Tulalip Yelabted Talking Circle – This is a group for parents who are in dependency cases with beda?chelh, or have closed a case with beda?chelh. It is for Moms & Dads. The group is led by two parents who have been through the system and are receiving support and training through the Yelabted program. They are there to provide support and resources to parents working towards reunification or just to be with folks who are in a similar situation.
Please welcome Katie Longstreet and Mary Mattern, they are excited and dedicated to making the Talking Circle be a great place for our parents to meet.
Spring Nettle harvesting Photos by Francesca Hillary
Tulalip News Facebook, March 12, 2014
TULALIP, WA – Inez Bill, coordinator of Rediscovery programs at the Hibulb Cultural Center and Natural History Preserve, took a few helpers to harvest early spring Nettle on Bluff Road in Tulalip.
She was joined by Tulalip tribal members Derek Houle and Lauw-YA Spencer. Lauw-YA, a summer youth worker in the Rediscovery program in 2012, discovered she loves to be in the forest helping to gather cultural items.
Nettles are rich in vitamins A, C, iron, potassium, manganese, and calcium and Inez uses them in recipes such as the famous “Hibulb bread” and even in a Fettuccini pasta dish, using nettles which she calls “nesto” instead of pesto.
New research shows that opening a new or expanding an existing tribal casino is associated with a reduction in childhood obesity. The finding is extremely important, according to researchers, because overweight/obesity is a significant problem among American Indian children and adults and because being overweight or obese in childhood has impacts that can eventually become life-threatening.
The research does not prove a causal relationship between casino development and fewer overweight/obese kids, but it does strongly suggest that such a relationship exists. Johns Hopkins’ Department of International Health’s Jessica C. Jones-Smith, lead investigator for the project, says, “This is a strong study that is not as methodologically rigorous as a randomized control trial but that offers better evidence towards causality than most other observational designs.”
The research also shows that the reduction in overweight/obese children associated with casino development appears to be long-lasting. Jones-Smith says, “In this time period of 2001 to 2012 different tribes opened their casinos at different times, and we did look at whether the time that you opened the casino had any impact on our estimate of the casino’s impact on obesity. It didn’t, so it looks like throughout this time whenever you opened the casino you still experienced a decrease in the risk for obesity.” Thus, a tribe that opened a casino in the early 2000s showed the same reduction in overweight/obese children as one that opened a casino five or six years later.
Researchers looked at a total of 117 California school districts that encompassed tribal lands, based on information from the U.S. Census Bureau. Of those school districts, “57 gained or expanded a casino, 24 had a preexisting casino but did not expand, and 36 never had a casino.” Then they looked at BMI (body-mass index) for the children in those districts based on information supplied by the California Department of Education. Forty-eight percent of the BMI measurements for children whose parents identified the child’s race as American Indian or Alaska Native were classified as overweight/obese.
In school districts that encompassed tribal lands where a new casino had been built or an existing casino expanded between the years 2001 and 2012, the risk of being an overweight/obese AI/AN child dropped 0.19 percent per new slot machine. Since there were on average 13 new slots per capita, the total reduction in the risk of being overweight or obese averaged 2.47 percent. Each new slot represented a per capita increase in annual income of $541 and a decrease in the number of people living in poverty. For the average of 13 new slots per capita, this would mean a 7.8-percent reduction in the number of people living in poverty.
The investigators concluded that the most plausible explanation for their findings is that opening a new or expanding an existing casino increased families’ and communities’ economic resources and that in turn led to a decrease in the risk of children being overweight or obese.
Jones-Smith is an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The other investigators on the project were William H. Dow from the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley, and Kristal Chichlowska, an independent consultant in Sacramento. The paper, “Association Between Casino Opening or Expansion and Risk of Childhood Overweight and Obesity,” was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in early March. The project was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Youths’ suicides rattle Indian country: The silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer numbers of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times the average on some reservations.
By Sari Horwitz, Washington Post
SACATON, ARIZ. The tamarisk tree down the dirt road from Tyler Owens’s house is the one where the teenage girl who lived across the road hanged herself. Don’t climb it, don’t touch it, admonished Owens’s grandmother when Tyler, now 18, was younger.
