On July 16, 1979, a dam collapsed at the Church Rock uranium mill, spilling more than 1,000 tons of radioactive waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive tailings solution into the Rio Puerco north of Gallup, N.M. The Albuquerque Tribune, then an ardent supporter of the uranium industry, buried news of the disaster in a brief item near the bottom of page 2.
Around the same time, some of the paper’s younger journalists, notably Tim Gallagher and Steve Lambert, were forming a staff softball team. The team took the name Nukes in mockery of the paper’s embarrassing editorial bias. The Nukes went on to play for many seasons, fielding a variety of squads made up of players who, thankfully, had more success in newsrooms than on the diamond.
The Tribune redeemed itself in later years. Two years after the spill, a 10-part series by Burt Hubbard detailed the state’s widespread environmental problems, prompting legislative reforms, and in 1994, after Gallagher had risen to editor, the Trib won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for stories by Eileen Welsome disclosing radiation experiments the government conducted on unknowing citizens.
Sadly, the Trib and the Nukes are gone. The Church Rock spill remains the largest accidental release of radioactive material in the nation’s history.
Jack McElroy Books 