Photo Gallery: Poisoned Water
Original source. LA TIMES
November 19, 2006
Oljato, Utah --- Mary and Billy Boy Holiday bought
their one-room house from a medicine man in 1967.
They gave him $50, a sheep and a canvas tent.
For the most part, they were happy with the
purchase. Their Navajo hogan was situated well,
between a desert mesa and the trading-post road. The
eight-sided dwelling proved stout and snug, with
walls of stone and wood, and a green-shingle roof.
The single drawback was the bare dirt underfoot. So
three years after moving in, the Holidays jumped at
the chance to get a real floor. A federally funded
program would pay for installation if they bought
the materials. The Holidays couldn't afford to, but
the contractor, a friend of theirs, had an idea.
He would use sand and crushed rock that had washed
down from an old uranium mine in the mesa, one of
hundreds throughout the Navajo reservation that once
supplied the nation's nuclear weapons program. The
waste material wouldn't cost a cent. "He said it
made good concrete," Mary Holiday recalled.
As promised, the 6-inch slab was so smooth that the
Holidays could lay their mattresses directly on it
and enjoy a good night's sleep.
They didn't know their fine new floor was
radioactive.
Fifty years ago, cancer rates on the reservation
were so low that a medical journal published an
article titled "Cancer immunity in the Navajo."
Back then, the contamination of the Navajo homeland
was just beginning. Mining companies were digging
into one of the world's richest uranium deposits, in
a reservation spanning parts of Arizona, New Mexico
and Utah.
From 1944 to 1986, 3.9 million tons of uranium ore
were chiseled and blasted from the mountains and
plains. The mines provided uranium for the Manhattan
Project, the top-secret effort to develop an atomic
bomb, and for the weapons stockpile built up during
the arms race with the Soviet Union.
Private companies operated the mines, but the U.S.
government was the sole customer. The boom lasted
through the early '60s. As the Cold War threat
gradually diminished over the next two decades, more
than 1,000 mines and four processing mills on tribal
land shut down.
The companies often left behind radioactive waste
piles and open tunnels and pits. Few bothered to
fence the properties or post warning signs. Federal
inspectors seldom intervened.
Over the decades, Navajos inhaled radioactive dust
from the waste piles, borne aloft by fierce desert
winds.
They drank contaminated water from abandoned pit
mines that filled with rain. They watered their
herds there, then butchered the animals and ate the
meat.
Their children dug caves in piles of mill tailings
and played in the spent mines.
And like the Holidays, many lived in homes silently
pulsing with radiation.
Today, there is no talk of cancer immunity in the
Navajos.
The cancer death rate on the reservation ---
historically much lower than that of the general
U.S. population --- doubled from the early 1970s to
the late 1990s, according to Indian Health Service
data. The overall U.S. cancer death rate declined
over the same period.
Though no definitive link has been established,
researchers say exposure to mining byproducts in the
soil, air and water almost certainly contributed to
the increase in Navajo cancer mortality.
The government has never conducted a comprehensive
study of the health effects of uranium mining on the
reservation. But individual scientists working on
their own have documented sharply elevated cancer
rates near old mines and mills. High concentrations
of uranium, arsenic and other heavy metals have been
found in one out of five drinking-water sources
sampled.
Particularly toxic were the "hot" houses built with
radioactive debris.
In every corner of the reservation, sandy mill
tailings and chunks of ore, squared off nicely by
blasting, were left unattended at old mines and
mills, free for the taking. They were fashioned into
bread ovens, cisterns, foundations, fireplaces,
floors and walls.
Navajo families occupied radioactive dwellings for
decades, unaware of the risks.
Over the years, federal and tribal officials
stumbled across at least 70 such homes, records
show. The total number is unknown because
authorities made no serious effort to learn the full
extent of the problem or to warn all those
potentially affected.
After years of delay, they fixed or replaced about
20 radioactive houses and then walked away from the
problem. Navajos continued to use mine waste as
construction material, and the homes were passed
down from one generation to the next.
Not until 2000 did the Holidays learn that their
hogan was dangerous. By then, the couple had raised
three children and sheltered a host of other kin
while the uranium decayed. The resulting alpha, beta
and gamma rays were invisible; the radon gas was
odorless. But the combination greatly increased the
chance of developing fatal lung cancer, according to
a radiation expert who sampled air in the hogan.
