Toxic Utah: Paying the price

When Chip Ward pondered whether to move his family to Grantsville in 1978, he considered factors like good schools, low property taxes and a small-town atmosphere. And, of course, he wanted to be near the desert that touched his soul and prompted him to leave behind the verdant valleys of Vermont.

It never dawned on him that the desert's beauty also harbored dark, deadly secrets — lands contaminated with residue from chemical weapons and nuclear fallout, air sullied with countless tons of pollutants and water swirling a potent brew of toxins.

From his front porch on Cooley Street, the professional librarian can point to three houses where children had been confined to wheelchairs, another where a child had spina bifida, and yet another where a child was missing a kidney. He can also point to other homes where kids died of cancer. And there was a 32-year-old woman on his block who also died of cancer. All in a small town of only about 4,400 people at the time.

Ward, whose dogged determination to find out what was wrong with the land he loves resulted in the book "Canaries on the Rim," is hardly alone in his suspicions that Utah's environment is contaminated with toxins that are sickening and killing thousands of Utahns.

The late Irma Thomas once documented 49 cases of cancer in her St. George neighborhood, and now her daughter, Michelle, is stricken with a host of ills. Former state lawmaker Bev White points to 14 cases of multiple sclerosis within a two-block area of the Tooele home where she has lived the past 50 years.

Former Monticello High School principal Dale Maughan recalls the leukemia deaths of seven young people who lived within a five-block radius of his home in southeastern Utah.

One was his son, Jon Alan Maughan, who died July 5, 1966, two months before his 17th birthday. The captain of his high school basketball team, Jon Alan used to swim with friends in the pond of water that collected at the uranium mill on the outskirts of this small town of less than a thousand people. There were no fences around the pond, no warning signs and nothing to keep the southerly winds from blowing the tailings dust into nearby homes.

From one end of Utah to another, victims of Utah's toxic legacy tell strikingly similar stories — stories of deceit and complicity by government and industry to bury the truth about the dangers of uranium mining and nuclear and chemical weapons testing, about public safety sacrificed in the name of corporate profits.

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"You learn quickly that the first victim of nuclear weapons or nuclear power is the truth, and the first casualty is the government's ability to tell the truth," said home-grown nuclear activist J. Preston Truman.