FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. (AP) By Felicia Fonseca— Grand Canyon National Park officials are hopeful they have put a long-standing rumor to rest.
For years, people in the area speculated that uranium mining waste was used to construct the athletic fields at the high school at the park, whose students include the children of park employees. Park officials never had found anything to substantiate the rumor, but they wanted to assure the community there was no health risk.
The results of a radiological survey released Wednesday found that radiation levels at the fields aren’t elevated and there’s no indication of uranium mining waste in the soils under the fields.
“There wasn’t any waste dumped there, and this survey proves that,” said park spokeswoman Maureen Oltrogge. “There were only rumors about that occurring.”
No one seems to know how the rumor got started.
Grand Canyon Unified School District Superintendent Sheila Breen first heard it from a maintenance director at the high school. From there, it came up at community forums, when someone got diagnosed with cancer, and she’s brought it up in conversations with Grand Canyon officials.
But no one ever expressed concern to her that it was dangerous to allow children to play sports or for the community to gather on the fields, she said. The district had conducted informal tests of the fields with a Geiger counter and didn’t find anything to worry about, she said.
Still, the rumor persisted.
“Anytime anyone gets sick, even if they just moved here, it seems like it ties back to, ‘I wonder if it’s that uranium thing?’” she said.
The Orphan Uranium Mine located along the south rim of the Grand Canyon (Image source: Grand Canyon National Park)
Community members cited the Orphan Mine on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, just miles from the school, as the likely source of uranium-bearing rock. The mining operation ceased in 1969, and the park service now is working to clean it up.
Stacey Hamburg, conservation program manager for the Sierra Club, said there continues to be a question of where the waste and tailings from the mine went.
Grand Canyon park officials were intent on proving it didn’t go to the athletic fields. For four days last year, investigators took nearly 28,850 gamma radiation measurements from surface locations and radium concentration measurements for soil were collected at 200 locations.
They found the radiation levels didn’t deviate statistically from background concentrations in the area and that the number of measurements reasonably assured that the waste rock would have been discovered if it was used during construction. The public’s health also wasn’t at risk, it found.
“The statistics on it are quite tight, and I do hope this will put it to rest,” said Greg Nottingham, an environmental protection specialist for the National Park Service.
Breen praised the park service for its work and said that although she doesn’t believe the rumor will entirely go away, the survey will help ease people’s concerns.
“You don’t want anything floating out there so serious when there is no foundation for it,” she said. “But you also don’t want to discount their fears unless you had some basis for it.”
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Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
The story didn’t say what the average reading was on the athletic fields and/or as the background radiation. It may be that the background levels are very high due to widespread contamination. Or maybe that is not the case. Rumours are better handled if the information is complete.