"It brings chills when you're told that your house
is like this," said Mary Holiday, now in her early
70s. "All the years that you've lived here ... " Her
voice trailed off.
Unsuspecting, she had gone about her chores in the
Navajo way, clad in the customary velveteen blouse,
long skirt, thick socks and dusty shoes. She chopped
wood for the stove, cooked tortillas and brewed tea.
She set up her loom to weave rugs under a juniper
tree while the grandchildren played dress-up for
hours inside the old hogan.
By the time of the discovery that now torments her,
she had lost her husband, Billy Boy, to lung cancer
and congestive heart failure. He didn't smoke, but
he'd worked in uranium mines by day and slept,
unknowing, in the equivalent by night.
Her grandnephew, too, would soon die of lung cancer,
at age 42. He had neither smoked nor mined. But he
had lived in the hogan for three years as a
teenager.
The dwellings in the Holiday family compound faced
east toward dawn, in accordance with Navajo
tradition. Behind them loomed the mesa, with a pale
green uranium stain that started at the old mine and
pointed down the cliff.
'Where is our guardian?'
More than 180,000 people live scattered across the
region bounded by the Navajos' four sacred peaks.
More than a homeland, it is holy land. The tribe's
creation stories are set here, among the painted
deserts, ponderosa highlands and layered sandstone
cliffs.
The U.S. government appealed to both Navajo
patriotism and self-interest when it asked the tribe
to open its land to uranium exploration in the
1940s. The mining would aid the American war effort
and provide jobs, federal officials said.
Some of the mining companies were conglomerates like
Kerr-McGee Corp. Some were small operators like A&B
Mining, a Utah firm that was the last to mine the
mesa near the Holidays' hogan.
Early on, federal scientists knew that mine workers
were at heightened risk for developing lung cancer
and other serious respiratory diseases in 15 or 20
years. Many did, and eventually their plight drew
wide attention. In 1990, Congress offered the former
miners an apology and compensation of up to $150,000
each.
But pervasive environmental hazards remained.
Starting in the late '50s, government scientists and
inspectors had written memos and journal articles
calling attention to the dangers posed by open mines
and exposed tailings.
But the warnings failed to spark vigorous action.
Pleading lack of funds, officials at the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Indian
Health Service dodged responsibility, declining to
study the health threats comprehensively, much less
eliminate them.
Navajo leaders tried sporadically to force federal
action, usually without success. On occasion, they
withheld information about uranium-related dangers
from their own people, reasoning that there was no
point stirring up fear if there was no money for a
solution.
Efforts to repair the environmental damage finally
began in the 1980s but have been fitful and
incomplete. Unable to agree on a thorough cleanup
under the federal Superfund program, the tribe and
the U.S. government settled for half-measures.
>From 1984 through 1995, the Department of Energy
spent $240 million to cover tailing piles at the old
uranium mills as part of a nationwide program.
Tailings are the fine sand left over when ore is
ground up to extract uranium. They retain most of
the radioactivity and give off large quantities of
radon, an odorless, cancer-causing gas.
But the tailings cleanup, though important, was
limited to the mills. It did nothing to ease the
hazards posed by the abandoned mines.
Over the last decade, the tribe has used money from
a federal mine-reclamation fund to seal entrances
and fill pits at most of the old mines. But the
cleanup was incomplete. At many of the sites,
radioactive rubble lies along cliffs and on
hillsides.
Erosion compounds the problem. Desert winds
constantly wear away the earthen caps at the mines,
exposing chunks of radioactive ore. Gullies eat into
buried pit mines, allowing rainwater to course
through irradiated soil and contaminate groundwater.
Now, with a renewed push for nuclear power driving
up uranium prices, the mining industry wants to
extract more from the still-vast Navajo reserve.
Tribal leaders are resisting.
By treaty and law, the United States is responsible
for the tribe's welfare, Navajo President Joe
Shirley Jr. noted. But the government's response to
the Cold War contamination has been half-hearted, he
said.
"It's an emergency that is not being treated like an
emergency," he said. "Where is our guardian?"
On their own
In 1975, Joseph M. Hans Jr., an EPA radiation
expert, was sent to inspect an abandoned
uranium-processing plant in Cane Valley, on Navajo
territory near the Arizona-Utah line.
Vanadium Corp. of America had operated the plant and
an adjacent pit mine in the 1950s. A successor
company, Foote Mineral, closed everything
down in 1969. Federal mining inspector Howard B.
