COVE, Ariz. – Hundreds of abandoned uranium mines and mine waste piles on the Navajo Nation have for decades leached cancer-causing elements into the watershed around Cove, Arizona.

And so the two words used by Navajo Nation Cove Chapter President James Benally to describe the designation of the Lukachukai Mountains Mining District as Superfund site were “historic” and “monumental.”

The Environmental Protection Agency announced the latest listing to the National Priorities List on March 7. Officials from EPA offices in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco attended a meeting Friday in Cove alongside Navajo Nation officials to celebrate the designation.

“We have a community that has pleaded and has begged for a cleanup that meets their needs,” said Amber Crotty, a delegate of the Navajo Nation Council. “They’ve gone through decades of alternatives, of remediation, and not all of that has been successful.”

The designation will unlock a trove of funding to remediate the environmental impacts of uranium mining. Residents of the region continue to suffer health problems stemming from exposure to the mine waste.

Beginning in 1944, private companies extracted 30 million tons of uranium ore from Navajo lands for about 40 years. Mining for uranium and vanadium began in the Lukachukai mountains in 1949, and more than 800,000 cubic yards of mine waste remains in piles and scattered throughout the district.

Every family in Cove has experienced health problems firsthand from the residual mining pollution, Benally said. Residents come into contact with the toxic heavy metals through myriad avenues, including the water they drink, the meat they eat, the material with which they build their homes.

The U.S. EPA and the Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency have identified 523 abandoned uranium mines within the confines of the nation.

The Northern Abandoned Uranium Mine Region, which includes the Lukachukai district as well as mines and waste piles across the Four Corners, contains 229 mines. So far, remediation is financed largely by what can be recovered from parties responsible for the pollution. EPA has established and recovered money from the parties for 139 of the 229 mines, although the agency now can cover the cost of cleaning up sites for which no specific responsible party has been identified.

“We can’t go back and change the fact that mining happened here,” said Kenyon Larsen, an EPA task order contracting officer working on the site. “We can move forward.”

For years, tribal officials have fought for the designation of the Lukachukai district as a Superfund site. The hazard ranking system used by EPA to determine which sites qualify for the funding takes population into account.

Given the sparse and scattered communities in the rural corner of Arizona, the Lukachukai Mountains struggled to rise to the top of the priority list, said EPA Region 9 Administrator Martha Guzman.

The residents of Cove live in the shadow of the 2015 Gold King Mine spill.

When a mistake by EPA contractors in Silverton, Colorado, sent 3 million gallons of water laden with heavy metals into the nation, much of the community lost confidence in the agency.

“It was hard to hear what happened up in Silverton,” Crotty said. “It was hard to hear that that was a U.S. EPA subcontractor. … We will not have that here in the Cove community. The community still believes that U.S. EPA is a good federal partner … but I will make sure there is not a renege on the promises you’ve made to the community.”

The establishment of a mining district as a Superfund site – a disparate assortment of sediment and waste scattered throughout a region – rather than a confined site is rare. The EPA modeled the Lukachukai district after the Bonita Peak Mining District, which surrounds Silverton and was established after the Gold King spill.

The new designation kicks off a yearslong process in which the EPA will study the impacts of mining, identify solutions and execute approved plans.

The funding in the first settlement – a $1 billion agreement in 2014 with Tronox Inc., the successor of Kerr-McGee Corp. – was not enough, Benally emphasized.

“But with this NPL, that ensures that whatever funding that we're lacking, it’s going to cover it,” he said.

rschafir@durangoherald.com