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Soundbytes: Arizona’s war on drugs

PHOENIX — Recent activity along Arizona’s border with Mexico suggests that illegal drug trafficking is starting to reach the same problem status as illegal human trafficking.

Over the past decade, 80 percent of the nation’s methamphetamine production has been shifted to meth labs in Mexico. About 90 percent of the nation’s drugs come from the same country, and across the same border, says Elizabeth Kempshall, special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Phoenix office.

Kempshall, 45, came to the Valley last fall from Houston. She has spent her entire 24-year career with the DEA as an undercover agent and administrator.

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INTERACTIVES

Elizabeth Kempshall, Arizona’s top DEA agent, speaks out on:

• Her drug-busting job

• Meth

• Steroids

• Online “pill mills”

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TZR recently caught up to Kempshall in her office and at a federal law enforcement shooting range near Interstate 17 and Carefree Highway north of Phoenix. [For the full story on Kempshall, her personal background, and what she intends to do about drugs in Arizona in the future, pick up a copy of the March 2008 issue of PHOENIX magazine.]

Her office has resources spread throughout the state, including Nogales, Yuma, Sierra Vista, Tucson, Phoenix and Flagstaff. She also has cooperation from local law enforcement agencies and state and federal prosecutors.

“Go on the offensive. Don’t go on the defense and wait for drugs to come across the border,” she says. “Because if I stay defensive, I’m going to miss drugs.”

Kempshall says the agency is rolling out a new public education campaign about steroids this spring in Phoenix, among other major U.S. cities. Two new tactical teams based in Tucson and Phoenix will try to infiltrate the illegal pharmaceutical industry on the Web.

But for meth, Kempshall says cooperation from the Mexican authorities is crucial. That’s because the majority of meth coming across Arizona’s border into the U.S. is being made and often shipped by the same groups behind drug and marijuana trafficking.

“Our fight against meth has been true law enforcement success, and for DEA in particular,” she says during a break from the firing line. “We’ve redirected what’s occuring in the meth business.”

Don’t be misled by the idea that enforcement has merely made meth an American import rather than ending the meth problem, Kempshall says. Now meth manufacturers have to make it across the border instead of making the drug in rural areas of the U.S. and shipping it throughout the region.

“If we can make it more difficult (to transport), then we can cost them more money,” Kempshall says. “And they’re in this for the money… . They have to go through that fatal funnel. I view that as a success story.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Urban needs drain Colorado River delta

High over the southern edge of the lagoon, a bald eagle appeared as if from out of nowhere, wheeling through the cloudless sky. Then, in a beating of wings that shook the desert air, several thousand snow geese took flight, honking in terror at the sight of a mortal enemy.

“Man, look at all those snows,” says Brad Andres, a wildlife biologist from Colorado. “I think two on the left are Caspian terns.”

Paul Meyers, a biologist from Alaska, pointed his binoculars to the west. “Here comes an osprey,” he says.

That morning at dawn, Meyers and Andres had set out from Yuma, Ariz. with a half-dozen fellow biologists for a tour of the Cienega de Santa Clara, a 40,000-acre wetland thriving in the midst of the bone-dry Sonoran desert, near the Gulf of California in northwestern Mexico.

A crucial stop on the Pacific Flyway, the cienega — Spanish for “marsh” — provides habitat for hundreds of thousands of migratory and resident birds, some of which, like the endangered Yuma clapper rail, are found virtually nowhere else on Earth. It is a birder’s paradise, where white-faced ibis, sandpipers, gulls, warblers, cranes and pelicans hunt among tall cattail reeds and rise in flocks that can momentarily darken a flawless blue sky.

“It’s crazy how wetlands out in the middle of the desert are always so incredibly productive,” Meyers says.

Remarkable though they may be, these wetlands are only a tiny fragment of what once was one of North America’s largest and most productive estuaries: the Colorado River Delta. In the days before the building of dams on the river, and the creation of giant reservoirs such as Lake Powell and Lake Mead, massive surges of freshwater created a wetland area here the size of the state of Delaware.

In 1922, ecologist Aldo Leopold explored the Delta by canoe, through a seemingly endless landscape of emerald-green lagoons and towering cottonwood and mesquite trees, where deer, bobcats and even jaguars roamed.

“The river was nowhere and everywhere…” Leopold wrote. “He divided and rejoined, he twisted and turned, he meandered in awesome jungles, he all but ran in circles…”

Today, those green lagoons — and the wildlife they supported — are all but gone, replaced by agricultural fields, cities, and barren salt flats that stretch as far as the eye can see. Canals and pipelines divert so much water from the river that it fails to reach the sea except in times of exceptional flooding.

