"Near the western New Mexico town of Grants, the toxic legacy of Cold War uranium mining and milling has shattered lives, destroyed homes and created a contamination threat to the last clean source of groundwater for an entire region"
"Driving along a stretch of New Mexico Highway 605, just north of the tiny Village of Milan, it’s easy to imagine that this area has always been no-man’s-land. Little appears in the distance except for a smattering of homes and trees peppered by expanses of bone-dry scrub brush. But a hard second look reveals something else — vestiges of a mass departure. Sidewalks lead to nowhere, a dog house sits in the middle of a field next to a mound of cinder blocks, phone lines crisscross empty stretches of land and deserted propane tanks and mailboxes sit perched in front of nothing. Around the bend on one unpaved side road, a neighborhood watch sign stands sentinel where a neighborhood no longer exists.
John Boomer and his partner, Maggie Billiman, roam around a peeling concrete pad, pointing out the location of their old bedroom, art studio and kitchen. As she stands in one corner of what was once a 7,200-square-foot warehouse-turned-home, Billiman describes how she and John would pray to the east as the sun came up behind Mount Taylor, one of four sacred mountains to the Navajo. Billiman then pulls up a sickly looking ear of purple corn that has sprouted in a cement crack, the product of an errant seed blown over from one of the garden beds the couple planted years earlier.
“Do you think it’s safe to plant?” Billiman asks Boomer, referring to the legacy of groundwater contamination caused by a colossal pile of uranium mill waste that still looms in the distance, which is the reason why the couple recently left. He shrugs. “We can try.”"
Alicia Inez Guzmán reports for Searchlight New Mexico March 13, 2025.
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