Many parts of the Navajo Indian reservation in the south-western U.S. are contaminated with radioactive debris leftover from Cold War uranium mining. There are over one thousand abandoned uranium mines in the reservation. Often water sources like wells and springs are contaminated as a result of this.
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did extensive water sampling back in the late 1990s and early 2000s to find out which water sources were contaminated and which were safer to drink from. They published it, but they never made the data truly available to the public. Especially not the populations that could use it the most – the Navajo people who live there. Basically the only way you could get the data was if you knew who to send a FOIA request to. They’d send you a DVD with scientifically-formatted PDF documents in it. It’s tremendously valuable data (life-or-death data so to speak, especially with the prevalence of contamination-related illnesses on the reservation), but it just wasn’t accessible and wasn’t presented in an understandable format. Read More
