You might see Elizabeth Johnson’s semi-tractor trailer traveling the U.S. interstate highways, especially between Colorado and Nebraska.

And if you do see it, there’s no way you can miss Johnson’s message.  The entire trailer carries the simple direct message: “Invisible No More.”

It’s a message meant to bring attention to the plight of missing and murdered Indigenous women whose cases are unsolved.

Johnson — a member of the Ho-Chunk Tribal Nation of Nebraska — has been spreading the message since 2017.

“My message as a woman is, if any woman sees this semi-truck and needs help, me and my dog Delilah will help you to safety,” Johnson said. “Knock on my semi-truck door.”

There are an estimated 506 cases of missing or murdered indigenous women across the country. And that’s likely an undercount due to bad data, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute. Of that number, 128 of the women are considered missing, while 280 were known murdered. Another 98 are cases of unknown status, according to the Urban Indian Health Institute.

The group surveyed 71 police stations and one state agency and found 5,712 missing and murdered Indigenous cases were reported in 2016. But of those, only 116 were logged in a Justice Department database.

According to the National Institute of Justice, as of May 2023, 84.3% more than 1.5 million American Indian and Alaskan Native women experience violence in their lifetime. Victimization of American Indian and Native woman is 1.2 times higher than white women.

Johnson and her family moved to Winnebago in Nebraska when she was five, and she was raised as a tribal member of the Nebraska Ho-Chunk tribe and given the name Rainbow Woman.

She left home when she was in her preteens and has kept moving.

“I don’t know if God would bless me to go further in my trucking industry or this is the end of my travels, but when I see family, I want to make an apple pie,” Johnson said.

Nebraska is always her home, she said, but so is Colorado because her son and grandchildren live in Brighton. She spends half her time with them.

Johnson started her mission because she was a victim of abuse herself. It was a two-way abusive situation, she said:  He was abusive to her, but she fought back.

“He would put me on his lap with a knife at my throat,” Johnson said. “It was a toxic relationship. I left, and I was done. As soon that door closed, God, or wherever you want to believe, started to open other doors for me.”

She had worked as a construction driver in the summer and fall. She was laid off in the winter but guaranteed to return in the summer. Even so,  she said she needed a more consistent job, and she needed reliable transportation to do that. She found a pick-up truck she liked and approached a bank looking for a loan.

“They never wanted to give me a loan, but I told them if you don’t give me a loan, I’m going to go somewhere else,” she said. “This is income that comes to your bank and comes back out. They gave me the loan, and I purchased a brand-new Silverado. When I purchased the truck, that was when I left the man. I thought I was going to die leaving him and was heartbroken, but I left.”

Johnson said she drove the Silverado for a while, and although it was nice to drive a cute truck, she was still broke.

“I went back to the bank and asked for a loan to trade off the Silverado for a used semi to make money,” she said. “I told the banker it was a win-win. I could make money at the same cost Silverado. The woman sat across from me and said, ‘I’m going do it for you’. Usually, they didn’t give business loans.”

That opened a door for Johnson, and she started her trucking company, Ho-Chunk Trucking, in 2017. After a couple of years, she was able to upgrade and buy a new semi-truck. Then, after a couple’s years of hauling other companies’ trailers, she took out another loan and purchased her own trailer in 2020.

“I wanted my own trailer because women in the industry are treated badly. It’s a whole other story,” Johnson said.

Johnson said that once she had a trailer, she started thinking about it as a platform for other Native American women.

“I went through hell and back. What is the message I wanted to say to the world?” she said.

Johnson decided to do a custom wrap on her trailer with a message about Indigenous women. She also included pictures of her family dressed in regalia and a friend dancing pow-pow and included information about 500 gone missing or murdered women.

One photo, showing a woman with a red hand over her mouth, is her niece Jalisa Horn who was left for dead from abuse and had to crawl to get help. Horn agreed to add her photo to draw attention to the message.

Gov. Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 22-150,  a law requiring official reports of missing indigenous people within eight hours. Missing children must be reported to law enforcement within two, under the law.

The act also requires the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to work on investigating missing or murdered indigenous persons and also work with federal, state, and local law enforcement to effectively investigate the cases.

In addition, an alert system and an agency called Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives are responsible for reporting and improving the investigation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and addressing injustice in the criminal justice system.

This story was previously published by Colorado Community Media and is being republished from AP StoryShare.

The post Brighton trucker offers a message and sanctuary for Indigenous women appeared first on Buffalo’s Fire.

Until recently, however, the cause of the fire remained a mystery. In early June, the Boulder County Sheriff’s office released the results of its investigation into the fire’s origin, identifying two sparks: a seemingly dormant ember blown from an outdoor firepit in Marshall, and a downed Xcel Energy power line a few hundred feet south. The findings resolved one major question about the Marshall Fire, though other challenges, from building codes to home insurance disputes, still smolder for the residents.

High Country News spoke with Ashley Stolzmann, the former mayor of Louisville and a current Boulder County commissioner, to understand the significance of the investigation, how to prepare for the next wildfire, and the details behind a lawsuit seeking damages from Xcel Energy for its role in starting the inferno.  

Stolzmann has amassed an unusual amount of experience when it comes to responding to climate disasters. Her first month as a Louisville city council member coincided with the 2013 Front Range flood, the largest rain event on record in Colorado, which destroyed 262 homes in Boulder County. That earned her an appointment to the Mile High Flood District by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, D, in 2020. A year later, the Marshall Fire forced then-Mayor Stolzmann and her husband to evacuate alongside 40,000 other area residents as she juggled the city’s disaster response. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

High Country News: You were mayor of Louisville during the blaze in 2021 and still live there today. As the fire bore down on the city, residents were sending you texts for information you didn’t have. At the same time, you had to lead the city’s emergency response while making your own decisions about what to save from your home as you evacuated. Could you walk me through what happened that day?

Ashley Stolzmann: I live in Louisville, very close to where the fire was extinguished. In my family, we sort of divided up the tasks that day. I have a great partner and he took care of evacuating our house and worrying about our personal life. That allowed me to go over to emergency operations and just focus on the city stuff. So, my partner really helped me to split my personal life apart from what I was working on for the community. And It was really hard, because neighbors would text me or call me and ask, “Is our neighborhood still here? Is our house OK?” And I didn’t know. It was important that I followed all the evacuation orders that we set because I couldn’t break the rules myself. I actually found out from a neighbor that did break the evacuation rules that our house was still standing. 

HCN: What has the Marshall Fire come to mean for Louisville and Boulder County? 

AS: For the most part, it really has brought people together and shown them the goodness in others: how people really want to help, and continue to want to help. Early in the recovery, some of the community had gas and power and shared their homes with those that didn’t. People were offering showers and heated beds and food. The food sharing has gone on for the whole year and a half, where folks cook dinners for one another and feed each other. Just a lot of caring for one another and resilience. But the fire has also set others back and forced some hard choices. I’ve heard from residents who had to use their children’s college savings account to rebuild their house. There are people that had to decide they’re not rebuilding, just because of their financial situation and their retirement plans. And there are some who didn’t want to rebuild just from the pain of the whole thing. Overall, people have really shown how supportive and resilient they are, what a strong community this is.

HCN: Based on what we know from climate science, this likely won’t be the last Front Range fire catapulted by extreme winds and drought conditions. What have the county and state done to prepare for the next one? 

AS: We’re really ramping up the amount of mitigation we’re doing in the forest and in the grasslands. The community was generous and passed the new tax for fire mitigation that has allowed us to unlock more federal grants because, for any FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) grants, you must have local money to match it. We have done more controlled burns this year, we’ve mitigated more acres of forest land, and we’re grazing areas heavily with livestock to cut down on fuel. But we’re trying to do that with more regenerative practices that keep the water and moisture in the soil. Then came this rainy spring, and we know that means even more fire fuel to manage later down the line. We’ve also made changes to our evacuation system and made changes to the way we dispatch firefighters so that we can try to put out fires faster. 

The biggest piece of it that I’m excited about is we’re working on a public communications plan. It’s a Smokey the Bear-style campaign with the theme of, ‘How can you prepare for forest fires and grassland fires?’ Because there’s another fire coming. It teaches residents about the importance of fire screens on roof vents to keep embers from getting sucked in and of having a fire-resistant perimeter surrounding the home. The campaign also talks about having photos of your house taken, so your insurance company has documentation of what you had in your house; it also underscores the importance of having insurance that’s up to date and a plan for evacuation. 