There are other taboo markers around the Gila River Indian reservation — eight young people committed suicide here over the course of a single year.
“We’re not really open to conversation about suicide,” Owens said. “It’s kind of like a private matter, a sensitive topic. If a suicide happens, you’re there for the family. Then after that, it’s kind of just, like, left alone.”
But the silence that has shrouded suicide in Indian country is being pierced by growing alarm at the sheer number of young Native Americans taking their own lives — more than three times the national average, and up to 10 times on some reservations.
A toxic collection of pathologies — poverty, unemployment, domestic violence, sexual assault, alcoholism and drug addiction — has seeped into the lives of young people among the nation’s 566 tribes. Reversing their crushing hopelessness, Indian experts say, is one of the biggest challenges for these communities.
“The circumstances are absolutely dire for Indian children,” said Theresa M. Pouley, the chief judge of the Tulalip Tribal Court in Washington state and a member of the Indian Law and Order Commission.
Pouley fluently recites statistics in a weary refrain: “One-quarter of Indian children live in poverty, versus 13 percent in the United States. They graduate high school at a rate 17 percent lower than the national average. Their substance-abuse rates are higher. They’re twice as likely as any other race to die before the age of 24. They have a 2.3 percent higher rate of exposure to trauma. They have two times the rate of abuse and neglect. Their experience with post-traumatic stress disorder rivals the rates of returning veterans from Afghanistan.”
In one of the broadest studies of its kind, the Justice Department recently created a national task force to examine the violence and its impact on American Indian and Alaska Native children, part of an effort to reduce the number of Native American youth in the criminal justice system. The level of suicide has startled some task force officials, who consider the epidemic another outcome of what they see as pervasive despair.
Last month, the task force held a hearing on the reservation of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community in Scottsdale. During their visit, Associate Attorney General Tony West, the third-highest-ranking Justice Department official, and task force members drove to Sacaton, about 30 miles south of Phoenix, and met with Owens and 14 other teenagers.
“How many of you know a young person who has taken their life?” the task force’s co-chairman asked. All 15 raised their hands.
“That floored me,” West said.
A ‘trail of broken promises’
There is an image that Byron Dorgan, co-chairman of the task force and a former senator from North Dakota, can’t get out of his head. On the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota years ago, a 14-year-old girl named Avis Little Wind hanged herself after lying in bed in a fetal position for 90 days. Her death followed the suicides of her father and sister.
“She lay in bed for all that time, and nobody, not even her school, missed her,” said Dorgan, a Democrat who chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. “Eventually she got out of bed and killed herself. Avis Little Wind died of suicide because mental-health treatment wasn’t available on that reservation.”
Indian youth suicide cannot be looked at in a historical vacuum, Dorgan said. The agony on reservations is directly tied to a “trail of broken promises to American Indians,” he said, noting treaties dating back to the 19th century that guaranteed but largely didn’t deliver health care, education and housing.
“The children bear the brunt of the misery,” Dorgan said, adding that tribal leaders are working hard to overcome the challenges. “But there is no sense of urgency by our country to do anything about it.”
At the first hearing of the Justice Department task force, in Bismarck, N.D., in December, Sarah Kastelic, deputy director of the National Indian Child Welfare Association, used a phrase that comes up repeatedly in deliberations among experts: “historical trauma.”
Youth suicide was once virtually unheard of in Indian tribes. A system of child protection, sustained by tribal child-rearing practices and beliefs, flourished among Native Americans, and everyone in a community was responsible for the safeguarding of young people, Kastelic said.
“Child maltreatment was rarely a problem,” said Kastelic, a member of the native village of Ouzinkie in Alaska, “because of these traditional beliefs and a natural safety net.”
But these child-rearing practices were often lost as the federal government sought to assimilate native people and placed children — often against their parents’ wishes — in “boarding schools” that were designed to immerse Indian children in Euro-American culture.
In many cases, the schools, mostly located off reservations, were centers of widespread sexual, emotional and physical abuse. The transplantation of native children continued into the 1970s; there were 60,000 children in such schools in 1973 as the system was being wound down. They are the parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers.
