n a hot, windy morning in early June, during a drive to visit a sacred spring at the village of Mishongnovi, Masayesva gestures out the window at some of the tightly clustered stone homes. None of them has running water, he says. Of the 12 Hopi villages on or near Black Mesa, only four have even rudimentary plumbing to bring drinking water into homes. All the others rely on communal wells or pump houses to access their share of the N aquifer's bounty. Behind the pueblos, outhouses crowd the cliff edges. Most residents collect their water in five-gallon buckets, which weigh more than 40 pounds when full. The labor of hauling those buckets naturally enforces a conservation ethic. Americans use, on average, 40 gallons of water daily, while the Hopi average falls below eight gallons. With about 10,000 Hopi living on the reservation, that comes to 80,000 gallons, or less than 3 percent of what Peabody pumps every day.
The spring at Mishongnovi is the site of the Hopi's nine-day Flute Ceremony, which takes place every two years and which only Hopi can attend. It is held in August to encourage rain and healthy crops of corn. (On alternate years, the Snake Ceremony is performed instead.) But the spring is nearly dry, with just a small puddle of algae-covered water at the very bottom of a large circular depression ringed with rocks. Much the same thing can be seen in any of the Hopi villages or on the Navajo portion of the mesa to the north, says Masayesva. The springs are low or dry everywhere, he says. And he and many other residents on Black Mesa are convinced that Peabody's use of the N aquifer's water for the coal slurry is the main cause.
"I recall when the land was plentiful with vegetation and there were natural springs in various areas near Peabody," says Mary Gilmore, a Navajo woman who testified at an Interior Department hearing in 1989. "Now the land is dry....Other natural springs, close to the mining area, are becoming dry and the vegetation is...being destroyed."
Beth Sutton says that the Peabody company is trying to cooperate with the tribes. "We're moving to look aggressively at alternatives," she explains, "but our lease agreement gives us the right to use this water. This is the most well-monitored aquifer in the country, and study after study has shown that we are not harming it."
At least that is what some studies have shown, including those funded by Peabody. Sutton declined to respond to questions about government data that show plunging water levels in Black Mesa's wells. The company's standard argument seems straightforward: It is extracting only a tiny portion of the aquifer's water. But Abe Springer, a hydrogeologist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, says that the company is using the wrong criterion to judge the aquifer's health. More important than the total amount of water stored in the aquifer, says Springer, is the amount of water that flows out to the surface through the aquifer's springs. Peabody may be removing just a fraction of the aquifer's stores, which contain an estimated 130 trillion gallons of water, but there is a real risk that the pumping might disrupt the outflow from the aquifer. Peabody has refused to comment on Springer's assessment.
"It's estimated that the natural discharge is 13,000 to 18,000 acre-feet per year," says Springer. "And Peabody pumps somewhere around 4,000 acre-feet per year. So if you look at it that way, it's pretty significant." For thousands of years before Peabody began pumping, rainfall slowly replenished the water flowing from the aquifer's springs. That is not the case now, in part because of the region's recent drought, and no one knows how the additional losses from pumping will affect the aquifer's natural balance of discharge and replenishment.
Peabody's mining also chokes off another source of water, says Springer. The company has dug more than 200 shallow ponds, or impoundments, to prevent the runoff of mining waste when it rains. But the impoundments dam water that would otherwise flow into the many washes that etch the Hopi and Navajo reservations. They also exacerbate the effect of the drought, says Springer, and contribute to the lower water table and dry wells that are parching Black Mesa.
Other studies have found serious signs of trouble. In 2000, NRDC published a lengthy assessment of the best available data on the aquifer. The report found that since Peabody began pumping, water levels in some wells on Black Mesa have dropped by 100 feet and the flow from most springs has decreased by more than 50 percent. While it's difficult to gauge how much the drought has contributed to the aquifer's decline, these measurements exceed the limits set by the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which is responsible for overseeing tribal water and mineral resources. (The office did not respond to several requests for interviews.) NRDC's David Beckman says the government has failed to enforce its own regulations regarding the responsible use of the aquifer, despite substantial evidence of damage. "To me these are significant legal violations," Beckman says, "and they continue to this day." A coalition of groups, including NRDC and the Sierra Club, has threatened to sue the Interior Department for its failure to act.
