It would be far better for the entire world if someone could find a way to un-invent the herbicide Agent Orange. It’s been banned since 1979, because, as a delivery system for cancer, it’s fairly well unsurpassed. We soaked Indochina with it in an effort to kill off the foliage that hid the Indigenous enemy. It killed off American servicemen, including (I suspect) my best friend in the news business, years after they came home. It’s still killing people in Vietnam. And according to some fine reporting from the Associated Press, it’s been making the inhabitants of a small Native reservation in Nevada sick. From the AP (via ABC News):
Left unsaid, and what troubled Marvin Cota’s family deep down, was that his story ended like so many others on the remote Duck Valley Indian Reservation. He was healthy for decades. They found the cancer too late. In the area, toxins are embedded in the soil and petroleum is in the groundwater—but no one can say for sure what has caused such widespread illness.
Until recently, a now-razed U.S. maintenance building where fuel and herbicides were stored—and where Cota worked—was thought to be the main culprit. But the discovery of a decades-old document with a passing mention of Agent Orange chemicals suggests the government may have been more involved in contaminating the land. “I don’t know if I’m more mad than I am hurt,” Terri Ann Cota said after her father’s service. “Because if this is the case, it took a lot of good men away from us.”
According to a 1997 document unearthed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and shared with the EPA, a BIA employee recalled using herbicides containing the chemicals that make up Agent Orange to clear vegetation from the irrigation canals that run all through the reservation. (Until the discovery of this document, it was believed that the herbicides had been used only to clear the roadsides in the area.)
A BIA official told the EPA and tribal leaders that it was long believed the herbicides were used for weed control along certain roads—not the canals—before rediscovering the document. The tribes’ current leaders said they were unaware of either scenario. What alarms them, they say, is that the canal system has greater reach than the two-lane highway that runs through town. Word cascaded down to tribal members, most of whom live along the canals, swam in them, used the water to farm on the edges, and gathered branches from surrounding willow trees to fashion cradleboards and roast marshmallows.
At issue are a pair of abandoned buildings, one of which was demolished, that stored a Whitman’s Sampler of various poisons.
At Owyhee, most of the environmental dangers have been traced to the two BIA buildings no longer in use or demolished. Back in 1985, at the now-abandoned irrigation shop, some 8,000 gallons of heating oil leaked from a pipeline next to the highway. Samples taken from sump, soil and floor drains around the building revealed a mix of the hazardous chemicals that were stored inside, including waste oil, arsenic, copper, lead and cadmium, along with the two herbicides that make up Agent Orange.
There is a long history of using reservation land as a dumping ground for all manner of environmental nasties, from nuclear waste to the lethal cocktail in this very small place, where people have been getting sick while life has gone on in the wider world.