Nickelson reported that the local manager had
assured him that "the area would be cleaned up. No
final inspection is planned...."
But Foote left behind piles of tailings and mine
rubble.
When Hans arrived, Congress was weighing the
proposal to cover tailings at closed uranium mills
across the country. The EPA was assessing the scope
of the task.
As Hans worked, he noticed a small community of
hand-built houses nearby. He began to worry that the
residents might have used Foote's leftovers as
construction material. A few months later, he and
some EPA colleagues returned with hand-held
radiation scanners, air samplers and
other equipment.
Berlinda Cly was 9 when the inspectors visited the
home where she lived with her parents and eight
siblings. "The meter went BEEEEP," she recalled.
To Hans' dismay, at least 17 of 37 homes tested
contained radioactive ore or tailings.
Hans said he wrote to EPA headquarters in
Washington, D.C., recommending that the agency clean
up the most contaminated homes or relocate the
occupants. "You've got two risks --- gamma radiation
and you've got radon," he recalled. "It wasn't
acceptable."
His higher-ups said no.
"I still felt uncomfortable," Hans said, so he
urged the Indian Health Service to act. The response
was the same.
"Finally, we got the message," said Hans, now
retired and living in Las Vegas. "We didn't have the
money to go decontaminating sites."
Still, he wanted to warn homeowners. Most spoke
Navajo and were uncomfortable with English. So Hans
went back with a translator.
"All we could say is, 'You got a problem.' "
He could offer no hope that the government would fix
it.
Just 200 miles from the reservation, in Grand
Junction, Colo., residents faced the same situation.
But there, the government was moving with urgency to
eliminate the health risk posed by homes, schools
and churches made with tailings from the Climax
Uranium Co.
State health authorities had armed themselves with
research and demanded federal action. The local
congressman, Democrat Wayne N. Aspinall, was
chairman of the House Interior Committee. He held
hearings and helped secure funds for a thorough
cleanup, which ultimately cost more than
$500 million.
The Navajos had no such champion. Nor did they
mobilize politically around the issue. In their
small, widely scattered settlements, people were
only vaguely aware of a radiation problem.
In Grand Junction, canvassers went door to door,
checking for contamination. Contractors replaced
foundations and floors, uprooted trees and cleaned
tainted soil. As a bonus, they upgraded electrical
systems that were not up to code.
The Navajos were left on their own.
Hans made one more try on their behalf in 1977, two
years after his first visit. He recommended that the
Department of Energy clean or replace the nine
most-contaminated houses in Cane Valley.
It fixed only three. Drawing a technical
distinction, the department passed over the other
six for lack of proof that the building materials
came from Foote Mineral's mill, as opposed to the
mine.
Juanita Jackson's house was one of those six.
Despite Hans' warning, she stayed put, stringing
beads for jewelry and weaving rugs until she died in
1992. She was 59. The cause was lung and breast
cancer, her daughter
said.
Jesse Black, his wife and their eight children
remained in their uranium house for 15 years. Black
died of lung cancer in 2000 at age 78. A daughter
was diagnosed with breast cancer at 27.
Oscar Sloan, too, hung on in Cane Valley, raising
three boys. One of them, Hoskey, now 54, says that
both of his parents and his grandmother developed
serious respiratory disease.
"If given a different place to live, we would have,
I guess," he said. "But it was the only dwelling we
had."
More contamination
Similar problems soon became evident in other parts
of the reservation. In 1979, employees of the
tribe's newly created environmental commission
escorted a television crew to the hamlet of
Oaksprings, Ariz., to interview former miners.
In one house, a tribal staffer offhandedly stuck a
Geiger counter against a wall. It screamed.
By April 1980, the tribe had found 16 more
Oaksprings houses with uranium. The tribal chairman,
Peter MacDonald, called together representatives of
Navajo agencies, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs
and the Indian Health Service, and "directed that
the homes be replaced immediately," recalled Harold
Tso, then the Navajo environmental director. "We
were to work together and get a plan."
Tso cobbled together enough federal money to replace
a handful of houses. The tribe evicted the other
families in the spring of 1981. They were left to
find shelter wherever they could.
There was no money to dismantle the condemned
structures. Many still stand, including the log
cabin that Clifford Frank built in the early '60s
for his family of eight. He mixed cement for the
foundation with rocks from the uranium mine where he
worked. Then he invited a Christian Reformed
minister to bless the house.