Michelle Rivard-Parks, a University of North Dakota law professor who has spent 10 years working in Indian country as a prosecutor and tribal lawyer, said that the “aftermath of attempts to assimilate American and Alaska Natives remains ever present . . . and is visible in higher-than-average rates of suicide.”
The Justice Department task force is gathering data and will not offer its final recommendations to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on ways to mitigate violence and suicide until this fall. For now, West, Dorgan and other members are listening to tribal leaders and experts at hearings on reservations around the country.
“We know that the road to involvement in the juvenile justice system is often paved by experiences of victimization and trauma,” West said. “We have a lot of work to do. There are too many young people in Indian country who don’t see a future for themselves, who have lost all hope.”
The testimony West is hearing is sometimes bitter, and witnesses often come forward with great reluctance.
“It’s tough coming forward when you’re a victim,” said Deborah Parker, 43, the vice chair of the Tulalip Tribes in Washington state. “You have to relive what happened. . . . A reservation is like a small town, and you can face a backlash.”
Parker didn’t talk about her sexual abuse as a child until two years ago, when she publicly told of being repeatedly raped when she “was the size of a couch cushion.”
“A majority of our girls have struggled with sexual and domestic violence — not once but repeatedly,” said Parker, who has started a program to help young female survivors and try to prevent suicide. “One of my girls, Sophia, was murdered on my reservation by her partner. Another one of our young girls took her life.”
Stories of violence and abuse
Owens recalls how she used to climb the tamarisk tree with her cousin to look for the nests of mourning doves and pigeons — until the suicide of the 16-year-old girl. The next year, the girl’s distraught father hanged himself in the same tree.
“He was devastated and he was drinking, and he hung himself too,” Owens said.
She and a good friend, Richard Stone, recently talked about their broken families and their own histories with violence. When Owens was younger, her uncle physically abused her until her mother got a restraining order. Stone, 17, was beaten by his alcoholic mother.
“My mother hit me with anything she could find,” Stone said. “A TV antenna, a belt, the wooden end of a shovel.”
Social workers finally removed him and his brothers and sister from their home, and he was placed in a group home and then a foster home.
Both Owens and Stone dream about leaving “the rez.” Owens hopes to get an internship in Washington and have a career as a politician; Stone wants to someday be a counselor or a psychiatrist.
Owens sometimes rides her bike out into the alfalfa and cotton fields near Sacaton, the tiny town named after the coarse grasses that once grew on the Sonoran Desert land belonging to the Akimel O’Odham and Pee Posh tribes. She and her friends sing a peaceful, healing song she learned from the elders about a bluebird who flies west at night, blessing the sun and bringing on the moon and stars.
One recent evening, as the sun dipped below the Sierra Estrella mountains, the two made their way to Owens’s backyard. They climbed onto her trampoline and began jumping in the moonlight, giggling like teenagers anywhere in America.
But later this month on the reservation, they will take on an adult task. Owens, Stone and a group of other teenagers here will begin a two-day course on suicide prevention. A hospital intervention trainer will engage them in role-playing and teach them how to spot the danger signs.
“In Indian country, youths need to have somebody there for them,” Owens said. “I wish I had been that somebody for the girl in the tamarisk tree.”
A contaminated pile near the community of Red Water Pond Road holds a million cubic yards of waste from the Old Northeast Church Rock Mine. Mark Holm for The New York Times
CHURCH ROCK, N.M. — In this dusty corner of the Navajo reservation, where seven generations of families have been raised among the arroyos and mesas, Bertha Nez is facing the prospect of having to leave her land forever.
The uranium pollution is so bad that it is unsafe for people to live here long term, environmental officials say. Although the uranium mines that once pocked the hillsides were shut down decades ago, mounds of toxic waste are still piled atop the dirt, raising concerns about radioactive dust and runoff.
And as cleanup efforts continue, Ms. Nez and dozens of other residents of the Red Water Pond Road community, who have already had to leave their homes at least twice since 2007 because of the contamination, are now facing a more permanent relocation. Although their village represents only a small sliver of the larger Navajo nation, home to nearly 300,000 people, they are bearing the brunt of the environmental problems.
