MOAPA VALLEY, Nevada — Lots of people have dusty fans. Sometimes they
seem to serve no other purpose but to make you feel guilty about your
house-cleaning skills. But something is different in the homes in this
valley just 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. If you run your finger
along the blades of any ceiling fan in this small town, your finger
won’t just be dusty, it will be filthy — caked with black grime.
To understand the black layer that infiltrates even the most
fastidiously swept and dusted home, here on the Moapa Paiute
Reservation, all you have to do is walk to the beautifully maintained
baseball field in the center of town.
From there, you have a direct view across the modest family homes —
with well-used cars parked at odd angles, their windshields practically
opaque with ashen dust — to the four smokestacks of the Reid-Gardner
coal-fired power plant, which first started dumping ash laced
with mercury, lead and arsenic in 1965. The plant, recently acquired by MidAmerican Energy when that company bought NV Energy,
sits just a few hundred yards away from some of the homes on the
reservation. Not many people here have air conditioning, but when demand
in Las Vegas spikes, the plant starts belching dark clouds to keep the
strip cool.
“I’m scared of it,” said Vickie Simmons, a leader of the Moapa Band
of Paiutes Health and Environment Committees. “I don’t like to even look
at it.” Simmons does prefer to keep her blinds down and her curtains drawn,
but that’s not because she actually believes that looking at the plant
will make her ill. It’s because the plant reminds her of her brother who
died at just 31 of an enlarged heart, after working at the plant for
over a decade. One of his equally young co-workers was claimed by the
same disease.
Simmons knows she could move, but this town is home. She is a Moapa Paiute, and the Moapa River Reservation is
her heritage. Moreover, with so many of her tribesmen dying so young,
somebody needs to continue the fight to end the chronic poisoning.
In June, Governor Brian Sandoval signed SB
123, putting the Reid-Gardner plant on the path toward complete closure
by 2017. While a huge victory for the Paiutes, the closure of the plant
marks the beginning of serious work to clean up the uncovered ash ponds
and often unlined landfills which will continue to contaminate the air
and groundwater long after the plant is shuttered. Between 2008 and
2012, monitoring wells for groundwater quality showed over 7,000
exceedances of state standards.
CREDIT: Bill Corcoran, Sierra Club
Looking back, Simmons, who was born in town and now lives within a
mile of the plant, is grateful that her mother couldn’t afford to look
after her when she was young. Simmons was sent away to stay with
relatives during school, and credits her longtime absence as the reason
why she is still healthy while nearly everyone else she knows in the 350
member tribe is struggling with some medical condition — asthma, heart
disease, lung disease, cancer.
“I used to work as a vocational counselor when I first moved back to
town,” Simmons recalls. “I remember sitting at my desk looking through
paperwork and wondering how our little tribe got this big grant for
disabled people, which so many other bigger tribes must have applied
for. Did we really have more disabled people than tribes ten times our
size?”
Despite all of the suffering, and the long and often seemingly
hopeless battle that the Moapa Paiutes have waged against the
Reid-Gardner plant, theirs is not just a story of an underprivileged
community being exploited by a big company.
Even as they prepare to bury another tribe member and their chairman
remains in the hospital for a fifth month with a mysterious ailment, the
tribe is preparing to break ground on the first large-scale solar project on tribal land in
the nation. The 350 megawatt project is expected to come online in
2015, The tribe has signed a contract to sell the electricity — enough
to power 100,000 homes — to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
“Who would have thought the Moapa Band of Paiutes would be supplying
power to LA?” said Eric Lee, acting chairman from the tribe.
Earlier this year, Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, announced that his city would be off coal power by 2025.
Currently, Los Angeles gets forty percent of its power from two old and
infamously dirty coal plants — the Navajo Generating Station in Arizona
and the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.
Lee indicated that if all went well with the first solar project, the
tribe would be interested in leasing more land for renewable energy
development. The tribe owns 72,000 acres, only 2,000 of which will be
developed under the current contract with K Road Power.
The Moapa Paiutes are far from the only tribe with a long and
complicated history with the fossil fuel industry. Across the nation, a
disproportionate number of power plants operate near or on tribal lands.
According to an AP analysis of EPA data, ten percent
of all U.S. power plants are within 20 miles of a reservation affecting
48 different tribes. Historically, dirty energy has been embraced by
communities who need the jobs and often lack the voice to stand up to
industrial scale pollution.
“What amazes me about the Moapa Paiutes is their persistence,” said
Bill Corcoran, Western Regional Campaign Director for the Sierra Club’s
Beyond Coal Program. “Over the course of this fight, the tribe has
buried so many of it’s leaders, but they’ve kept at it. Somehow
maintaining their passion and momentum and bringing up new leaders to
keep the fight going.”
The battle is far from over, though. Even as the suits to make NV
Energy clean up the plant begin, Simmons and her neighbors worry that
MidAmerican Power will bring natural gas development into the area.
“We’ve endured enough,” said Simmons. “We’re developing clean energy and we challenge MidAmerican to do the same.”
Top image credit: Bill Corcoran, Sierra Club
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/08/23/native-american-tribes-push-for-solar-wind-to-replace-coal-keep-out-natural-gas/
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