When the tribe padlocked the cabin years later,
Frank was furious. But there was little he could do.
Frank, a nonsmoker in his 50s, was in the Indian
Health Service hospital in Shiprock, N.M., slowly
succumbing to lung cancer.
A family in the dark
The Holidays had no inkling of a problem.
Their hogan in Oljato had become the center of a
bustling family compound. Dogs and chickens ran
between an assortment of earthen and stucco
dwellings. An array of aging trucks and cars sat in
the dirt.
By the late '70s, Mary and Billy Boy had moved out
of the hogan and into a two-room house 15 feet away
that they painted a bright teal blue.
But the old place wasn't empty. Mary allowed her
niece, Elsie Begay, to move in with her seven
children after Elsie's marriage broke up in 1978.
Elsie and her brood ate their meals on the floor. At
night, they rolled out their sheepskins and went to
sleep. After three years, they left for a smaller
dwelling on the Holiday property.
The hogan wasn't vacant long. Two of the Holidays'
grown children, Daisy and Robert, returned to Oljato
and moved in.
Daisy had taken a husband. He'd grown up on the mesa
where the old mine was. He turned the story of their
courtship into a fable: He slipped one day while
herding sheep, fell down the slope, found Daisy at
the bottom and married her. The uranium stain on the
cliff marked the path of his slide, he liked to
quip.
Robert had taken a bride. Mary was a witness,
signing the marriage certificate the only way she
knew how, by dipping her right thumb in ink and
affixing her print.
The two couples, and soon enough three children,
lived together under the green-shingle roof. From
the front door, they could watch the setting sun
wash Monument Valley's spires of stone in red.
Members of the family took jobs catering to
tourists. The paved road that had first attracted
Mary and Billy Boy to the hogan led to a historic
lodge. They cleaned rooms there and tended the
register at the grocery store next door. They guided
visitors to the rock formations and sold turquoise
and silver jewelry from plywood stands.
In 1989, Elsie Begay's son Lewis died of a brain
hemorrhage caused by a tumor. He was 25. The next
year, Billy Boy died, suffering from lung cancer and
other diseases. He was in his early 60s.
During the 1990s, touches of modernity seeped into
the compound. Daisy and her husband, Frank Haycock,
bought a trailer and hooked it up to electricity.
They even got a TV.
Robert left the reservation to join his older
brother, John, in Salt Lake City, lured by a good
job installing air conditioners and heaters.
But the hogan still had its uses. The Holidays
stored cans of beans, sacks of flour, extra blankets
and toys there, along with garden tools and blue
plastic water barrels.
The door was padlocked, but the children liked to
stand on one another's shoulders and climb through
the windows. They'd tear into the folded clothes and
don them for long games of pretend.
Once a month, Robert's family came down from Salt
Lake for the weekend. There was only one place to
stay: the hogan. Everyone took to calling it "the
rabbit house" because one of the toddlers pronounced
"Robert" that way.
U.S. 'lack of interest'
In 1981, 10 of the reservation's local governments,
called chapters, asked the tribe to inspect houses
for signs of uranium contamination. But "we had our
old nemesis --- money," Tso said. His appeals to
federal agencies were met with "a real lack of
interest."
The prevailing attitude was expressed in a December
1986 memo by Charles A. Reaux, an Indian Health
Service official stationed in the Navajo region.
Ticking off mining-related hazards, he wrote: "Radon
in homes is another significant but resource
consuming endeavor."
The tribe had surveyed 96 homes and found 37 with
radon levels above the EPA's safety threshold, he
wrote to his superiors. Many areas near abandoned
mines had yet to be tested, including Monument
Valley-Oljato, where the Holidays lived.
But he recommended against getting involved because
of the cost. The health service, he wrote, "should
only monitor tribal efforts."
Reaux offered his bosses the same advice for nearly
all of the environmental problems confronting the
Navajos: Keep your distance. "The true risk
assessment of the radiation problems may never be
performed due to the vast cost," he wrote.
In a recent interview, Reaux, now a consultant in
Las Vegas, said that if the same contaminants "were
in the middle of Los Angeles, something would be
done about it because there would be thousands of
people living around them."
But Navajo shepherds moving through the desert with
their herds and the locals in their far-flung hogans
were not numerous enough to warrant government
action. "That's life," Reaux said.
