenth, Nineteen Seventy-Nine
Near Gallup, New Mexico
Four months before July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-nine, a partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania had frightened the nation into a sustained argument about nuclear safety. The coverage was extensive. The cameras were there. Congressional hearings followed.
On July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-nine, exactly thirty-four years to the day after the Trinity test detonated the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, a uranium tailings impoundment dam at United Nuclear Corporation's Church Rock mill in McKinley County breached. Ninety-four million gallons of radioactive liquid and eleven hundred tons of uranium mill tailings entered the Puerco River.
The contamination traveled more than eighty miles downstream across the Navajo Nation. Approximately seventeen hundred Dine people lived along the Puerco River corridor. The river was their water source. Their livestock drank from it. Some wells in the area had already been contaminated by years of uranium mining and processing. The spill added to that contamination in a single morning.
Church Rock released more radioactivity into the environment than Three Mile Island had. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has documented this. Smithsonian Magazine has documented this. The nation barely noticed.
The reasons are not difficult to identify. The communities affected were rural and Navajo. There was no visible reactor building, no television-friendly drama of partial meltdown. There were contaminated animals dying in the riverbed, and there were Navajo families being told, in some cases days after the spill, not to let their children near the water.
The Church Rock site is now an EPA Superfund site. Cleanup has been ongoing for decades. The full public health accounting of what the spill caused, and what the preceding thirty years of uranium mining had already caused, is still being assembled.
The date is not coincidence. July sixteenth, nineteen forty-five. July sixteenth, nineteen seventy-nine. New Mexico's nuclear history began and nearly ended on the same calendar day, thirty-four years apart.