“It feels like we are being pushed around,” said Ms. Nez, 67, a retired health care worker, who recalled the weeks and months spent in motel rooms in nearby Gallup as crews hauled away radioactive soil from the community’s backyards and roadsides.
“This is where we’re used to being, traditionally, culturally” she said. “Nobody told us it was unsafe. Nobody warned us we would be living all this time with this risk.”
These days, this sprawling reservation, about the size of West Virginia, is considered one of the largest uranium-contaminated areas in United States history, according to officials at the Environmental Protection Agency. The agency has been in the throes of an expansive effort to remove waste from around this tiny and remote Navajo village, and clean up more than 500 abandoned mine areas that dot the reservation.
Federal officials say they have been amazed at the extent of the uranium contamination on the reservation, a vestige of a burst of mining activity here during the Cold War. In every pocket of Navajo country, tribal members have reported finding mines that the agency did not know existed. In some cases, the mines were discovered only after people fell down old shafts.
“It is shocking — it’s all over the reservation,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the E.P.A.’s regional administrator for the Pacific Southwest. “I think everyone, even the Navajos themselves, have been shocked about the number of mines that were both active and abandoned.”
Between 2008 and 2012, federal agencies spent $100 million on the cleanup, according to the E.P.A.; an additional $17 million has been spent by energy companies determined to be responsible for some of the waste.
But the scope of the problem is worse than anyone had thought. The E.P.A. has said that it could take at least eight years to dispose of a huge pile of uranium mine waste that has sat near Red Water Pond Road since the 1980s — waste that must be removed before the area can finally be free of contamination.
“The community is frustrated, I know I’m frustrated — we’d like it to go quickly,” Mr. Blumenfeld said.
But before the latest round of cleanup can begin, an application to remove the waste pile must be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which will then conduct environmental and safety reviews. That process will probably take two years, and there is the possibility that public hearings on the plan could extend the process several more years, said Drew Persinko, a deputy director for the commission.
That time frame seems unreasonably long for tribal members, who said that spending so long living away from the reservation has been difficult. So far, the E.P.A. has spent $1 million on temporary housing for residents of Red Water Pond Road; much of that cost will be reimbursed by General Electric, which acquired the old Northeast Church Rock Mine site in 1997, and also its subsidiary company, United Nuclear Corporation, which operated the mine.
As in the past, the relocations will be voluntary. Some residents wondered — as they have for years now — if the land will ever really be clean.
“Our umbilical cords are buried here, our children’s umbilical cords are buried here. It’s like a homing device,” said Tony Hood, 64, who once worked in the mines and is now a Navajo interpreter for the Indian Medical Center in Gallup. “This is our connection to Mother Earth. We were born here. We will come back here eventually.”
Residents still remember seeing livestock drinking from mine runoff, men using mine materials to build their homes and Navajo children playing in contaminated water that ran through the arroyo. Today, the site near Red Water Pond Road holds one million cubic yards of waste from the Northeast Church Rock Mine, making it the largest and most daunting area of contamination on the reservation.
The waste does not pose any immediate health risk, Mr. Blumenfeld said, but there are concerns about radioactive dust being carried by the wind, runoff from rain, and the area’s accessibility to children, who can slip in easily through a fence.
Under a plan being developed by General Electric and the E.P.A., the waste would be transported to a former uranium mill just off the reservation — already considered a Superfund site — and stored in a fortified repository. The estimated cost is nearly $45 million.
“General Electric and United Nuclear Corporation are committed to continue to work cooperatively with the U.S. government, Navajo Nation, state of New Mexico and local residents to carry out interim cleanups and reach agreement on the remedy for the mine,” said Megan Parker, a spokeswoman for General Electric.
The Navajo E.P.A., which is an arm of the tribe’s own government, for years has been calling for a widespread cleanup of abandoned mines. Stephen Etsitty, the executive director of the agency, said he was hopeful that progress was finally being made, but acknowledged that the scope and technical complexity of the operation at Red Water Pond Road was unprecedented.
“We’re pushing and doing as much as we can to keep the process going as fast as we can,” Mr. Etsitty said. “It’s just taken so long to get there.”
On a recent day, Ms. Nez and several other residents stood on a bluff near a cluster of small homes and traditional Navajo hogan dwellings as the wind whipped across a valley that once bustled with mining activity.