Cancer on the rise
Richard M. Auld Jr. arrived on the reservation in
1982, fresh from his residency in internal medicine
at UC San Diego.
He was posted to the Indian Health Service clinic in
Shiprock, N.M., at the edge of the uranium belt.
Over the next two years, he treated six cases of
stomach cancer. Two of the patients were women, 18
and 20 years old.
Auld thought this highly unusual. He won a two-year
fellowship in gastroenterology at the Scripps Clinic
and Research Foundation in La Jolla, to try to find
an explanation. He worked with William S. Haubrich,
a prominent gastrointestinal specialist.
Their review of Indian Health Service medical charts
showed that stomach cancer on the reservation had
spiked sharply in 1975 --- which suggested, given
cancer's latency period, that something had changed
during the '50s. The increase kept up through the
mid-'80s. Patients typically died within five
months.
The doctors' research ruled out hereditary factors,
medications, alcohol and smoking as possible causes.
But when the locations of cases were plotted on a
map, they clustered around the sites of uranium
mines and mills.
They discovered that incidence of stomach cancer was
15 times the national average in some areas near
uranium deposits and mills.
And the disease was not limited to former miners. In
two western parts of the reservation filled with old
pit mines, stomach cancer was 200
times the U.S. average for women ages 20 to 40.
New evidence shows that gastric cancer rates rose
50% during the '90s among Indians in two New Mexico
counties salted with Navajo uranium mines.
"I don't know quite what to make of it. It's not
what's happening regionally," said Charles Wiggins,
director of the New Mexico Tumor Registry, who
analyzed the data for the Los Angeles Times.
Diet or bacterial infections could play a role, but
so could an environmental insult, Wiggins said: "All
three of those things are what I would want to look
at."
Uranium mining could be connected to reproductive
cancers as well. In 1981, the tribe's health
department reported a sharp increase in breast,
ovarian and related cancers among teenage girls.
Rates 17 times the national average were found.
In 2001, Navajo graduate students and reservation
elders asked scientists at Northern Arizona
University to investigate whether the old uranium
mines might explain the increase in cancers.
Biologist Cheryl A. Dyer was intrigued but
skeptical. "I didn't believe this for a long time,"
she said.
Dyer specializes in the female reproductive system.
So she and a Navajo doctoral candidate, Stefanie
Raymond-Whish, fed uranium-tainted water to mice.
They discovered that uranium mimics the hormone
estrogen, causing changes in reproductive tissue.
Increased estrogen has been linked to breast and
ovarian cancers.
The findings "changed my research," Dyer said. "Now
all I do is uranium." She has discovered that
uranium speeds the growth of human breast cancer
cells. "Instead of killing them," she said, "it
makes them happy."
Closer to the truth
A helicopter rumbled low and loud across the sky
over Oljato in the late summer of 1997.
Mary Holiday took little notice. She had heard that,
under pressure from the tribe, the EPA was finally
gathering data on potential radiation hazards
throughout the reservation, beyond the old mills.
She did not know the copter's onboard scanner had
picked up high levels of radiation on her property.
The helicopter was forgotten until 1999, when a
filmmaker from Chicago showed up looking for Mary's
niece, Elsie Begay.
Elsie, it turned out, had been featured as a young
girl in a silent movie from the 1950s set in Navajo
country. She had never seen it. The man from
Chicago, Jeff Spitz, had come into possession of a
copy and was recording her reaction to it.
Someone mentioned the helicopter and the radiation
sampling. Curious and a bit worried, Spitz called
the EPA when he got home. He eventually pried a map
from the agency. Unfurling it on his kitchen table,
he studied the bright purple splotches marking high
radiation. One of the largest and darkest spots was
over the Holiday compound.
"Look at this!" he blurted. "That's Elsie's house!"
He got a message to her.
Around the same time, Elsie's youngest son, Leonard,
learned that he had lung cancer. He was 38.
Leonard had been 16 when his mother sought refuge
with her children in the Holidays' cozy hogan. He
grew into a handsome man with a broad face, a dark
mustache and glossy black hair. He took up carpentry
and played drums at the Pentecostal church. He
passed a note during services to a young woman named
Sarah. She became his wife.
After the children came along, Leonard installed a
trailer at the Holiday compound. Their daughter was
7 and their son 12 when Leonard was diagnosed. He
sought a second opinion; the doctor concurred. He
got a third with the same result.