“I’ve heard from residents who had to use their children’s college savings account to rebuild their house” 

HCN: Insurance companies have fought to prevent payouts to those who lost their homes, adding to the trauma of the fire. What steps are being taken to make sure future wildfire victims are fairly compensated after a loss?

AS: We got two bills passed at the state level this year that I’m proud of. One is about the insurance payout and what people get in a declared disaster and complete loss to make it so that people don’t have to go through the retraumatization of itemizing everything they lost. Judy Amabile, our state representative, brought a bill to correct that part of the insurance process. It allows the Division of Insurance to look at the payout levels on an ongoing basis. The way insurance works is they have software that assesses what the company thinks it will cost to rebuild. 

And then the other bill we passed is called the FAIR Act. The state can now step in with public insurance if a consumer is told by the companies, “No, we will not insure your home.” So, there’s a way for every person in the state to get insurance, because we were starting to see people being denied coverage.

HCN: There’s an ongoing lawsuit against the utility giant Xcel Energy seeking damages since it was one of the company’s downed powerlines that initiated the Marshall Fire. The county investigation confirmed that the dangling wire was one of the fire’s two ignition points but found no grounds for criminal charges against the company. What do you think about the lawsuit and the decision not to pursue charges against Xcel? 

AS: The sheriff’s office did the investigation and then the district attorney looked to see if there could be charges brought. So much detailed effort was put in to really consider if there was a case for a criminal charge, and the district attorney found there was not. But that doesn’t mean that people cannot pursue civil lawsuits for accountability.

HCN: The fire torched over a thousand homes in Boulder County. How far has the recovery come in the year and a half since? 

AS: For our community members, it’s not going nearly fast enough. We want everybody back home. But from a disaster standpoint, when you look at other disasters like ours, we are really doing great as a community getting homes rebuilt. All of the debris is removed, and more than half of the people who lost their homes are well into the process of rebuilding, which is incredible. And then the best news I can deliver is that the rebuilding of a large condo unit that burned down, broke ground last weekend. That was one that was keeping me up at night. 

Samuel Shaw is an editorial intern for High Country News based in the Colorado Front Range. Email him at samuel.shaw@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. Follow Samuel on Instagram @youngandforgettable. 

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This story is the first in a series about the Colorado River. See the rest, as well as other great reporting from High Country News by signing up for our newsletter.

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The Navajo Nation has for years been locked in contentious negotiations with the state of Arizona over water. With the tribe’s claims not yet settled, the water sources it can access are limited.

The hospital tried tapping an aquifer, but the water was too salty to use. If it could reach an agreement with the state, the tribe would have other options, perhaps even the nearby Little Colorado River. But instead, the Dilkon Medical Center’s grand opening has been postponed, and its doors remain closed.

For the people of the Navajo Nation, the fight for water rights has real implications. Pipelines, wells and water tanks for communities, farms and businesses are delayed or never built.

ProPublica and High Country News reviewed every water-rights settlement in the Colorado River Basin and interviewed presidents, water managers, attorneys and other officials from 20 of the 30 federally recognized basin tribes. This analysis found that Arizona, in negotiating those water settlements, is unique for the lengths it goes to in order to extract concessions that could delay tribes’ access to more reliable sources of water and limit their economic development. The federal government has rebuked Arizona’s approach, and the architects of the state’s process acknowledge it takes too long.

The Navajo Nation has negotiated with all three states where it has land — Arizona, New Mexico and Utah — and completed water settlements with two of them. “We’re partners in those states, New Mexico and Utah,” said Jason John, the director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources. “But when it comes to Arizona, it seems like we have different agendas.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1908 that tribes with reservations have a right to water, and most should have priority in times of shortage. But to quantify the amount and actually get that water, they must either go to court or negotiate with the state where their lands are located, the federal government and competing water users. If a tribe successfully completes the process, it stands to unlock large quantities of water and millions of dollars for pipelines, canals and other infrastructure to move that water.

“We’re partners in those states, New Mexico and Utah. But when it comes to Arizona, it seems like we have different agendas.”

But in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin — which includes seven states, two countries and 30 federally recognized tribes between Wyoming and Mexico — whatever river water a tribe wins through this process comes from the state’s allocation. As a result, states use these negotiations to defend their share of a scarce resource. “The state perceives any strengthening of tribal sovereignty within the state boundaries as a threat to their own jurisdiction and governing authority,” said Torivio Fodder, manager of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous Governance Program and a citizen of Taos Pueblo.

While the process can be contentious anywhere, the large number of tribes in Arizona amplifies tensions: There are 22 federally recognized tribes in the state, and 10 of them have some yet-unsettled claims to water.

Federally recognized tribal reservations and trust land in Arizona

The state — through its water department, courts and elected officials — has repeatedly used the negotiation process to try to force tribes to accept concessions unrelated to water, including a recent attempt to make the state’s approval or renewal of casino licenses contingent on water deals. In these negotiations, which often happen in secret, tribes also must agree to a state policy that precludes them from easily expanding their reservations. And hanging over the talks, should they fail, is an even worse option: navigating the state’s court system, where tribes have been mired in some of the longest-running cases in the country.

Arizona creates “additional hurdles” to settling tribes’ water claims that don’t exist in other states, said Anne Castle, the former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. “The tribes haven’t been able to get to settlement in some cases because Arizona would impose conditions that they find completely unacceptable,” she said. 

Neither Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican who left office in January after two terms, nor his successor, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs, responded to requests for comment on the state’s approach to water-rights negotiations. The Arizona Department of Water Resources, which represents the state in tribal water issues, declined to answer a detailed list of questions.

Shirley Wesaw, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, lives near the not-yet-open Dilkon Medical Center. She eagerly watched as it was built, anticipating a time, after it was completed in June 2022, when her elderly parents would no longer have to spend hours in the car to see their doctors off the reservation. But Wesaw is familiar with the difficulty accessing water in the area. Shared wells are becoming less reliable, she said. It’s most difficult during the summer, when some of her relatives have to wake up as early as 2 a.m. to ensure there’s still water to draw from a community well.

“When it’s low, there’s a long line there,” Wesaw said, “and sometimes it runs out before you get your turn to fill up your barrels.”

Pipe dream

One impact of Arizona’s negotiating strategy was particularly evident at the outset of the pandemic.

In May 2020, as the Navajo Nation faced the highest COVID-19 infection rate in the country, the tribe’s leaders suspected that their limited clean water supply was contributing to the virus’ spread on the reservation. They sent a plea for help to Ducey, the governor at the time.

More than a decade earlier, as the tribe was negotiating its water rights with New Mexico, Arizona officials inserted into federal legislation language blocking the tribe from bringing its New Mexico water into Arizona until it also reaches a settlement with Arizona. John, with the tribe’s water department, said the state “politically maneuvered” to force the tribe to accept its demands.

 A multibillion-dollar pipeline that the federal government is building will connect the Navajo Nation’s capital of Window Rock, Arizona, to water from the San Juan River in New Mexico. But without a settlement in Arizona, the pipe can’t legally carry the water. The restriction left the tribe waiting for new sources of water, which, during the pandemic, made it hard for people to wash their hands in communities where homes lack indoor plumbing.

“For the State of Arizona to limit the access of its citizens to drinking water is unconscionable, especially in the face of the coronavirus pandemic,” then-Navajo President Jonathan Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer wrote to the governor. Nez and Lizer included with their letter a proposed amendment that would change a single sentence in the law. They asked Ducey to help persuade Congress to pass that amendment, allowing enough water for tens of thousands of Diné residents to flow onto the reservation.

Arizona rejected the request, according to multiple former Navajo Nation officials.

The Department of Water Resources did not provide ProPublica and High Country News with public records related to the state’s denial of the Navajo Nation’s request for help getting its water to Window Rock. Hobbs’ office said it could not find the communications relating to the incident.

Land and water

Nearly half of the tribes in Arizona are deadlocked with the state over water rights.

The Pascua Yaqui Tribe has 22,000 enrolled members, but limited land and housing allow only a third to live on its 3.5-square-mile reservation on the outskirts of Tucson. A subdivision still under construction has just started to welcome some Pascua Yaqui families on to the reservation. But the new development isn’t nearly large enough to house the more than 1,000 members on a waiting list. More than 18,000 additional acres of land would be needed to accommodate the tribe’s future population, according to a 2021 study that the tribe commissioned.

But Arizona has used water negotiations with tribes to curtail the expansion of reservations in a way no other state has. 

It’s state policy that, as a condition of reaching a water settlement, tribes agree to not pursue the main method of expanding their reservations. That process, called taking land into trust, is administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and results in the United States taking ownership of the land for the benefit of tribes. Alternatively, tribes can get approval from Congress to take land into trust, but that process can be more fraught, requiring expensive lobbying and travel to Washington, D.C.

