Superfund Research Program
Title: Unregulated Wells on the Navajo Nation Interactive Web Map and Data Dashboard
Accession Number: Not Available yet
Link to Dataset: https://unmcop.unm.edu/metals/
Repository: GitHub
Data Type(s): Environmental Science Data, Exposure Data
Summary: The aim of this website is to allow users to make informed inferences and decisions about the quality of unregulated water sources on the Navajo Nation. Nearly 30 of households in the Navajo Nation, a sovereign Indigenous nation in the Southwestern United States, lack access to running water from regulated public water systems. Water hauling from unregulated water sources is common in this region and may present a disproportionate burden of exposure to harmful toxicants like uranium and arsenic. Research shows that wells in closer proximity to one of the more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation have higher counts of uranium and arsenic that exceed the federally mandated maximum contaminant level for each, 10 ppb and 30 ppm, respectively. One of the main challenges in addressing this problem is the lack of available information to water users and decision-makers in the Navajo Nation about which wells are unsafe. Researchers at the University of New Mexico METALS Superfund Research Program have compiled a database of water quality measurements from 1101 wells within the reservation using data from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project (CRUMP), Navajo Nation Environmental Protection Agency (NNEPA), U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Tolani Lake Enterprises, Northern Arizona University (NAU), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (ACOE), and other fellow researchers. To date, none of these compiled data have been disseminated publicly and in a format that facilitates easy interpretation. The dataset used in this map has been cleaned and converted from long to wide format. In total, the dataset includes details of 1101 wells with location information from publicly available sources. Each data point in the table represents an aggregation of all data points from the sources listed above. Uranium measurements are converted from radioactive activity in picocuries per liter (pCi/L) to mass in micrograms per liter (ug/L) by dividing pCi/L by an assumed constant of 0.67. Multiple measurements for each well are combined according to type, where primary standard analytes, which includes radionuclides, metals, and metalloids, are aggregated by median value; water chemistry analytes, which includes pH and hardness, are aggregated by the arithmetic mean. Measurements that are below the detection limit (BDL) are excluded from the dataset for two reasons: first, detection limits vary by the lab and are not always reported, so imputation is inconsistent; second, because the primary intent of this map is visualization we have opted to favor ease of use over various sensitivity analyses. Information on data sources and cleaning will be displayed and clearly articulated in a modal window.
Project(s) associated with this dataset: