Is cancer Utah mill's legacy?

MONTICELLO — The children called them "sand hills," a name that in retrospect is one of the heartbreaking details about this town's not-too-distant past.

Surrounding the giant hills was a cattle fence, two simple strands of wire with plenty of space for a child to crawl through. So, the children played there, making forts in the hills of uranium mill tailings and in the contaminated water of the ponds and creek. And the grown-ups hauled away the tailings to make mortar for their houses, to pave their streets and to fill the sandboxes in their back yards.

This was in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s, after the "uranium frenzy" of the 1940s and 1950s, and after the federal government abandoned the uranium mill on the south side of town — but before the government finally came back to clean up the site.

"It was a paradise for kids," Bruce Adams remembers.

After the uranium mill closed in 1960, he and his best friend, Alan Maughan, used to swim in the evaporation ponds. In 1966, when he was 16 and captain of the Monticello High School basketball team, Alan died of leukemia.

Forty years later, there have now been 24 leukemia deaths, 77 serious respiratory diseases and a total of 407 cancers — and counting.

"I have two more victims," said Adams on Tuesday when he ran into Barbara Pipkin at the courthouse. Pipkin wrote down the names — a woman and her son who had moved away from Monticello years ago.

Pipkin is a member of VMTE, the Victims of Mill Tailings Exposure, a small committee formed two years ago to carry the banner for the on again-off again battle to get the federal government to pay attention to the health problems of Monticello. They want the government to do a "dose reconstruction" that will determine, as Pipkin says, "what we were contaminated with and at what levels." That includes not only radiation but toxic chemicals, she adds.

This week the committee is having a victory of sorts.

Representatives from the Utah Department of Health, the federal Centers for Disease Control and several other state and federal agencies will be in Monticello to listen to resident concerns. The UDOH and CDC will also release their own findings about the town's cancer rates. The town meeting is tonight at Monticello High School at 6 p.m.

Townspeople aren't sure what to expect. But VMTE member Fritz Pipkin says, "They're not getting out of here telling us we don't have a cancer problem."