The policy will force the Pascua Yaqui “to choose between houses for our families and water certainty for our Tribe and our neighbors,” then-Chairman Robert Valencia wrote to the Department of Water Resources in 2020. “While we understand that our Tribe must make real compromises as part of settlement, this sort of toll for settlement that is unrelated to water is unreasonable and harmful.”

For tribes across Arizona and the region, building homes and expanding economic opportunities to allow their members to move to reservations is a top priority.

The Pueblo of Zuni was the first tribe to agree to Arizona’s land requirement when it settled its water rights with the state in 2003. The Zuni had hoped to take into trust more land they own near their most sacred sites in eastern Arizona, but that will now require an act of Congress. Since the Zuni settlement, all four tribes that have settled water rights claims with Arizona have been required to agree to the same limit on expansion, according to ProPublica and High Country News’ review of every completed settlement in the state.

In a 2020 letter, the Navajo Nation’s then-attorney general called the state’s opposition to expansion “an invasion of the Nation’s sovereign authority over its lands and so abhorrent as to render the settlement untenable.”

The Interior Department, which negotiates alongside tribes, has agreed, objecting on multiple occasions in statements to Congress to Arizona’s use of water negotiations to limit the expansion of reservations. In 2022, as the Hualapai Indian Tribe settled its rights, the department called the state’s policy “contrary to this Administration’s strong support for returning ancestral lands to Tribes.”

Tribes in Arizona often wait decades to secure water rights

Seven federally recognized tribes in Arizona have filed but not settled any of their claims to water rights. The settlement process can take decades and wind through courts and Congress.

Tom Buschatzke, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources, explained the reasoning behind Arizona’s stance to state lawmakers, noting it’s based on Arizona’s interpretation of a century-old federal law that Congress is the only legal avenue for tribes to take land into trust. “The idea of having that tribe go back to Congress is so that there’s transparency in a hearing in front of Congress so the folks in Arizona who might have concerns can get up and express those concerns and then Congress can act accordingly,” he told the Legislature, adding that the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ process, meanwhile, puts the decision in “the hands of a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.”

The Department of Water Resources has even gone outside water-rights negotiations to challenge reservation expansion without an act of Congress. When the Yavapai-Apache Nation filed a trust land application with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 2001, the department fought it, according to documents obtained via a public records request. The department went on to argue in an appeal that the trust land transfer would infringe on other parties’ water rights. A federal appellate board eventually ruled in favor of the tribe, but the state’s opposition contributed to a five-year delay in completing the land transition.

Pascua Yaqui Chairman Peter Yucupicio has watched non-Indigenous communities grow as he works to secure land and water for his tribe. “They put the tribes through the wringer,” he said.

Arizona’s demands

No one has defined the terms of water negotiations between Arizona and tribes more than former U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz.

Before entering politics, he was a longtime attorney for the Salt River Project, a water and electric utility serving parts of metro Phoenix. During that time, he lobbied for and consulted on state rules that force tribes to litigate water disputes in state court if they’re unable to reach a settlement. After landing in the Senate, Kyl and his office oversaw meetings where parties hashed out disputes, and he saw his role as that of a mediator. He helped negotiate or pass legislation for the water rights of at least seven tribes.

“I wasn’t taking a side,” Kyl told ProPublica and High Country News, “but I was interested in seeing if they could all reach agreements.”

Tribes, though, often didn’t see him as a neutral party, pointing especially to his handling of negotiations for the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe. He was shepherding a proposed settlement for the tribes through Congress in 2010 when he withdrew support, saying the price of the infrastructure called for in the proposal was too high to get the needed votes. A 2012 version of the tribes’ settlement also died after he added an extension to allow a controversial coal mine to continue operating.

Even when Kyl wasn’t directly involved, tribes were pushed to accept concessions, including limits on how they used their water. Settlements across the basin, including in Arizona, typically contain limits on how much water tribes can market, leaving unused water flowing downstream to the next person in line to use for free.

Even when Kyl wasn’t directly involved, tribes were pushed to accept concessions, including limits on how they used their water.

And several tribes in Arizona were asked to give up the ability to raise legal objections if other users’ groundwater pumping depleted water underneath their reservation.

Tribes have also often had to trade the priority of their water — the order in which supply is cut in times of shortage, such as the current megadrought — to access water. The Bureau of Reclamation recently proposed drastic cuts to Colorado River usage, and, in one scenario based on priority, a quarter of the proposed cuts to allocations would come from tribes in Arizona.

“Some of the Native American folks had a hard time with the concept that they had to give up rights in order to get rights,” Kyl said, adding that tribes risked getting nothing if they kept holding out. “If you’re going to resolve a dispute, sometimes you have to compromise.”

Given the long list of terms Arizona typically pursues, some tribes have been hesitant to settle — which can leave them with an uncertain water supply — so the state has tried to push them.

In 2020, Arizona legislators targeted the casino industry — the economic lifeblood of many tribes. Seven Republicans, including the speaker of the House and Senate president, introduced a bill to bar tribes from obtaining or renewing gaming licenses if they had unresolved water-rights litigation with the state. The bill failed, but Rusty Bowers, the House speaker at the time, said the legislation was intended to put the state on a level playing field with tribes. “Where is our leverage on anything?” Bowers said. If tribes weren’t using the water, then others would do so amid a drought in the growing state, he said.

The state’s economic and population growth has presented tribes with other challenges: They must now negotiate not only with the state and federal governments but also with the businesses, cities and utilities that have, in the interim, made competing claims to water.

It has taken an average of about 18 years for Arizona tribes to reach even a partial water-rights settlement, according to a ProPublica and High Country News analysis of data collected by Leslie Sanchez, a postdoctoral fellow at the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station, who researches the economics of tribal water settlements. The Arizona tribes that filed a claim but are still in the process of settling it have been waiting an average of 34 years.

Chairman Calvin Johnson of the Tonto Apache Tribe — which has a small reservation next to the Arizona mountain town of Payson — remembers, as a child, watching his uncle, then the chairman, begin the fight in 1985 to get a water-rights settlement.

Still without a settlement, the tribe hopes to one day plant orchards for a farming business, build more housing to support its growing population and reduce its reliance on Payson for water, Johnson said. But, faced with Arizona’s demands, the tribe has not yet accepted a deal.

“The feeling that a lot of the older tribal members have is that it’s not ever going to happen, that we probably won’t see it in our lifetime,” Johnson said.

Turning to the courts

Tribes that hope to avoid Arizona’s aggressive tactics can instead go to court — an even riskier gamble that drags on and takes the decision-making out of the hands of the negotiating parties.

The Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians is the only federally recognized tribe in Arizona yet to file a claim for its water. It has a reservation near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but with only 400 members and minimal resources, it would face a daunting path forward. To settle its rights, the tribe would have to engage in court proceedings to divvy up Kanab Creek, the only waterway that crosses its reservation; bring anyone with a potential competing claim to the creek’s water; find money to complete scientific studies estimating historical flows; and then, because the waterway spans multiple states, possibly face interstate litigation before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s about creating and sustaining that permanent homeland,” said Alice Walker, an attorney for the band, but the path between the tribe and that water “boils down to all of those complex, expensive steps.”

Arguing before the Supreme Court on behalf of Arizona and other parties in 1983, Kyl successfully defended a challenge to a law called the McCarran Amendment that allowed state courts to take over jurisdiction of tribal water-rights claims.

“It’s about creating and sustaining that permanent homeland.”

“Tribes are subject to the vagaries of different state politics, different state processes,” explained Dylan Hedden-Nicely, director of the Native American Law Program at the University of Idaho and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. “As a result, two tribes with identical language in their treaties might end up having, ultimately, very different water rights on their reservations.”

Some states, such as Colorado, set up special water courts or commissions to more efficiently settle water rights. Arizona did not. Instead, its court system has created gridlock. Hydrological studies needed from the Department of Water Resources take years to complete, and state laws add confusion over how to distinguish between surface and groundwater.

Two cases in Arizona state court that involve various tribes — one to divide the Gila River and another for the Little Colorado River — have dragged on for decades. The parties, which include every person, tribe or company that has a claim to water from the rivers, number in the tens of thousands. Just one judge, who also handles other litigation, oversees both cases.

Even Kyl now acknowledges the system’s flaws. “Everybody is in favor of speeding up the process,” he said.

After years of negotiations that failed to produce a settlement, the Navajo Nation went to court in 2003 to force a deal. Eventually, the case reached the Supreme Court, which heard it this March. Tribes and legal experts are concerned the court could use the case to target its 1908 precedent that guaranteed tribes’ right to water, a ruling that would risk the future of any tribes with unsettled water claims.

The Navajo Nation, according to newly inaugurated President Buu Nygren, has huge untapped economic potential. “We’re getting to that point in time where we can actually start fulfilling a lot of those dreams and hopes,” he said. “What it’s going to require is water.”

Just across the Arizona-New Mexico border, not far from Nygren’s office in Window Rock, construction crews have been installing the 17 miles of pipeline that could one day deliver large volumes of the tribe’s water to its communities and unlock that potential. Because of Arizona’s changes to the federal law, that day won’t come until the state and the Navajo Nation reach a water settlement.

For now, the pipeline will remain empty.

Anna V. Smith is an associate editor of High Country News. She writes and edits stories on tribal sovereignty and environmental
justice for the Indigenous Affairs desk from Colorado. @annavtoriasmith

Mark Olalde is an environment reporter with ProPublica, where he investigates issues concerning oil, mining, water and other topics around the Southwest.

Umar Farooq is an Ancil Payne Fellow with ProPublica, where he reports on national issues. @UmarFarooq_

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Cathy Topper stood at the door to her house looking over the field of solar panels visible from just about anywhere on her property. 

“I finally have gotten to the point where I don’t cry all the time,” she said, as we sat at her kitchen table. 

The shades were drawn throughout the house so she wouldn’t have to see the solar array while going about her day.

Solar farms have been popping up all around Montezuma County, Colorado, over the past few years. Montezuma County, sitting at 6,000-7,000 feet in elevation, gets 300+ days of sun a year. With the high elevations keeping temperatures cooler, and a significant amount of sun, the region is an ideal place for solar development.

Topper has lived in her house on agricultural land outside Cortez, Colorado, in the Four Corners region for 31 years. She hopes to pass down the house and land to her son. She said it was a peaceful place to live, with views of the fields to the north and Sleeping Ute Mountain to the southwest. 

That changed in June 2022 when the solar farm, a project of Empire Electric Association (EEA), began construction. Since then, Topper said the sound of jackhammers has filled the air every day, seven days a week. 

A Long List of Concerns

The location of solar development can be a major point of contention for residents, especially those who have to look at solar projects every day. For Topper, the issue is about the way the installation has disrupted the peace of her rural life. But people have other concerns about solar installations, including solar arrays installed on irrigated agricultural land, which render it useless for agricultural production. 

In 2004, Colorado was the first state to enact a renewable energy standard (RES), requiring 30% renewable energy for investor-owned utilities, and 10% or 20% for municipalities and electric cooperatives. Rural electric coops, including Montezuma County’s Empire Electric Association, and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, where Empire Electric buys most of their electricity, have been ramping up their transition toward renewable energy in the past few years.

Mike Conne, who lives adjacent to another Empire Electric solar array at Totten Lake, was worried about wildlife in the area and how the solar project would affect the animals. During the permitting process for the Totten Lake solar project, Conne attempted to convince the county that the solar project should go elsewhere, on the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land, away from residential and agricultural land. However, the land used for the Totten Lake solar project was already owned by Empire Electric. “It made economic sense to use that property to generate additional revenue for our members through a lease with the array developer,” said Empire Electric in an email.

One of Conne’s biggest concerns was the bald eagle nest next to the Empire Electric-owned property. Colorado Parks and Wildlife recommends placing any development at least a quarter mile from any eagle’s nest. OneEnergy Renewables, the developer for the Totten Lake project, followed these recommendations and curved the solar project to provide a quarter-mile radius around the nest. OneEnergy also completed construction before nesting season. Now, Conne worries about a housing development going in across the street from the solar array, within the quarter-mile radius of the eagle’s nest.

The Totten Lake solar project was completed and brought online in December 2022. Now, Conne has seen deer get hit by cars because they walk on the road instead of crossing the newly-fenced-off land with the solar array.

Perry Will, a Colorado State Senator for District 5 and former wildlife officer, said that any time you take land out of production by fencing it off, you’re reducing wildlife habitat, especially for ungulates like deer and elk who need fields and sagebrush for critical winter range. “It’s impacting the habitat,” Will said. “It’s really no different than paving it over as a parking lot or putting up a building. It’s still habitat loss.”

Conne was also frustrated with the amount of land degradation that took place while the solar construction was underway. “I expected that they were just gonna put the panels over the vegetation. They completely destroyed the whole area,” he said as he showed photos of a machine grading the 12-acre property next to Conne’s house. 

In response to questions about landowner concerns, Empire Electric said in an email that “During the permitting phases for both the Totten Lake and Montezuma solar generators there were landowners adjacent to the projects who came forward with concerns about the facilities being built near their homes. EEA [Empire Electric] worked with the solar developer and the county planning and zoning board to ensure the projects complied with statutory requirements and also addressed individual member concerns. In the end, all parties were able to come to terms and the projects were approved. In our opinion, the process allowed members with concerns to have their concerns addressed in a fair manner.”

Topper said that when the solar project was announced, she and her neighbors fought it, but they lost the battle. Nathan Stottler, associate director of project development for OneEnergy Renewables, says that he should have reached out to neighbors earlier in the project development for this specific project. During the permitting process, however, there is built-in time for public comment. When neighbors like Topper came to the public comment meetings with frustrations, OneEnergy did make some allowances like moving the project 50 feet from the property line, building an 8-foot-tall privacy fence (which you can still see over from most spots on Topper’s property), and promising to plant 6-foot tall trees for privacy once the project is finished. 

“We’re held to a higher standard than oil and gas because oil and gas is an established use,” said Stottler, “And to the extent we can, we try to welcome that, we want to be better, we want to do better. I work in solar for a reason, because I want to fight climate change.”

A Legal and Logistical Maze

Empire Electric’s contract with Tri-State dictates that the co-op is only allowed to generate up to 5% of its own electricity and must buy the rest from Tri-State. If Empire Electric was able to generate more of its own electricity with solar, electricity prices could go down. But because of the current contract, community members like Topper do not receive any financial benefits from having a solar project in their backyard. 

Stottler, who grew up in rural Minnesota, understands how the view of a solar farm is not what residents desire. However, he said that if people see themselves as a part of the regional community and county, there are more direct benefits to having solar installed locally, including keeping money in the community and stabilizing electricity prices.

“OneEnergy is going to be pumping more tax money into Montezuma County, and that’s a big thing that wouldn’t have happened if you were buying your power from out of state or out of county,” said Stottler. Because Empire Electric, a locally owned cooperative, owns these solar farms, anyone who purchases electricity from Empire Electric keeps their dollars in the community instead of sending it out of the county to a coal or natural gas plant elsewhere.

Other Southwestern rural electric coops such as Kit Carson in Taos, New Mexico, and Delta Montrose in Southwest Colorado have bought out of their contract with Tri-State and are now pursuing 100% solar energy during the day, which can stabilize and lower electricity costs for residents. 

One of the reasons solar developers choose a specific parcel of land is access to roads, power lines, and substations. If the power is being sold to a transmission company, there need to be transmission lines nearby. The Totten Lake and Montezuma Solar projects are only for distribution through Empire Electric Association, which means they need to be located near Empire Electric-owned distribution lines. EEA is not allowed to back feed power onto the transmission grid because of their contract with Tri-State, which means they are only allowed to generate the minimum daytime load (typically determined by the amount of power used from a substation in the middle of the day) and they cannot use Tri-State owned transmission lines to distribute the power produced by the solar arrays.

Stottler said the siting of solar development has three phases. 

“It has to be in Empire’s territory, [and] it has to be on their distribution lines,” said Stottler. The project also needs to be adjacent to a substation. 

For smaller solar projects like the Montezuma (5 megawatts) and Totten Lake (2.5 megawatts), there is not much wiggle room for moving farther away from distribution lines and substations. Building new infrastructure isn’t feasible because the profit margins are much smaller than they would be for a larger, transmission-size solar project. 

“Some of the prime agricultural land is also the prime land for solar energy production because it’s flat and it gets a lot of sun,” said Tyler Garrett, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union’s director of government relations. “The worry is that that [land] will be taken and we’ll be gradually decreasing the amount of land that’s available for agriculture.” 

Bob Bragg, Topper’s neighbor and an agricultural journalist, said that it’s important for developers to consider the people who live near solar arrays. “We’re so hellbent on putting in solar installations that we want it close to the substations, when in reality maybe we need to spend a little bit more money to get those to where they’re not impacting someone’s home who lived there for a very long time,” Bragg told the Daily Yonder.

