Family fights government in land dispute near Area 51

Dispute over historic Groom Mine in Nevada pits Air Force against local family near Area 51

http://video.foxnews.com/v/5244593192001/

By Andrew Craft
FoxNews.com

Joe Sheahan is in the fight of his life to save his family’s Nevada mine from being swallowed up by the federal government's mysterious Area 51.

Technically, Sheahan’s family no longer even holds title to Groom Mine, which it owned for 130 years. The federal government took the deed through eminent domain after first offering the Sheahans $333,300, a price family lawyer James Leavitt called “embarrassingly low.” The family is fighting back in federal court, but if the Sheahans and Uncle Sam can’t agree on a value, it could wind up before a jury.

Possibly more interesting is what the federal government wants with a parched stretch of rural Nevada desert and an old mine that hasn’t been active in decades. The area is known for two of the feds’ most closely guarded secrets: nuclear testing and UFOs.

So far, the family has not been paid for the land. Initially, the family was sued by the federal government in September of 2015 in a complaint case of eminent domain. A few days later the government then filed a motion to take the over the property. Now, Appraisal reports are being exchanged in the discovery phase of the litigation. If the parties cannot reach a sufficient value for the land, the Sheahans are prepared to fight it in a jury trial.

The mine hasn’t been in full operation since 1954, but until fall of 2015 family members went out from time to time to blast for minerals. The 400 acres of land sits almost 6,000 feet above sea level with panoramic views of the surrounding Groom Mountain Range and borders the Nevada Test and Training Range, which includes Area 51. According to Sheahan, his family’s land had always been highly sought after by the U.S. Air Force base looking to expand its flight-testing range, “They told me the land was like a suit hemmed in too tight that needed to breathe, that’s why they want our land“ Sheahan said.

Sheahan told Fox News that Air Force officials started showing up unannounced on the property in the 40’s and 50’s, intimidating his grandparents. He said his family complained to the Air Force, but nothing happened. Then nuclear tests came without warning. According to the Las Vegas Review Journal archives, on Jan. 27, 1951, the Air Force detonated the first above-ground test on land next to the Groom Mine. Sheahan says his family wasn’t told about the test. “This bomb goes off, who do you call, who do you Google, there’s no one … those blasts did significant damage to the property, not only in radiation,” he said. Sheahan claims family members and mine workers suffered long-term radiation effects and says some livestock died from beta burns.

In the winter of 2014, government officials from the Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force approached the Sheahan family about purchasing the property. At that time, Sheahan and other family members had never had the property appraised but he says the family thought offers of $2.4 million, $5.2 million, and $1.5 million from the Air Force were too low and so they rejected them. “We’re not going to sit down with those numbers at the table.” said Sheahan.

The Air Force confiscated the property on Sept. 16, 2015 through a federal court ruling in US District Court in Nevada. The family had three outside experts appraise the property after the seizure. Due to its proximity to Area 51 and the mineral rights to the land, each appraiser recognized the “unique value” of the property and came to the conclusion that the real value of the land was worth upwards of $44 million to $116 million dollars, Leavitt told Fox News.

In a statement on Nov. 9, 2016 obtained by Fox News, a prior commander at Nellis Air Force Base, Col. Thomas E. Dempsey explained the reason for seizing the land; “Over the years, technology has increased demand for the test and training range assets and the Air Force has developed infrastructure that directly supports range activities that cannot be replicated elsewhere.”

Leavitt is fighting to get the family just compensation, which real estate expert and Fox News Legal Analyst Bob Massi explains as “an objective understanding of the value of that property.”

Fox News reached out for a comment from Justice Department, which is representing the Air Force but was told by deputy press secretary Wyn Hornbuckle the department will not comment on pending litigation.

Freelance local investigative reporter Glen Meek has been researching the Sheahan case since the government seized the land and is making a documentary about the land dispute. He noted government’s unwillingness to provide answers and boiled it down to two major fundamental issues - individual rights and national security, saying “the government’s position is pretty much, the testing that’s going on there now is incompatible with civilians having private land in that area.”

The case is currently in discovery. Sheahan says he is a God-loving American and does not want to be portrayed as unpatriotic but wants his family to receive just compensation. Sheahan and Leavitt expect a late spring or early summer court date where a jury will decide on the matter of just compensation.

Tainted water runs beneath Nevada desert

The state faces a water crisis and population boom, but radioactive waste from the Nevada Test Site has polluted aquifers.

A "typical American house" on the Nevada Test Site, one of two that survived the May 5, 1955, detonation of a 29-kiloton device named "Apple II" on Yucca Flat. (Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times)

By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Yucca Flat, Nev. - A sea of ancient water tainted by the Cold War is creeping deep under the volcanic peaks, dry lake beds and pinyon pine forests covering a vast tract of Nevada.

Over 41 years, the federal government detonated 921 nuclear warheads underground at the Nevada Test Site, 75 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each explosion deposited a toxic load of radioactivity into the ground and, in some cases, directly into aquifers.

When testing ended in 1992, the Energy Department estimated that more than 300 million curies of radiation had been left behind, making the site one of the most radioactively contaminated places in the nation.

During the era of weapons testing, Nevada embraced its role almost like a patriotic duty. There seemed to be no better use for an empty desert. But today, as Nevada faces a water crisis and a population boom, state officials are taking a new measure of the damage.

They have successfully pressured federal officials for a fresh environmental assessment of the 1,375-square-mile test site, a step toward a potential demand for monetary compensation, replacement of the lost water or a massive cleanup.

