Toxic Utah: Paying the price
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.
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.
 Timeline
Requires Adobe Acrobat. | |
You can be the first to comment on this story.