Garrett worries a lot about farmland being taken out of production with the development of more and more solar farms across the West. He sees agrovoltaics — the marriage of solar and agriculture — to be the best path forward. 

One way agrovoltaics can work is to raise solar panels high enough for farming or ranching to take place beneath the solar installation. Colorado-based farm Jack’s Solar Garden is working with the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center to educate farmers and ranchers about what this could look like.   

Byron Kominek, director of the Colorado Agrovoltaic Learning Center, agreed. “We have well over 10,000 acres of solar panels in Colorado as far as I understand, and we’re going to have millions of acres of solar panels across our country in the coming years,” said Kominek, “It would be unfortunate if all that land just goes to dirt or weeds or gravel or any degraded state.”

The potential of agrovoltaics is still being explored in Colorado and around the country. In Colorado, a bill was signed on May 19th, 2023, that will provide half a million dollars in grant money for agrovoltaics and conduct a study on the opportunities and challenges with agrovoltaics in Colorado. 

Conne said he loves solar but would prefer to see development away from homes and with less land degradation. He said he would support more agrovoltaic development with cattle or sheep to maintain the agricultural nature of rural areas. He sees BLM land as a good opportunity for future solar development as well as landfills. “I love solar, I really do,” said Conne, “but there’s a lot of things that need to be changed in the future.”

The post Solar Farms in Colorado: Fossil Fuel-Free Energy Comes With Controversies appeared first on The Daily Yonder.

Here in the Western U.S., smoke season has become a summer ritual. It’s never enjoyable and never routine, but far too common to brush off: Days too choked with smoke to go outdoors, weeks of scratchy throats and headaches, constant low-level anxiety about fire and health impacts.

But so far the heavy smoke has mostly clung to the Western half of the country.

So it’s strange to see it take hold in New York City: That familiar smoky orange haze hanging over skyscrapers, enveloping the Statue of Liberty, smogging up the streets. Sorry to say this, Northeasterners, but welcome to our reality. Our sympathies. It’s stressful and suffocating and disorienting. We get it.

But for better or for worse, though, we’ve developed some coping strategies that some might find useful. So from your friends out West, here are some tips on surviving smoke season:

The first time Oakland was fully socked in with smoke a few years ago — the sun didn’t come out for a day or two, which was really eerie and frightening — I was shocked that some people just tried to keep on with their workdays. It helped me a lot to pull back and take time for what was really going on: grief. THIS IS NOT NORMAL, and trying to go on with my regular day made it feel even worse. I ended up strapping on an N-95 mask and going for a really short walk to take in how totally scary and weird it was in my neighborhood. That was a physical health risk, to be sure, but it helped my mental health to fully process what was going on. And I ran into other neighbors who were walking their dogs or doing the same thing I was. Connecting over the scariness of it all helped, too.

—Sarah Trent, editorial intern

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“All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

If you know someone with COPD, asthma or similar diseases — in my case, a vulnerable family member — try to find ways to help them so they don’t have to leave their house. Fetch groceries, pet food, mail, etc., if you can, and make sure that they have necessary prescriptions, especially inhalers, and that their cooling system is working as well as possible — which is not easy for poor folks living in challenging conditions, I know. Like Sarah, I sometimes masked up (thank you, Dr. Fauci!) to go for walks outside, because walking is necessary to me, and besides, if I stayed inside too long, the climate grief and depression overwhelmed me — but I certainly avoided any outdoor activities that might require heavy breathing. You never really get used to it — or even accept that it’s actually happening to a place you love so dearly. It was strange, but at times the light was eerily magical; sometimes I thought of Yeats: “All is changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born.”

 —Diane Sylvain, copy editor

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A home air filter is about the same size as a box fan. You can duct-tape one to the back/intake side of the fan and turn the fan on. It’s an inexpensive way to filter particles out of the air indoors.

— Toastie Oaster, staff writer

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The light is different, the air can feel strange, time passes differently. You’re not going crazy; it is really disorienting. I found it helpful to remind myself this was just going to be weird and find ways to ground myself. For example, cold showers help with the vaguely sooty, sweaty feeling. Also: That headache? Yes, it probably IS because of smoke.

Also: Use your COVID toolkit. Maybe you got yourself an air purifier or rigged up a makeshift one. Put that back in action! Did you get a humidifier to help with COVID symptoms? That may help ease your throat scratchiness. If you have to go outside, your N95 mask will help protect you, although it isn’t going to block everything.

 —Kate Schimel, news and investigations editor

“Fire season” is a household phrase here, as depressing as that is. But I noticed that like the grinding doldrums of the pandemic, we slowly found ways to process the nightmare through humor and memes — all small acts of defiance against something larger than ourselves and largely out of our control. So share that selfie with the hellish sunset! Become Vin Diesel in The Chronicles of Riddick! For once, we all get to be in on the same pitch-black joke. And If you’re a nerd like me, you might also find that mapping the inferno provides a small measure of calm: it’s nice to know thy enemy, so to speak. Here’s a NASA tool where you can put a face to that flaming monster with satellite imagery. 

—Samuel Shaw, editorial intern

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If you have young kids, find out where the indoor tumbling classes are to keep them occupied. And I think it helps to invest in a good map app that can show you smoke paths, like OpenSummit.

 —Michael Schrantz, marketing communications manager

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I boil rosemary. Somebody told me it purifies the air by binding to smoke particles. I have no idea if this is actually true, but the added humidity and pleasant smell make me feel better when my asthma acts up during smoke events.

There’s value in rituals of healing, something as simple as sipping tea or massaging oil onto a strained muscle. Even if it turns out whatever the tea was made of, or whatever was infused in the oil, doesn’t have any extra health benefit, the act of noticing an ill and paying attention to it does. These things allow me to pause, admit there is a problem, and feel for a moment that I have some agency over a solution.

 —Luna Anna Archey, associate visuals editor

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When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

Wildfire smoke will wreck more than your lungs. Ash can also damage vehicles and other items outdoors if you try to wash it off with water: The particulate wood ash reacts to form a weak lye solution that can damage your paint. Keep vehicles indoors, or cover them if you can. If not, try to brush the ash off rather than rinsing it. In a pinch, putting a wet bandanna over your nose and mouth can help with the worst effects of smoke.

Also, it’s normal for orange skies and the eerie, blood-red sun to affect your mood and mental health. Symptoms of smoke exposure, like shortness of breath and a vague, general feeling of unwellness, mirror and can exacerbate anxiety symptoms. When it looks, feels and smells like the world is ending, don’t expect you’ll be at peak physical and mental performance.

 —Rachel Alexander, managing editor at Salem Reporter

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Being surrounded by wildfire smoke soup often makes me feel powerless and hopeless. It’s hard to feel safe when systemic forces and global problems — climate change, forest management — seep across borders and make your lungs, throat, eyes and head hurt. But I’d encourage people experiencing wildfire smoke for the first time to protect themselves, and then push for change that lasts after the smoke dissipates and protects the most vulnerable. Disasters can be pivotal moments, and action is an antidote to despair. Demand that wildfire fighters, who are on the frontlines of these blazes, receive adequate compensation and health care. Demand that farmworkers, who harvest food when the rest of us hole up inside, receive adequate protections from smoke (and heat!). Demand that people living without shelter have access to clean indoor air. Don’t just buy an air filter and go back to normal.

—Kylie Mohr, editorial fellow

Being an avid walker and hiker is difficult during wildfire smoke events. Some days it’s simply not feasible or advisable to exercise out of doors (purple and red days!). But other days, especially for those who don’t have health issues that make them particularly vulnerable to marginal air quality, it can be done. I watch the air quality index (AQI) throughout the day and choose my walking/hiking time based on air-quality reports. I also watch different air-monitoring stations throughout my area, and choose my walking/hiking locations based on AQI, which can be variable even locally. Sometimes I will take a walk wearing a N95 mask. I don’t do more strenuous walking or hiking masked, though. On days when it’s better to stay inside, I use a stationary bicycle to get my cardio fix. During the Thomas Fire of 2017-2018 (which burned for over a month), air quality was so bad for such a prolonged time that I and many others in our area who had the ability to do so simply packed up and left home.

—Jennifer Sahn, editor in chief

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I grew up in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The summer after college, I went to Montana for eight weeks of field ecology classes (maybe I was done with college, but college wasn’t quite done with me). On the last day of the program, I woke to the hazy hot air and lurid neon-red sun that now, after more than 15 years of living in the West, I’m very familiar with. That day felt like the Apocalypse or the End Times — something biblical, something entirely beyond my previous understanding of what the world could even be. What I’ve learned since then is that the smoky days will always be hard and scary, but they do pass. One day it will rain, one day I’ll be able to see the distant hills from my back deck, one day the morning sun will be as yellow as the roses blooming in my neighbor’s yard.

