Stimulus funds bring clean water to Indian Country

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. — The road from the Navajo community of Sweetwater to Red Mesa is unpaved and rugged but well traveled.

Twice a week, about 100 residents on the outskirts of Sweetwater load up 55-gallon drums and drive 12 miles so that they can have clean drinking water for themselves and their livestock. Other water sources closer to home exceed standards for arsenic.

“They say water is life, and that’s true,” said Sarah Lee, administrator of the Navajo Nation’s Sweetwater Chapter. “It’s hard when it’s really not accessible right here at your fingertips, having water in your home.”

Federal stimulus spending announced this week may end the long trek for water in Sweetwater and dozens of tribal communities across the nation.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said Thursday that $90 million in funding will help eliminate unsafe water sources, build infrastructure, and create jobs in American Indian and Alaska Native communities.

Nearly 10 percent of homes in tribal communities lack access to safe drinking water, forcing many residents to haul water long distances or rely on unregulated or contaminated sources. By comparison, less than 1 percent of homes in non-Native communities are without a safe water source, Jackson said.

The funding provides for 95 wastewater and 64 drinking water projects that will benefit 30,000 homes, she said. Alaskan communities are set to get nearly $28 million of the stimulus funding. The Navajo Nation that extends into New Mexico, Utah and Arizona will see the largest chunk of the funds: $13.3 million that will serve 4,577 homes.

The 30 projects on the Navajo Nation — the country’s largest Indian reservation — range from septic tank and drainfield upgrades to improvements at wastewater treatment facilities. The funding also includes $3.1 million for the first phase of a pipeline project from Shiprock, N.M., to Sweetwater. That alone will serve 1,900 homes on the reservation where 30 percent of residents don’t have safe, piped drinking water.

The first of eight phases of the project will connect four public water systems in Sweetwater and three other Navajo communities.

Until then, residents of Sweetwater, about 20 miles from the Four Corners, will have to keep hauling water. Many perform the task before sunrise or after dark to beat the crowds.

They line up at an old trading post where a well provides them with water at no cost. But the travel takes a toll on their vehicles, and Lee said the water often freezes during the winter.

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority has promoted subdivisions to lower the cost of connecting residents to water systems. But traditional Navajos who prefer to live in scattered housing miles from their neighbors have opposed the idea.

In many Alaskan native villages, the environment greatly contributes to the lack of access to water or wastewater facilities. Paula Vanhaagen of the EPA’s water and watersheds office in Seattle said many villages are in the arctic and remote parts of Alaska and don’t have roads. Rivers that flow in the summer freeze over the in winter, and it can be expensive to get construction materials to the villages, she said.

“We’re doing much better,” she said. “There’s been a continuous upgrade over time, but there are communities that do not have plumbed toilets and so on.”

Projects for Alaskan communities range from installing pipes for water and sewage, to upgrading water treatment plants and completing lagoons.