Of the Delta’s former wetlands, only the Cienega de Santa Clara remains.

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INTERACTIVES

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“It’s the last relic we have of the wetlands of the Delta,” says Martha Roman, a field biologist for the Mexican state of Sonora. “It’s a treasure.”

Yet even this remnant wilderness is threatened, as water officials north of the border weigh diverting as much as 70 percent of the water that sustains it for use in cities and farms in the United States.

ENVIRONMENT VS. ECONOMICS

As American water officials like to point out, this remaining marshland is an artificial creation, more replica than relic. For while the Delta’s former wetlands relied on the spring floods of the Colorado River for life, the Cienega depends on millions of gallons of agricultural run-off from farms in Arizona, water delivered through a concrete canal built in the 1970s.

That run-off was intended for delivery to the Yuma Desalting Plant, which was intended to purify and return the water to the river. But due to a series of unusually wet years, and the high cost to operate the desalter, the water was allowed to bypass the plant, which stood idle. Instead, it flowed into the desert, and there, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Delta’s wetlands were reborn.

“For the longest time people didn’t even know these wetlands existed,” said Robert Mesta, a birds of prey specialist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who is coordinating conservation efforts in the area. “They just depend on the fact that canals leak.”

For Arizona’s water managers, though, Nature’s gain is their loss. An average of 110,000 acre-feet of water – enough to supply 220,000 Arizona households for a year – flows across the border to the wetlands. This volume is equal to about 8 percent of Mexico’s total share of Colorado River water.

Yet until the plant begins operation, that water is subtracted from Arizona’s river allotment, a supply already stretched to the breaking point by massive population growth and compounded by the worst drought since the region’s record-keeping began.

“Because the U.S. is not operating Yuma, we were delivering water into Mexico that was not being accounted for,” says Sid Wilson, director of the Central Arizona Project. “It was just ice cream for Mexico, and it was lowering levels in Lake Mead by a foot a year.”

If elevations in Lake Mead and Lake Powell sink to a pre-determined level, a shortage will be declared on the Colorado River, leading to immediate cuts in water deliveries to Nevada and Arizona. With less water available, the Southwest’s development-driven economies would inevitably suffer.

Gloomy predictions about imminent shortages on the river have been tempered somewhat by heavy snowfall in the Rocky Mountains. At the moment, spring runoff is estimated to be about 117 percent of average, which would add about 10 feet to Lake Mead’s elevation, and forestall a shortage at least for a few years.

Nevertheless, booming population growth in the region, and the prospect of more dry years on the horizon, has water managers scrambling to secure every drop of water they can. One of the most attractive options has been halting the flow of agricultural runoff and other unregulated water into Mexico, and keeping it for use in the United States.

Yet while that water has been targeted under the banner of conservation, much of it flows down the main channel of the river, sustaining the Delta’s remaining wetlands.

“Some of the water that flows off of these fields really does support some important habitats,” says Karl Flessa, a paleobiologist and chair of the University of Arizona’s geosciences department, who has studied the Delta for decades. “But that flow is likely to be reduced to near zero, so that the United States can retain as much water in the river as possible.”

FEW OPTIONS FOR CIENEGA’S SURVIVAL

The Yuma Desalting Plant has been eyed for years as a potential tool for reducing accidental flows into Mexico. Were the plant put into full operation, however, flows to the Cienega would be reduced to a brackish, pesticide-laden sludge.

According to Jim Cherry, Yuma area manager for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, after a successful test run at 10 percent capacity last year, the plant could be restarted almost immediately. “It ran beautifully,” he says.

The reopening of the plant was simply a matter of time, Cherry adds.

According to Wilson, flows to the Cienega could eventually be cut by as much as 70 percent, down to about 30,000 acre-feet. But Wilson, who has been deeply involved in delicate negotiations with environmentalists and other groups over the fate of the Cienega, argued that such a reduction might not spell disaster for the wetlands.

“I don’t know how much water the Cienega needs, and neither do the environmentalists,” he says. “Nobody really knows.”

And while Wilson said he recognized the value of the wetlands as a unique habitat, he could not guarantee that they would avoid the impact of future shortages on the river.

“The Cienega, like the rest of us, will have to learn to deal with drought,” he says.

With a growing recognition of its environmental importance, it appears unlikely that flows to the Cienega de Santa Clara will be dramatically disrupted in the short-term. Even more promising to its long-term survival are several alternative strategies for providing water to the region.