—Emily Benson, senior editor-north

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

Last year, Fairmead received a grant to help plan for farmland retirement in order to recharge groundwater under California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA. But the community’s vision for the future is bigger than that: The locals also want to see improved air quality, a community center and reliable domestic wells.

The West is not just facing an energy transition, it is also at the beginning of a major transition in land and water use. In California’s Central Valley, groundwater regulations will require retiring between 500,000 and 1 million acres by 2040. (Retirement, or “fallowing,” refers to taking lands out of agricultural production.) The planning and decision-making now underway across more than 260 regional Groundwater Sustainability Agencies will determine how SGMA plays out across different groundwater basins: whether landowners will be compensated for retired lands, what the lands will become and who will manage them, and how counties will replace the revenues they currently collect from agricultural lands and use to help provide services to residents in need.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone.”

But while groundwater sustainability is SGMA’s focus, it’s not the only thing on Central Valley residents’ minds: They also need jobs, as well as clean air and water. Many Central Valley towns have diverse demographics; Fairmead, for example, is over 70% Latino — mostly immigrant and predominately Spanish-speaking — but there are also Black, Asian, Indigenous, mixed-race and white individuals. The median household income is less than half of the state’s average, and the residents are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards.

“The side effects of agriculture have a huge impact on the environment and on everyone,” said Ángel Fernández-Bou, a climate scientist at the nonprofit science advocacy organization Union of Concerned Scientists, which is researching the Central Valley’s land-use transition. He and others spoke to High County News about how SGMA can help create a healthier and more sustainable post-agriculture Central Valley:

Improved air and water quality: Locals are in dire need of better air quality. “When they spray, they spray all kinds of pesticides,” said Nelson, who is also president of the organization Fairmead Community and Friends. “The Central Valley has a lot of problems with people with asthma and COPD because they grow so much stuff out here. The environment is bad to breathe, plus it’s super-hot.”

Around 200 million pounds of pesticides are used in California each year, and the geographical pattern of their application is one of environmental inequality: According to the Pesticide Action Network, majority-Latino counties see 906% more pesticide use than counties with fewer than 24% Latino residents. Fernández-Bou calculated that creating “buffer zones” by retiring the farmland in a one-mile radius around the Central Valley’s “disadvantaged communities” — a term used by the state of California for municipalities with median household incomes lower than 80% of the state’s — would decrease pesticide use by 12 million pounds, and also combat the health effects of pesticide drift.

Agricultural inputs also affect the water quality. When the nitrate from fertilizers leaches into aquifers, it can cause chronic health effects and conditions, such as blue baby syndrome. A long-term study by the Environmental Working Group found that 69 Central Valley water systems serving at least 1.5 million residents — the majority of them Latino — exceeded federal standards for nitrate. The impact is likely even higher, given the numerous domestic wells. Creating buffer zones would reduce nitrate leaching into aquifers by over 200 million pounds, per year, Fernández-Bou calculated.

The impact of land fallowing on dust is less clear. The Public Policy Institute of California has raised concerns about increased dust blowing off fallowed lands and affecting farmworkers and nearby communities. But Fernández-Bou took a more optimistic view, saying that dust is most often a problem when farmers till fallowed fields; left alone, he said, cover crops or weeds will grow roots that hold the soil in place.

Workforce transition: For many Central Valley residents, the biggest question concerns jobs, wondering how they’ll make a living once farmland is retired. Transitioning away from agriculture is “a hard pill to swallow,” said Eddie Ocampo, director of the organization Self-Help Enterprises. “Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Under Fernández-Bou’s buffer-zone model, an estimated 25,682 agricultural jobs would be lost. Communities are only beginning to think about what will replace them. One option is renewable energy: California’s SB100 requires the state to be 100% renewable by 2045 — a timeline similar to SGMA’s land fallowing — and the Central Valley is being eyed for significant solar production. “We’re going to see long-term sustained demand for solar construction and maintenance jobs,” said Andrew Ayres of the Public Policy Institute of California. Community colleges in the Central Valley are working to develop training programs for these jobs. Another initiative plans to re-train farmworkers to install water recycling systems.

“Everyone is for economic diversity, but there’s going to be a gap, and those who are the most vulnerable are going to be the most affected.”

Access to drinking water: Like Fairmead, many of the Central Valley’s low-income rural communities lack urban water infrastructure and must rely on shallow domestic and municipals wells to meet their drinking water needs. Because SGMA prioritizes access to drinking water, many people believe it could improve the health of those wells. “Generally speaking, SGMA implementation is going to be good for rural groundwater wells,” said Ayres. Recharging groundwater, he said, “can buoy those community wells.”

Dialogue: The planning process itself, said Ocampo, has been beneficial for the Central Valley. Developing successful land-repurposing plans, he said, requires the participation of diverse interests — agribusiness, environmental justice organizations, land trusts and under-represented communities. “A lot of stakeholders realize that the more diversity of opinion there is, the more multi-beneficial and inclusive the outcome will be,” said Ocampo.

Planning for groundwater sustainability gives historically agricultural communities the chance to envision myriad new economies and land uses that will shape the future of the Central Valley. Habitat restoration, parks, regenerative agriculture, community centers and cooling centers are all on the table.

“I would say the possibilities are endless,” said Fernández-Bou. “But please don’t bring bad stuff to the valley.”

Caroline Tracey is the climate justice fellow at High Country News. Email her at caroline.tracey@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

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The Department of Health’s expanding climate health team, which also includes a scientist who studies insects as disease vectors and experts on water quality and climate justice, is part of a deepening understanding of how profoundly climate change affects human health. Recent studies paint a grim picture: In addition to increasing the severity and frequency of both extreme heat events and wildfires, climate change is creating disease hotspots while also making some infectious diseases worse. This realization is changing health experts’ training, including at Harvard Medical School, which recently added a climate curriculum to all four years of instruction.   

The Washington climate team members approach their work with the foundational understanding that climate exacerbates historic injustices. “Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change,” said Kelly Naismith, the agency’s newest climate epidemiologist. “They’re more vulnerable.” She plans to monitor emergency room data in close to real time to see how high temperatures drive diagnoses and patient numbers. “One thing we’ve learned in the past couple years, during heat waves, is that there’s a pretty big increase in ER visits,” she said.

“Communities of color, children, older adults and pregnant people are all more sensitive to the impacts of climate change.”

Michelle Fredrickson is quantifying the unequal distribution of climate impacts. She’s using LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, a type of laser scan, to determine how tree canopy, green space and asphalt coverage affect neighborhood temperatures during heat waves. Her work builds on research that has already shown how widespread those inequities are. A nationwide study published in 2020 found that areas subject to racist housing practices in the 1930s experience hotter temperatures today: Lower-income people and people of color live in areas with less greenery and more asphalt, which magnifies heat.

Washington epidemiologists are using existing data about air quality and heat-related deaths, things that are historically monitored by public health departments, for a new purpose: illuminating their connections to climate change. “When you start pulling together climate data and environmental hazard data, it starts to paint a clearer picture of the existing environmental justice issues in the state,” said Rad Cunningham, senior epidemiologist. “You start seeing patterns of how those issues are going to get worse over time.”

But they’re not just addressing current issues; they’re also trying to determine what the future will look like and how to prepare for it. “It’s a paradigm shift,” Cunningham said. A proactive approach can help states save lives, blunt unhealthy trends and be better prepared for emerging climate-driven threats.

That may improve the situation on the ground in Washington in the coming years. School evaluations could show where state funding is most needed to retrofit buildings and design new ones to make spaces cooler and cleaner on hot, smoky days. The team is working to make public health tools and messaging — such as tips on how to protect yourself from wildfire smoke with box fans and filters — less jargony and more useful. The epidemiologists are collaborating with newly created, climate-focused local public health positions across the state.

The climate health team’s total budget — $1.8 million this fiscal year — comes from state and federal sources. Washington is looking to climate health programs in other states like California and Colorado for inspiration. And the epidemiologists hope to learn from places dealing with problems that aren’t as prevalent in Washington — yet. For example, warmer temperatures are allowing ticks to spread into areas they previously weren’t able to survive. In response, Michigan’s Department of Health has become an expert on ticks and tick-borne diseases, such as Lyme. “We have a lot to learn from them,” Cunningham said. “We have a chance to do what they wish they would’ve done.”