The group talked of their grandparents — medicine men who were alive when the mines first opened — and wondered what they would think about Red Water Pond Road today.
“They would say ‘How did this happen? They ruined our land,’ ” Ms. Nez said. “ ‘How come you haven’t prayed to have this all fixed up?’ ”
A version of this article appears in print on February 20, 2014, on page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: Nestled Amid Toxic Waste, a Navajo Village Faces Losing Its Land Forever. Order Reprints|Today’s Paper|Subscribe
Between disputes—even wars—over land rights to the fight for a fair wage, there is no doubt that the coffee industry affects the lives of indigenous people wherever coffee is grown. This is especially true here in Central America where coffee is one of the developing world’s biggest exports. Compacting the affect of coffee on indigenous communities is the threat to their land. Rainforests are cut down to make fields for the coffee while water is contaminated by chemical run offs from herbicides and the curing process. As indigenous people, what can we do to support our brothers and sisters in the Coffee Belt? Well, we can start by buying coffee with ethics but just what do all the labels and certifications mean? Here are four of the most commonly used certifications for coffee and a quick run down of what exactly they stand for:
Rainforest Alliance Certification (RAC)
Created to help combat the destruction of the rainforest, coffee is just one of many products that the Rainforest Alliance certifies. Their environmental standards call for 70 trees (at least 12 must be native species) per 2.5 acres, no altering of natural watercourses, no trafficking of wild animals or irresponsible dumping of hazardous waste.
Children under 15 cannot be hired under the RAC, and coffee farmers are expected to take steps to allow minors to continue their education. However, unless the label reads 100% RAC, as little as 30% of the beans in your bag of coffee may actually be RAC. The origin and growing practices of the other 70% is anybody’s guess.
Organic
Unlike the RAC, at least 95% of the beans in a bag of coffee must meat the USDA’s organic standards to be labeled as organic. These standards prohibit the use of synthetic substances like herbicides and pesticides. While most synthetic substances rarely make it to the consumer (they are either washed off in the processing or burnt off in the roasting) these standards do help the environment and increase the quality of the air, water, and soil that the workers are working in.
Fair Trade
The Fair Trade initiative began as a way to establish a minimum price on a pound of coffee. It’s been estimated that as little as 1 cent of each pound of coffee sold goes to the worker who picked the coffee, and less than copy to the farmer who grew it. As of April 11, 2011, Fair Trade certified coffee guarantees the farmer a price of copy.40 a pound, or copy.70 if it is organic—which still seems like chump change when compared to the copy2-copy6 you will spend on that same pound of coffee. However, the Fair Trade organization also ensures that some of that extra money trickles down to the coffee pickers in the form of a set minimum wage.
Under the Fair Trade label, farmers must follow sustainable practices for disposing of hazardous waste as well as maintain buffer zones around bodies of water to prevent contamination. Water and soil conservation is also stressed.
Shade-Grown Coffee
Shade-grown coffee is simply coffee that has been grown in the shade—under a tree canopy. There are a couple of benefits to shade-grown coffee: first, many swear that it tastes better. After all, it is the traditional way that coffee has been grown. Second, shade-grown coffee is better for the environment because it prevents a monoculture of coffee from occurring. Instead of having acres and acres of just coffee, every few feet a shade tree is planted. This helps cut back on diseases that monocultures are vulnerable too, it’s better for the soil (less erosion) and it encourages birds and other animals to inhabit the area.
However, there is no government or third party certification for shade-grown coffee. Essentially any producer or seller could slap the term “shade-grown” onto their coffee even if it’s not true. Therefore, you can never be sure how exactly your coffee was grown.
Darla Antoine is an enrolled member of the Okanagan Indian Band in British Columbia and grew up in Eastern Washington State. For three years, she worked as a newspaper reporter in the Midwest, reporting on issues relevant to the Native and Hispanic communities, and most recently served as a producer for Native America Calling. In 2011, she moved to Costa Rica, where she currently lives with her husband and their infant son. She lives on an organic and sustainable farm in the “cloud forest”—the highlands of Costa Rica, 9,000 feet above sea level. Due to the high elevation, the conditions for farming and gardening are similar to that of the Pacific Northwest—cold and rainy for most of the year with a short growing season. Antoine has an herb garden, green house, a bee hive, cows, a goat, and two trout ponds stocked with hundreds of rainbow trout.