The Yuma area suffers from an exceptionally high groundwater table, water that is too salty for use in agriculture. Were that water pumped into the desalting plant, it could replace the agricultural run-off that currently flows into Mexico.

“We’ve been looking at whether it makes sense for this plant to be operating a little bit differently,” Cherry says. “This is a more sustainable use of the desalting plant, and it would still allow the Cienega to flourish.”

Still other options exist, such as paying Yuma farmers for their water rights. “In times of real drought, where you don’t have supplies available to go to the Cienega, part of the solution might be short term, temporary leases of land, and fallowing of that land,” said Wilson. “That would free up some water to go down to the Cienega.”

MEXICAN INVOLVEMENT NEEDED

To environmentalists, while the long-term survival of the Cienega would represent a major victory, much more work remains to be done in the Delta, where around 95 percent of the original wetlands have vanished.

The task of restoring the greater Delta is complicated considerably by its location in Mexico. In the U.S., tens of billions of dollars have been spent restoring estuaries and wetlands such as Chesapeake Bay, the Everglades and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California.

“You don’t see the same corresponding effort going into restoring the Delta, I think because it’s simply on the other side of the border,” Flessa says. “The United States hasn’t taken its full responsibility in assisting Mexico in restoring some of these habitats.”

North of the border, a $626 million effort to restore riparian and marsh habitats along the river is underway, led by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. That restoration work, aimed at shoring up populations of endangered birds and fish, ends at the U.S.-Mexican border.

Wildlife in the region, however, does not respect international boundaries. “The common interest is that these birds are found on both sides of the border,” Mesta says.

The key ingredient in further restoration of the Delta is water — lots of it. Conservative estimates suggest that at least 1 to 2 percent of the Colorado River’s total flow would be necessary to begin repairing significant amounts of habitat. But the river’s supply is under tremendous strain, with essentially every drop already divided up between users in seven U.S. states and Mexico.

Not represented at the negotiating table, of course, are environmental uses such as the Delta.

Dr. Osvel Hinojosa-Huerta directs the water and wetlands program for Pronatura, a Mexican environmental organization. On a recent bird-counting trip into the Delta’s remaining wetlands, he and his team identified 109 species — among them eagles, hawks, the endangered snowy plover and even a great horned owl.

Hinojosa has seen the Colorado River reach the sea a few times in his many years in the Delta, during times of major floods. He says he hoped one day it would be a regular occurrence, allowing the Delta to flourish once more.

“If we want it to happen again, we need to make a legal allocation [of water] for the environment , with both countries working together,” he says. “That’s a big challenge, but I think it’s very possible.”

WATER USERS BICKER OVER RIGHTS

High anxiety over water for human uses in the region, however, make the prospects for significant new allocations for the environment uncertain at best. Negotiations over the Colorado River are extraordinarily complex, involving seven U.S. states, the U.S. Department of the Interior and Mexico.

The Delta’s location south of the border provides additional cover for those who would rather prefer to steer the river’s water towards development.

Wilson, for instance, praised efforts by Mexican environmental groups working to secure water rights for the wetlands. But he expressed doubt that the U.S. was obligated to provide additional water supplies to the area. “It’s really a Mexican issue, to begin restoring the Delta,” he says.

Others feel that responsibility should be shared among all river users.

“Saying that Mexico should use its allocation to restore habitats in the Delta, would be like saying the state of Louisiana is responsible for the dead zone off the mouth of the Mississippi River, and that none of the upstream states in the Mississippi River system should bear any responsibility for putting excess fertilizer in the river,” Flessa says. “It’s simply unfair, regardless of the fact that it’s in another country.”

A number of U.S. environmental groups are working towards just that goal, including the Sonoran Institute, based in Tucson, as well as Environmental Defense and the Pacific Institute. But fair or not, implementing a policy to allocate U.S. water for the Delta will be far from easy.

Unless the Southwest breaks out of its current drought and enters a prolonged wet period, increasing demand from cities and agriculture seems almost certain to keep supplies stretched tight. With demand already exceeding supply, securing water for any new purpose—much less an environmental use in a foreign country—won’t happen without a long struggle.

After all, as Mark Twain once observed, “In the West, whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.

Toxic rock soils town, Colorado River

CIBOLA – When Ron Swan first found this tiny riverside town in 1970, he was struck by its remote beauty and fertile lands. The jagged Trigo Mountains loomed off in the distance, and wild ponies and burros would soon roam freely in a wildlife refuge nearby.

