The danger down below: Cancer cluster raises questions about legacy of toxic waste in Utah soil

Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series that looks at the legacy of toxic waste left by Utah mines.

A lifetime of memories flicker in the shadows of Nelda Lisonbee's back yard.

As she stands in the grass on a warm June afternoon, her long white hair pulled back into a youthful ponytail that curls down the middle of her back, Lisonbee can see the places her children played — the dirt, the canal — and of course, the image of her husband of 54 years always working the ground.

Her little white house sits at the top of a tiny hill in West Jordan, on a street lined with ramblers on one side and factories on the other. She once had a giant garden here — a small farm, really — where she grew enough food to completely feed her family of seven for five years. There were peach trees, pigs and turkeys, all keeping her family alive.

"There's no place I'd rather be than right here," she says as a cool breeze washes over her face.

But then again, sometimes she wishes she'd never lived here at all.

On this street of 20 houses, the neighbors talk about cancer — about all of the people who lived with it, survived it or died from it over the past two decades. While neighbors estimate 15 people on the street have had the disease, at least eight different cases from six families are certain — including Earl Lisonbee, Nelda Lisonbee's husband. Neighbors can't prove those cases were caused by the lead and arsenic laced in their soil by a torrent of toxins sent downstream from the looming mines above. But they still wonder, and to be safe, they stay out of the dirt.

It's been 20 years since the Environmental Protection Agency scraped a layer of contaminated dirt from the neighborhood and hauled it off to a repository on Kennecott Utah Copper property 11 miles away.

But, buried under 18 inches of fresh soil, the heavy metals are still in the ground, and long-term residents such as Lisonbee have often questioned the consequences of living on a toxic hotbed. Has it made them sicker, they wonder? Has it affected their behavior, hindered their intelligence? The questions are echoed across the West, where people from almost 50 communities live on land once contaminated by mining.

The fact is, no one knows the answers yet.

When Lisonbee and her husband moved here 47 years ago, they had no idea that about a century before, miners had dumped tailings — tiny rocks, spiked with lead and arsenic — into the creek that carried water into their yard.