Take it seriously – if untreated, you and your partners could suffer long-term physical harm
SNOHOMISH COUNTY, Wash. – The number of gonorrhea cases in Snohomish County increased dramatically in the past year. The case total for 2012 was 168, and the number rose to 249 in 2013 – a nearly 50 percent jump. This is the highest incidence of gonorrhea in the county’s history.
Gonorrhea rates statewide have climbed steadily since 2010, but state health officials are unable to pinpoint the specific causes. Several counties, including Snohomish County, have reached outbreak levels of the disease.
CDC estimates that nearly 20 million new sexually transmitted infections occur every year in this country, half among young people ages 15-24. In Snohomish County, about one-third of new gonorrhea cases in 2013 were in young people ages 15-24.
Among sexually transmitted infections, gonorrhea is second only to chlamydia. Gonorrhea spreads through unprotected vaginal, anal, or oral sex with an infected partner. The infection often has no symptoms, particularly among women. Even when a woman has symptoms, they often are mild and can be mistaken for a bladder infection or other vaginal infection. Untreated, gonorrhea infection can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility, and higher risk of HIV transmission. The only certain way to know if you are infected is to be tested.
“Gonorrhea is a serious disease,” said Dr. Gary Goldbaum, Health Officer and Director of the Snohomish Health District, the county’s public health agency. “Fortunately, antibiotic treatment is effective and accessible. However, it is far better to avoid infection in the first place. Take precautions to keep the bacteria from spreading.”
Abstinence is the only sure way to prevent sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea, but risk can be reduced by consistent and correct use of condoms, partner treatment, and mutual monogamy. The Health District also recommends routine screening for sexually active people. Both testing and treatment are readily available locally at doctors’ offices, hospitals, and clinics – call ahead to inquire about fees.
Snohomish Health District (SHD) offers a free confidential service to notify partners of their exposure to gonorrhea infection. SHD provides free antibiotics to contacts of gonorrhea-positive individuals. Call 425.339.5261 for more information.
Established in 1959, the Snohomish Health District works for a safer and healthier Snohomish County through disease prevention, health promotion, and protection from environmental threats. Find more information about the Health District at http://www.snohd.org
YouTube Meagan Baldy is changing Native eating habits one video at a time.
Source: Indian Country Today Media Network
From her home kitchen, Meagan Baldy, director of the Hoopa Community Garden, is teaching people how to cook meals with local, Native ingredients. Baldy launched her cooking series in fall 2013 on YouTube and Facebook to promote healthy lifestyles and agricultural sustainability in her community and throughout Indian country.
This week’s menu features black trumpet, kale and salmon stir fry—all sourced from local Native businesses or the Hoopa Food Distribution Program and Vegi Club shares—a Community Supported Agriculture.
She promotes leafy greens and superfoods, like kale and trumpets, as well as wild fish and game.
“Mushrooms are a great source of vitamin E; they’re full of antioxidants,” Baldy says on her most recent video. “They have a lot of qualities good for us if you’re trying to loose weight; they are a metabolic booster,” she tells viewers. Holding up the kale, she explains it’s a good source of iron.
“I like to take comfort foods we’re used to preparing and add fresh new ingredients,” Baldy told the Two Rivers Tribune. “You have the familiar flavors, plus something new and nutritious.”
Over the past six years, Baldy has converted the diet of her family. “My family, especially my husband, was the meat and potatoes type of family,” Baldy said. “But now they all love kale. They know it goes well with everything. Now they love to promote it, and other healthy foods just as much as I do.”
Beyond her weekly cookng show, Baldy can be found in the Hoopa at K’ima:w Medical Center’s Diabetes Program, and leading short cooking lessons at Hoopa Elementary School. She’s even got some students hooked on kale smoothies, she told the Two Rivers Tribune.
Baldy’s videos are filmed in collaboration with Hoopa Food Distribution, the Klamath-Trinity Resource Conservation District, Hoopa Food Policy Council, K’ima:w Medical Center, Hupa Resource Center and other organizations. Check out her YouTube channel here.