Swan took one more look at his life in arid Casa Grande and never looked back.

“Water,” he says simply. “There’s a river here and an opportunity to really farm…In June, I’ll have been here 35 years, so I guess I like it.”

Today, Swan is 74. He runs one of the largest businesses in town, River Bottom Farms. It grows alfalfa, cotton, corn, wheat and Bermuda grass on the Arizona side of the Colorado River.

But Swan, like most of Cibola’s 200 residents, unknowingly face a colossal public health hazard.

The entire town – from its front yards to its unpaved streets – is covered with manganese, an element used mainly as an alloy in steel. It can be toxic if ingested or inhaled in even modest quantities. A few tablespoons of the stuff can pollute an entire swimming pool.

For years, this flaky, dark-colored ore has been spread all over Cibola as dust-control in a dusty town. Farming equipment grinds it up into dust that floats around people and crops. During the rainy season, washes that are normally dry deliver it to the Colorado River floodplain.

Long-term inhalation of unsafe levels of manganese have been shown to clog the lungs, damage the central nervous system and human reproduction or inhibit learning ability in children, according to the few studies conducted by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There’s even a condition called “manganism,” which is due to chronic exposure suffered mostly by miners.

Although some government officials are aware of Cibola’s problem, they have yet to host a public meeting on the subject. Interviews and public records suggest that officials are unable to pin the liability on anyone, and that no solution is in sight.

Public records also show that the federal Bureau of Land Management, which owns and operates most of the land surrounding Cibola, has been aware of the problem since August 2002 but done little to address it for lack of Congressional funds.

A state investigation brought the issue back to the forefront. And it shows that in a town full of ghost stories, the tale of Cibola’s manganese problem is only too real.

A HISTORY OF FARMING, MINING

Cibola dates back to the late 1880s, when settlers moved to the region to farm along the riverbank and mine the mineral-rich Trigo Mountains. Its name is derived from the 14th-century expeditions Spanish explorers made of the Southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Gold. They found Native American tribes instead.

But Cibola’s townsfolk persevered centuries after the Spanish left. Around 1900, they built a steamboat landing to move goods up and down the river. They built a 16-mile canal from the river to their farms (which ultimately failed) and a bridge to move goods across the Colorado into California (which was too low for boats to pass under).

By the late 1950s, mining had caught up to farming as one of Cibola’s leading industries, thanks to a stockpiling program initiated by the Department of Defense in the name of national security. With the Cold War heating up, the federal government was paying twice the market rate for manganese – an alloy in steel used for everything from heavy equipment to semiconductors – and then transporting it to larger piles in remote locations.

Miners in towns like Cibola responded by scrambling out into the hills, staking new claims or digging without permission. The piles grew and grew as miners cashed in; most of Cibola’s manganese tailings ended up in a massive stockpile near Wendon, Ariz., according to officials for the state Department of Mines and Mineral Resources.

But pay dirt quickly became dirt again. The U.S. government ended its subsidy of the national stockpiling program, and miners walked off the job in Cibola in 1959.

Yet the manganese piles remained, a hulking pile of toxic rock just a mile or so from Cibola Lake and the Colorado River. People drove ATVs around and over them, used them as a backdrop for makeshift shooting ranges and, eventually, tapped them as groundcover to knock the dust down in Cibola.

AUTHORITIES AWARE, UNABLE TO HELP

A state investigation now shows that federal officials first caught wind of the ad hoc gravel pit’s existence in August 2002. That’s when Lowell Jeffcoat, a BLM hazardous materials coordinator, wrote to his superiors after noticing that large amounts of the manganese had eroded into a nearby wash that feeds the Colorado River.

At the time, Jeffcoat said it was a threat to water quality and the riparian habitat of the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge nearby. Two months later, soil samples taken at the site indicated manganese levels exceeded safe levels.

Shortly after the results were in, BLM employees reported a strange occurrence at the site. They noticed about 10,000 tons of manganese tailings had disappeared, and that two men in a green pickup truck and a white dump truck had hauled off a load of the material, according to an inter-office email at the time. The memo also mentioned that the material was spread all over Cibola.

In January 2003, BLM employees notified officials with the Arizona State Land Department – which also owns land that one of the mines sat on – and the Department of Health Services in nearby Imperial County, Calif. The health official dismissed their environmental concerns, but BLM employees fretted about people inhaling manganese dust, according to a recent state investigation.

In June 2003, the firm studying the soil samples confirmed the BLM employees’ fears. The agency pledged $100,000 to help clean up the site with monies available in March 2005.

