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The Navajo Nation faced water shortages for generations — and then the pandemic hit - The Verge

The Navajo Nation faced water shortages for generations — and then the pandemic hit - The Verge

The Navajo Nation faced water shortages for generations — and then the pandemic hit - The Verge
Jul 06, 2020 2 mins, 19 secs

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation coped with a different public health problem: access to safe, running water.

They also increase their risk of exposure to the novel coronavirus each time they venture outside to buy limited supplies of bottled water from stores or haul it home from communal wells.

To make sure people have water to cook, clean up, and wash their hands, the Navajo Water Project works to install home water systems across the reservation.

“These problems are being solved by Navajos for Navajos,” says Robbins, who leads the project housed within the nonprofit DigDeep, which works to improve access to clean running water in communities that have been left behind in the US.

She ultimately returned to the reservation where she grew up to lead the Navajo Water Project.

Robbins remembers being excited to see her grandparents whenever they made the 30-mile drive to her parents’ home, where they sometimes showered and filled up tanks with water from the hose outside.

It would take an investment of more than $700 million to get everyone on the reservation hooked up with safe tap water and basic sanitation, the Indian Health Service estimates.

They’ve brought running water to 300 homes on the Navajo Nation this way since 2016.

The culture has persisted through devastating efforts by the US government to decimate the Navajo Nation — efforts which have deprived the nation of safe water for generations.

The US forced the Navajo people from their lands in 1863 after a brutal “scorched-earth campaign” that destroyed villages, crops, livestock, and water sources.

More than 8,500 Navajo people who survived were forced to walk roughly 400 miles to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, where water was so alkaline it made people sick.

The Navajo Nation has been locked in legal battle after legal battle with individual states for its share of water for decades.

Today, in places like Oljato on the Arizona-Utah border, “a single spigot on a desolate road, miles from any residence, serves 900 people,” Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez said in a testimony to the House Natural Resources Committee last June in a hearing over a water rights settlement with Utah.

The scarcity of running water on the reservation “is not something that is only affecting Navajos during COVID.

The pandemic put the Navajo Water Project’s home installations on pause, right when families needed running water the most.

To make sure people without indoor plumbing still had water in the midst of the pandemic, the project distributed 251,856 gallons of bottled water throughout May.

Buying bottled water was hard for a lot of people on the reservation, Robbins points out.

The Navajo Water Project plans to move forward with a medium-term fix that doesn’t depend on bottled water while the reservation remains under a shelter-in-place order.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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