Kylie Mohr is an editorial fellow for High Country News writing from Montana. Email her at kylie.mohr@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy. 

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He calls it the “tin can.” Its heater is broken. The cold creeps through its thin walls. Wind rattles the wooden cabinets. But it’s all he could afford.

A year ago, two runaway fires set by the U.S. Forest Service converged to become the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon wildfire. It rode 74 mph wind gusts, engulfing dozens of homes in a single day as it tore through canyons and over mountains.

The blaze became the biggest wildfire in the continental United States in 2022 and the biggest in New Mexico history. And it was the federal government’s fault: An ill-prepared and understaffed crew didn’t properly account for dry conditions and high winds when it ignited prescribed burns meant to limit the fuel for a potential wildfire.

By the time the blaze was fully contained in August, it had destroyed about 430 homes, according to the Forest Service. Monsoons helped extinguish the fire, but they spurred floods that caused more damage.

FEMA stepped in to help, offering cash for short-term expenses and, after the state requested it, temporary housing to 140 households. But the federal government has acted so slowly and maintained such strict rules that only about a tenth of them have moved in, an investigation by Source New Mexico and ProPublica has found.

A year after the fire began, FEMA says most of the 140 households it deemed eligible for travel trailers or mobile homes — essentially, people whose uninsured primary residences sustained severe damage — have found “another housing resource.”

What the agency doesn’t say: For some, that resource is a vehicle, a tent or a rickety camper. It’s a friend or relative’s couch, sometimes far from home. It’s a mobile home paid for with retirement funds or meager savings.

The fire upended a constellation of largely Hispanic, rural communities that have cultivated their land and culture in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for hundreds of years. Many residents can find their family names on land grants issued by Mexican governors in the 1830s.

Now they’re dispersed across the region, even out of state. Source New Mexico and ProPublica obtained records from local officials and volunteer groups and eventually interviewed more than 50 people who between them lost 45 homes.

Many of them said FEMA’s trailers were offered too late, cost too much to get hooked up or came with too many strings attached. Several said they went through multiple inspections, only to learn weeks later that one rule or another made it impossible to get a trailer on their land. In some cases, FEMA officials told people that their only option was a commercial mobile home park, miles down winding, damaged mountain roads from the homes they were trying to rebuild.

People who between them lost 17 homes said they withdrew from the housing program because of those problems.

As of April 19, just 13 of the 140 eligible households had received FEMA housing. Only two of them are on their own land.

Martinez said he got a call from FEMA in mid-October, seemingly out of the blue. By then, he had been living in the tin can for a couple of months. As temperatures dropped, he had started sleeping on the couch, closer to the space heater.

A FEMA representative asked if he needed a trailer to live in.

“I told them it was too late,” he said. “Way too late.”

FEMA said terrain and weather, among other factors, presented challenges in providing housing to survivors. But the agency said it made an exception to its rules by providing trailers and mobile homes in the first place — normally such programs are reserved for disasters that displace a large number of residents.

The agency said it tries to place temporary housing on people’s property, but couldn’t in many cases because of federal laws and its own requirement that trailers be hooked up to utilities. State and local officials have asked the agency to loosen its rules, but it hasn’t.

FEMA knows it has a problem with its response to wildfires. A 2019 Government Accountability Office report said FEMA’s housing programs are better suited to help those displaced by hurricanes and floods because some victims can remain in their damaged homes, there’s often more rental housing in those areas and there’s more space for large mobile home parks than there is in the rugged mountains scorched by wildfires.

FEMA agreed with the findings and said it would explore providing housing funding to states because they’re better positioned to guide recovery. That didn’t happen after the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire.

Last month, Martinez woke up on the couch in severe pain from a swollen bladder. Now he needs frequent medical appointments to check his catheter and figure out what’s causing the pain. His sister has been trying to get him a FEMA trailer in a commercial park closer to a clinic in the town of Mora. It’s just 8 miles away, but it can take 45 minutes to drive there.

What neither of them knew when he bought that old trailer last summer is that doing so made him ineligible for a FEMA trailer.

Martinez wants to stay on his property if he can. His great-grandfather once owned the land where he built that cabin. He raised his hands to show his stiff, swollen fingers. “They ain’t worth shit now,” he said. “But a man builds his own castle, right?”

The cost of free housing

By mid-June, firefighters had finally started to get the blaze under control, and people were being allowed back into communities in the area known as the burn scar. New Mexico officials turned their attention to those who had nothing to return to.

Kelly Hamilton, deputy secretary for the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, told FEMA in a letter that people were living in their cars, at work and in churches, in campers and even in tents.

He asked FEMA to provide travel trailers or mobile homes. “If the housing situation is not immediately addressed, the survival of each community is bleak,” he wrote.

“If the housing situation is not immediately addressed, the survival of each community is bleak.”

He cited an analysis showing there was just one rental apartment available in Mora and San Miguel counties, the two hardest hit by the fire. He noted that roughly 20% of residents in those counties were below the poverty line and that one-third of Mora County residents were disabled, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures.

It took FEMA a month to approve Hamilton’s request and about two weeks more to tell the public. On Aug. 2, the agency announced it would launch a small housing program, which “will likely entail placing a manufactured home on the resident’s property for the length of time it takes to rebuild.”

But there were strict rules for where those trailers could go. Recipients would need to have electrical service, septic tanks and drinking water close to the housing site. The agency’s draft contract for the housing program specified details down to the width of straps that were required to secure trailers against wind.

Local and state officials and disaster survivors told Source and ProPublica that the utility requirements were unreasonable, especially in this area. It’s common for homes to be heated with wood stoves fed with timber harvested from the surrounding land. Some people didn’t have running water or septic tanks even before the fire. Electrical outages were common in remote areas.

Martinez’s cabin never had running water; he got it from his neighbor’s well. So even if FEMA had offered him a trailer earlier, he would have had to pay thousands of dollars to build a well — if he could’ve found someone to do it.

FEMA is “very efficient in deeming people ineligible.”

“I’m trying to put this diplomatically,” said David Lienemann, spokesperson for New Mexico’s emergency management department. FEMA is “very efficient in deeming people ineligible.”

The effect of those rules is clear. As of April 19, FEMA said 140 households were eligible for trailers, as determined by the agency’s own inspections and policies. Of those, 123 had “voluntarily withdrawn.”

People dropped out because they “opted to live in their damaged homes, located another housing resource or declined all Direct Housing options,” said FEMA spokesperson Angela Byrd in an email. “However, those households remain eligible for the program should their situation change.”

FEMA wouldn’t allow Vicki Garland to connect a trailer to her solar panels, which weren’t touched by the flames. Instead, the agency insisted that she connect to the power grid, which would’ve cost her about $20,000. She’s now moving to the outskirts of Albuquerque, about 140 miles away.

Six individuals and families said they left the program because it would’ve cost too much to hook a trailer up to electricity, restore their wells or meet other utility rules.

Emilio Aragon was living in his office when he was told he was third on the list for a FEMA trailer. After waiting six months, he gave up and spent his retirement savings on a mobile home. He was among six individuals and families who said they were offered housing too late or faced delays that forced them to find housing on their own.

In response to those accounts, FEMA said in a written statement that it must ensure housing is safe and secure. “Generally, this is not a fast process because it requires us to be so thorough and meticulous. Working during the monsoon season meant it took additional time to make sure these sites were safe.”

FEMA has had a hard time getting people into temporary housing quickly after disasters. After Hurricane Ida struck Louisiana in 2021, FEMA said its housing program “is not an immediate solution for a survivor’s interim and longer-term housing needs” because it takes months to get sites ready. The agency praised Louisiana’s decision to launch its own federally funded housing program alongside FEMA’s.

A few months after the storm, The New York Times reported, the state’s program had housed around 1,200 people in about the same time it had taken for FEMA’s program to house 126.

Because FEMA’s housing programs end 18 months after a disaster declaration, every delay runs down the clock. Unless the Hermits Peak housing program is extended, it will expire in November, when the next winter is approaching.

FEMA declined to say whether it would extend the program, saying it would work with the state to meet survivors’ needs.

Wesley Bennett and his wife, JoDean Williams Cooper, said they went through three inspections to see where a trailer could be placed on their property. No spot was suitable, and they were instead offered a site at a mobile home park. Five other individuals and families said they pulled out of the housing program because of the red tape.

FEMA has noted that nine households declined to live in a mobile home park. Several of the trailers it has installed at those sites stand empty.