But Jeffcoat was eventually transferred to the BLM’s Utah office, and neither of the piles were ever fully contained and capped, BLM officials told TZR recently.

Then, on June 13, 2007, the phone rang inside ADEQ’s Solid Waste Inspections and Compliance Unit. The anonymous caller had a tip: Manganese tailings were on the roads and most of the yards in Cibola, Ariz.

Twelve days later, an ADEQ team was in town collecting soil samples that would ultimately lead to the most detailed look at Cibola’s toxic problem.

TZR obtained the results of that investigation under a state public records request. The details of that report make up the bulk of this story.

MANGANESE LEVELS UNSAFE

Just days after Thanksgiving in 2007, five inspectors from ADEQ set out for Cibola. The town is about 30 miles south of Ehrenberg, which is where they met officials from BLM and La Paz County, which manages the unincorporated town of Cibola.

From there the group headed south for a tour of the manganese piles and roads and yards of Cibola. It visited two manganese piles, the county’s public works gravel pit, an old rock quarry and four locations within Cibola, including the town’s main trailer park, roads and bridge.

Investigators found that the concentrations of manganese in the soils near the piles and in the washes were between five and seven times the safe levels for residential remediation. Arsenic levels were also highly unsafe.

They were also able to match the manganese from the piles to the gravel covering the Cibola’s yards and roads.

“In places, it appears the tailing piles are partially situated in the historic drainage path of the wash,” wrote ADEQ compliance coordinator Henry Darwin in his Jan. 10 summary. “If the tailings continue to remain in an un-stabilized condition, then erosive processes will continue to transport them to the wash.

“ADEQ believes this material could become an air quality concern if the same material becomes further broken up and crushed by vehicles,” Darwin adds.

During the visit, La Paz County Public Works director Tom Simmons told investigators that over the years, three different independent contractors working under a county road maintenance contract spread the manganese throughout Cibola, and that the companies were no longer in business because their proprietors had died.

The state investigation connected the dots and caught everyone by surprise – including Simmons himself.

“I was flabbergasted,” he told TZR months later. “I was probably the most surprised person in the world. Honestly, I had no idea.”

QUICK CLEANUP IS FAR OFF

Local, state and federal officials agree that there are two ways to solve Cibola’s manganese problem: Crews can either dig up the roads and haul the waste off to a special treatment facility, or they can cap all of the roads and yards with a glue-like sealant or pavement. [Simmons and interim La Paz County Manager Donna Hale say they are waiting from guidance from state and federal officials.]

But both of those solutions cost money that officials for the agencies involved say they don’t have. And that excludes the costs to fence off and seal the manganese mills themselves.

In addition, officials don’t have anyone to hold liable – and thus extract money from – because there is no documentation supporting the manganese mill’s existence, says William Harris, who now leads the BLM’s hazardous material program in Phoenix.

Harris says that at least $200,000 is needed to seal up the larger manganese pile for good. “But for us, that’s a lot of money to secure,” he adds.

That’s because his agency only receives about $2 million to $5 million annually to cap thousands of mines nationwide. In Arizona alone, state mine officials believe there are 100,000 abandoned mines.
Harris says there are about 20,000 abandoned mines on BLM land in Arizona.

That means there is a waiting list, and priority is given to those mines that pose a greater threat to the environment.

Most of the BLM’s mine cleanup money is currently being used to clean up lead and arsenic at Saginaw Hill outside Tucson, Harris says. Any future funding for other mines would literally require an act of Congress.

Harris says Cibola’s best shot at getting money from Congress would fall under the groundwater effects of the manganese piles, not the public inhalation of manganese dust.

But even if Harris’ agency received congressional funding for Cibola’s manganese piles today, it would take six to nine months to clean it up the mess, Harris says.

As a backup plan, Harris says he is negotiating with a branch of the Department of Defense that cleans up and processes these abandoned stockpiles of raw materials. However, the manganese in and around Cibola is of a lower grade – about 20 percent pure – that is not marketable, according to state mining officials and Richard Farkas, a local mining expert in Cibola.

So the chances of re-processing Cibola’s tailings for a commercial profit seem slim. Yet Harris says the cleanup discussions include Cibola’s manganese piles and two other stockpiles in Arizona.

Either way, Cibola’s townsfolk must wait for solution as they enter another dry, hot and dusty summer.

“We’re not ignoring them,” Harris says of Cibola’s townsfolk. “They’re on our radar screen. They’re in our long-term plan. It’s all about funding.”

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.