Since November 27, 2013, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) has been receiving public comments on Flint Hill Resources’ request to reduce its liability to clean up drinking water at its North Pole refinery that is seriously contaminated with sulfolane, an industrial solvent used in the production containing gasoline.
The DEC issued a “letter of conditional approval for revised human health risk assessment for the Flint Hills North Pole Refinery regarding the alternative cleanup level for sulfolane in local groundwater,” and a public notice allowing for comments. The deadline for public comment is February 10, 2014.
On February 5, Flint Hills Resources Alaska, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, announced that it would be closing its refinery this summer, laying off 80 employees, and leaving Alaska after contaminating the municipal water supply and water wells for more than 300 families. Company officials cited the cost of cleaning up the contaminated water as one reason for closing the refinery.
Last year, the Alaska DEC established a site-specific alternative cleanup level for sulfolane in groundwater of 14 parts per billion (ppb). DEC decided on that level using new toxicity data and on the advice of state and federal agencies.
But Flint Hills wants a lower alternative cleanup level of 362 ppb, leaving 348 ppb of contamination in Alaska’s waters. According to the DEC’s Contaminated Sites program, Alaskans should not drink water if it has over 25 ppb of sulfolane. “If your water well results showed above 25 parts per billion sulfolane, we advise you not drink the water,” cites a warning on its website.
At the National Toxicology Program Board of Scientific Counselors meeting in December 2011, Dr. Chad Blystone of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences reported that sulfolane is a highly polar chemical that is presumed not to break down and is absorbed by plants (your food).
The sulfolane contamination in the North Pole affects more than 300 wells, and the exposure may last up to 20 years, according to the DEC. Contamination from the plume is estimated to be over 2.5 miles wide and three miles long.
Some studies observe symptoms of neurotoxicity: convulsions, seizures, hyper/hypo-activity, and hypothermia. In a sulfolane inhalation study on animals, Dr. Blystone reported 37 days mortality in monkeys, chronic lung inflammation in all animals, chronic liver inflammation in rats after 90 days, and decreased white blood cells and mortality in dogs and monkeys.
Responding to news of the refinery closure, Rep. Don Young said, “We see companies like Flint Hills shuttering their operations due to deteriorating conditions caused by diminished supplies and onerous regulation.”
Onerous regulations, like cleaning up after your mess?
“This is a sad day for the entire Interior region and Alaska as a whole,” said Rep. Pete Higgins, R-Fairbanks. “We will be looking to the governor for his leadership in the coming days, which will hopefully address the Dept. of Environmental Conservation decisions that forced Flint Hills into making this announcement. This will have far-reaching impacts economically to the Interior. The news hit us hard and fast today, and we will be working with the governor and the DEC to alleviate the impact to the families and businesses affected by the shutdown.”
Rep. Steve Thompson, R-Fairbanks, said, “The announcement today regarding Flint Hills shutting its doors came as a shock. We will continue to monitor the situation as to loss of jobs, groundwater contamination, and the economic impact this will have on our community.”
But Mike Wenstrup, Chair of the Alaska Democratic Party, said what a lot of Alaskans are thinking: “Interior Alaska knows actions speak louder than words: The Koch Brothers are closing the refinery and tossing Alaska aside while choosing to invest hundreds of millions in political attacks. It shows how little they care about Alaska and Alaskans.”
Ann Farris, an engineer with Alaska DEC who served as on the multiagency team formed to deal with the sulfolane contamination said, “This is the biggest plume of sulfolane groundwater contamination ever, and it’s the biggest groundwater-contamination plume involving an industrial substance in Alaska.”
I don’t live in North Pole. I am just an Alaskan who would like our land not to be left contaminated by companies that have economically benefitted from our natural resources. It was sad to read many of Alaska’s so-called leaders jumping on the bandwagon to defend Flint Hills Resource Alaska business instead of being outraged by the fact they want to pack their bags, leave our groundwater contaminated, and then expect Alaskans to clean up their mess.
Myrna Gardner is the CEO of 3R Products and the Managing Member of MGM Properties, LLC. She resides in Juneau, Alaska.