"We were supposed to grow old together," said Sarah
Begay. "He just started getting into his Bible. He
told me not to tell nobody at all."
A tainted home
In January 2000, specialists from the Army Corps of
Engineers showed up in Oljato to sample drinking
water for the EPA. They were part of the same
project that had sent the helicopter overhead.
The leader, Glynn R. Alsup, was worried by what they
were finding. One in five water sources tested was
polluted with dangerous amounts of uranium and other
mining byproducts.
"Nobody could believe it was that bad," he said.
Alsup briefed local officials and residents about
his work, and offered to screen homes for radiation.
At Oljato, he visited the Holiday compound and
talked to Elsie Begay. He told her he had permission
from the chapter to sample anything she wanted.
She wanted a check of her aunt's hogan. She knew the
history of its
concrete floor.
Alsup held a radiation detector up to an outside
window. The needle
jumped to the top of the scale.
"I'd gotten readings that high at the entrance to
uranium mines,"
recalled Alsup, now retired.
Leonard and Sarah Begay heard his voice quaver as he
circled the hogan, calling out numbers. Inside,
emissions reached 1,000 microroentgens per hour, 75
to 100 times the radiation level deemed acceptable
by the EPA.
Leonard was losing weight. The pain was getting bad.
A sudden suspicion struck him and his wife.
Mary Holiday and Daisy Haycock were also on hand for
the radiation readings. Daisy called her brother
Robert in Salt Lake City to break the news about the
"rabbit house."
Reluctant to act
Navajo officials in the tribal capital of Window
Rock, Ariz., did not like Alsup informing locals of
the dangers he was uncovering. Alsup only wanted to
help. But the tribe's environmental staff believed
nothing good would come of it. There was no money to
fix the problems.
"It's just a fancy, nice-looking report that's going
to sit on a shelf," Derrith Watchman-Moore, then the
tribe's environmental director, remembered thinking.
Frightened Navajos, she said, "would be coming to
us: 'What are you going to do about it?' "
The situation revived long-standing tensions.
Despite years of appeals from the Navajos, the U.S.
government still had not committed to pay for a
comprehensive cleanup of the reservation. Alsup's
visit to the Holiday hogan was the last straw, as
far as the tribal government was concerned.
The Navajos demanded that the EPA pull Alsup off the
reservation. He was gone within weeks, and the
sampling ground to a halt.
The hogan was left standing. Six months later, in
June 2000, Elsie Begay wrote to the EPA to inquire
about its fate. "The kids were still going
in it," she recalled.
"We recommend that people stay out of that hogan,"
Sean P. Hogan, an EPA official, wrote back after
three more months had passed. "We also recommend
that the hogan be removed from the area so that no
one is exposed to those levels of radiation."
But treading carefully after the blowup with Navajo
officials, he added that the EPA would not take
action unless the tribe asked.
The Oljato chapter appealed to the tribal
government, which in October 2000 authorized the EPA
"to take the steps necessary to eliminate this
risk."
It was not until April 2001 that the EPA destroyed
the place, along with a radioactive house miles
away.
The grand total of government demolitions still
stands at two.
Where the Holidays had lived for decades, the
wrecking crew wore moon suits and radiation badges
for a single day's work.
The U.S. government gave Mary Holiday a
corrugated-metal shed to compensate her for the loss
of storage space.
Uranium's deadly toll
On Dec. 7, 2003, two days after his lung began
bleeding profusely, Leonard Begay collapsed and was
flown to University Medical Center in Tucson. "This
patient lives in Monument Valley, UT, near the
uranium mines," the attending physician noted in his
records.
Leonard knew what to expect. Sarah's father, a
veteran of the mines, had died of lung cancer the
month before.
"He was aware that he was going," Sarah recalled.
"He would talk to me: Take care of yourself. Stay in
the Word. Take the kids to church."
He kept hugging and kissing his family and asked his
wife to lie beside him. Sarah said he instructed her
"to build a house for the kids and then for the
grandkids that he'll never see."
On Dec. 19, he died at 2:50 a.m.
Sarah told her children that they all had something
in common: She had lost her dad to uranium, and she
was certain they had lost theirs to uranium, too.
judy.pasternak@latimes.com
Times researchers Mark Madden and Sunny Kaplan
contributed to this report.
Copyright 2006 Los
Angeles Times