Some survivors, including Bennett and Cooper, said it wasn’t feasible to live in a trailer park an hour away from the homes they were rebuilding, especially with so many roads washed out by the flooding that followed the fire. They needed to stay on their land to take care of crops and deter theft.

“People who have largely lived in a rural setting are not going to be as comfortable in a trailer park. It’s just their whole way of life,” said Antonia Roybal-Mack, a lawyer who’s from the area and is assisting hundreds of victims in filing administrative claims for damage with the federal government.

“Here’s hoping it’s a paperwork issue”

Erika Larsen and her partner, Tyler White, were living in a camper van after losing their home in the village of San Ignacio when they learned FEMA was offering temporary housing.

Their livelihoods depended on being on their land, they said. Larsen is an herbalist who before the fire made tinctures and elixirs with ambrosia, hops and nettle she grew in gardens dotting the property. White works in construction and gets a lot of her work from neighbors who know where to find her.

Early on, White was feeling optimistic. She posted to a private Facebook group of disaster survivors on Aug. 23, a day after a FEMA inspection.

“Amazingly enough, yesterday we were approved for a trailer to live in. There is only one place to put anything on our property because of flooding. Our well and septic are shot because of fire and floods so we didn’t think we’d qualify. But we did. We should get it in a couple months,” she wrote.

“All this is to say as much as it stinks dealing with FEMA,” she wrote, “as hard of a fight as it can be, you might just get something out of it.”

Two days later, she added something.

Their case manager had “asked us if we wanted to live in a FEMA trailer park. We told him we’d been approved for a trailer at home and he said there was no record of that. Here’s hoping it’s a paperwork issue!”

She and Larsen waited for word while living nearby in their camper van. By late August, afternoon storm clouds often formed over the mountains, bringing monsoons that seeped through the roof and flooded their land. They worried about further damage to their property while they were away.

Two weeks after her first post, White offered another update. FEMA said the proposed site was in a floodplain, so the couple wasn’t allowed to put a trailer there.

“Our case manager said lots of people have been saying they were told they were approved for a trailer just to be declined,” she wrote. “So the moral of my story is: If a bunch of FEMA people come and tell you you are getting a trailer, you still might not be eligible.”

“If a bunch of FEMA people come and tell you you are getting a trailer, you still might not be eligible.”

They appealed the decision, but more inspections over the next two months determined that other sites on their property were too far from a septic tank, well or electricity hookup.

The agency also apparently made an error in its denial: Inspection records provided by Larsen showed the proposed trailer site isn’t actually in the floodplain on the map that FEMA says it uses for such decisions.

FEMA officials declined to comment on particular cases without written permission from the people who’d filed the claims.

By early November, as temperatures dropped and a long winter loomed, they’d had enough and decided to move into a dilapidated mobile home on a neighbor’s property. The landowner used it for storage, but at least it had a wood stove.

Larsen likened dealing with FEMA to an abusive relationship. “It really has been the worst part of this whole experience for me,” she said. “I feel capable of doing the work of processing this trauma. But having to keep talking to these people that are just fucking with my mind is pretty intense.”

The flood that never came

It wasn’t just residents who saw that the program wasn’t working. State and local officials asked FEMA to relax its requirements or make accommodations, but the agency didn’t budge.

After FEMA announced in early August that it would provide trailers, officials met with Amanda Salas, the planning and zoning director for San Miguel County, and told her inspections and approvals could take 10 weeks.

Across the burn scar, survivors were arranging inspections with caravans of contractors and FEMA employees who poked around their properties to evaluate possible sites.

In late-September, Salas cleared her desk, expecting a flood of building permit requests from residents seeking permission to place FEMA trailers on their land.

Getting people back was “number one,” she said in an interview. “I need them to be in a warm place, you know?”

The flood of permit requests never came. About 35 people expressed interest in FEMA’s housing program when she told them about it after they showed up in her office to ask questions about cleanup and rebuilding. Most withdrew due to bureaucratic hurdles and delays, she said. Her counterpart in Mora County said he observed the same thing.

FEMA spokesperson Aissha Flores Cruz said in an email that the agency respects survivors’ decisions not to apply.

In mid-October, Salas attended a meeting of local and federal officials. It was her first opportunity to talk to high-ranking FEMA officials in person, and she spoke up.

She told them it didn’t make sense to require electricity, wells or septic systems in a rugged area where people didn’t rely on those services before the fire. She asked FEMA to provide gas generators.

“It seemed like they heard us,” Salas said of the meeting. “But they didn’t do anything about it.”

“It seemed like they heard us, but they didn’t do anything about it.”

Meanwhile, state officials sought waivers for the utility requirements and urged FEMA to outfit homes with portable water tanks or composting toilets. The state wanted “to at least get people back in a safe, warm home, on their property,” said Lienemann, the state emergency department spokesperson.

On Dec. 19, as temperatures dropped to single digits in parts of the burn scar, the state had not heard back from FEMA about its request. Ali Rye, an official with the state Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, asked for a response and again requested that FEMA approve waivers for high-need cases.

Lienemann said FEMA told the state that it would make decisions on waiving rules on a case-by-case basis. The agency never made any exceptions.

FEMA said federal law doesn’t allow it to waive the rules for its housing programs. And Flores Cruz said FEMA funds cannot pay to reconnect or rebuild utilities because that would be “permanent work” funded through a program intended to be temporary.

Payment for permanent repairs falls to a special FEMA claims office created in January, but it hasn’t cut any checks to survivors yet. Congress set aside about $4 billion in compensation funds in acknowledgement of the federal government’s role in starting the fire.

Sheltered but not home

Daniel Encinias is one of the two people who got trailers on their own land. Each month, a FEMA representative stops by and asks for proof that he’s trying to find permanent housing — one of the conditions of living in the agency’s trailers.

He tells them he’s waiting for a check from the $4 billion compensation fund. “The minute FEMA releases the money and gives me enough money to build my home back,” he said, “that’s when things are gonna get done.”

The claims office will handle such requests. It was supposed to start sending out money in early 2023, but the agency is behind schedule.

“I have to tell you, opening an office is hard,” claims office Director Angela Gladwell told a packed lecture hall of frustrated fire survivors at Mora High School on April 19.

FEMA said it now expects to open three field offices to the public this month and it is trying to make partial payments while it finalizes its rules. Case navigators — who are locals who know the communities, the agency pointed out — are reaching out to those who have filed claims for damages.

The throngs of FEMA employees who swarmed into the area last summer to offer short-term aid have moved on. Some survivors are in limbo, running low on disaster aid and lacking the money to rebuild.

For Rex “Buzzard” Haver, a disabled veteran, the first disaster has split into a tangle of smaller ones. After his home burned in May, his family spent nearly $64,000 on a mobile home — more than the roughly $48,000 he’s gotten from FEMA so far. He doesn’t have the money to install a wheelchair ramp.

The company that delivered his replacement home broke its windows, tore the siding and ripped off lights during delivery. But they won’t come and fix it until the county repairs the road to his house. Haver has no washer or dryer, and for months, his satellite TV provider kept calling to collect a dish that had melted into black goo.

Haver didn’t learn that FEMA was offering trailers until several months after his new mobile home arrived in July, according to his daughter, Brandy Brogan. Now he’s in hospice, and he’s struggling.

“He doesn’t feel that he has a purpose anymore,” Brogan said. “There’s nothing for him to do. There’s nowhere for him to go.”

On a recent snowy afternoon, just down the road from Haver, strong winds rushed past blackened trees and through gaps in David Martinez’s trailer. He raised his voice to be heard over the wind.

“I’ve never been a sick man,” he said, wincing. “Till lately.”

Martinez can hardly walk due to his medical problems. The once-avid outdoorsman spends most days sitting in the kitchenette, the space heater on full blast, watching hunting shows on a 16-inch television. He ultimately got $34,000 from FEMA in short-term aid, but he’s down to a few grand.

On a recent afternoon, his sister, Bercy Martinez, and her grand-nephew drove up the washed-out driveway to deliver groceries and bottled water, which she does a few times a week. She loaded her brother’s fridge. “This is very good,” she said in Spanish of the meatloaf she bought. “It’s not too spicy.”

She’d been asking FEMA for weeks about getting her brother a spot in a mobile home park so he doesn’t have to navigate the bumpy road that makes drives to the clinic so painful.

Two weeks ago, she reached a FEMA employee on the phone and asked if the housing program that had arrived too late for her brother could help him now. The answer, she said, was no. He’s no longer eligible because he has a place to live.

Patrick Lohmann is a reporter for Source New Mexico and a recipient of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network grant. He reports from Las Vegas, New Mexico. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.