"It is one of the largest resource losses in the country," said Thomas S. Buqo, a Nevada hydrogeologist. "Nobody thought to say, 'You are destroying a natural resource.' "

In a study for Nye County, where the nuclear test site lies, Buqo estimated that the underground tests polluted 1.6 trillion gallons of water. That is as much water as Nevada is allowed to withdraw from the Colorado River in 16 years -- enough to fill a lake 300 miles long, a mile wide and 25 feet deep.

At today's prices, that water would be worth as much as $48 billion if it had not been fouled, Buqo said.

Although the contaminated water is migrating southwest from the high ground of the test site, the Energy Department has no cleanup plans, saying it would be impossible to remove the radioactivity. Instead, its emphasis is on monitoring.

Federal scientists say the tainted water is moving so slowly -- 3 inches to 18 feet a year -- that it will not reach the nearest community, Beatty, about 22 miles away, for at least 6,000 years.

Still, Nevada officials reject the idea that a massive part of their state will be a permanent environmental sacrifice zone.

Access to more water could stoke an economic boom in the area, local officials say. More than a dozen companies want to build solar electric generation plants, but the county cannot allow the projects to go forward without more water, said Gary Hollis, a Nye County commissioner.

The problem extends beyond the contamination zone. If too much clean water is pumped out of the ground from adjacent areas, it could accelerate the movement of tainted water. When Nye County applied for permits in recent years to pump clean water near the western boundary of the test site, the state engineer denied the application based on protests by the Energy Department.

(The department did not cite environmental concerns, perhaps to avoid acknowledging the extent of the Cold War contamination. Instead, federal officials said the pumping could compromise security at the test site, which is still in use.)

"Those waters have been degraded," said Republican state Assemblyman Edwin Goedhart of Nye County, who runs a dairy with 18,000 head of livestock. "That water belongs to the people of Nevada. Even before any contamination comes off the test site, I look at this as a matter of social economic justice."

Even before the Cold War turned the landscape radioactive, the test site was a forbidding place, as empty a spot as any in the country.

Creosote and sagebrush covered much of the gravelly terrain, punctuated by soaring mountains and crusty lake beds. In the winter months, snow covered the 7,000-foot Pahute Mesa, and a few herds of wild horses roamed the high country.

In 1950, President Truman secretly selected the site for nuclear testing and withdrew the federally owned land from public use.

In early 1951, atomic blasts started lighting up the sky over Las Vegas, then a city of fewer than 50,000. Early atmospheric tests spawned heavy fallout, and some areas are still so radioactive that anybody entering must wear hazardous-material suits. Later tests were done underground, leaving hundreds of craters that resemble otherworldly scars.

Each of the underground detonations -- some as deep as 5,000 feet -- vaporized a huge chamber, leaving a cavity filled with radioactive rubble.

About a third of the tests were conducted directly in aquifers, and others were hundreds or thousands of feet above the water table. Federal scientists say contamination above the aquifers should remain suspended in the perpetually dry soil, a contention that critics say is unproven.

In the hottest zones, radioactivity in the water reaches millions of picocuries per liter. The federal standard for drinking water is 20 picocuries per liter.

Federal officials say they don't know how much water was contaminated. Whatever the amount, they say, extracting it would be prohibitively expensive, and even if the radioactive material could be separated, it would have to be put back in the ground elsewhere.

Although radiation levels in the water have declined, the longer-lived isotopes will continue to pose risks for tens of thousands of years. The Energy Department has 48 monitoring wells at the site and began drilling nine deep wells in the summer.

Bill Wilborn, the Energy Department's water expert at the site, said the water is moving about two-thirds of a mile every 1,000 years from low-lying Yucca Flat, where 660 nuclear tests were conducted.

At the higher Pahute Mesa, where 81 of the biggest and deepest tests occurred, the water movement is more complicated. It generally flows downhill toward Beatty and the agricultural district of Amargosa Valley. On average, it is moving 1 3/4 miles every 1,000 years, but the annual pace ranges from about 1 foot to 18 feet, Wilborn said.

"The good thing is that it is not highly mobile," he said. "There are not a lot of nearby [people], and we are not pumping to accelerate the flow."

Federal scientists concede that much is unknown about the test site, whose vast size and complex geology make it a difficult place to study in detail.

Based on their calculations, government geologists acknowledge that the forward plume of radioactive water under Pahute Mesa should have already crossed the site boundary, although it has yet to be detected by monitoring wells. Some experts worry that the contamination could reach deeper aquifers that move much more quickly.

Because the contaminated water poses no immediate health threat, the Energy Department has ranked Nevada at the bottom of its priority list for cleaning up major sites in the nuclear weapons complex, and it operates far fewer wells than at most other contaminated sites.

The test site receives about $65 million a year from the department's $5.5-billion annual nuclear cleanup budget. By contrast, about $1.8 billion a year is spent on the Hanford plutonium production site in Washington state, even though soil and water contamination there is one-thousandth as severe as in Nevada.

Although Nevada has not pressed for compensation or replacement water so far, public officials say they are considering such action.

They have been emboldened by their recent success in blocking a federal plan to build a nuclear waste dump adjacent to the test site at Yucca Mountain.

"All the attention has been on Yucca Mountain. Now if the battle has been won on Yucca Mountain, then you may see some attention that will focus on cleaning up the test site," said Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.), who wrote the authoritative history of the Nevada Test Site.

The state attorney general's office recently put a temporary halt on dumping low-level radioactive waste from other states at the Nevada Test Site. Under pressure from the office, the federal government agreed this year to conduct a new environmental analysis of the site.

"Once we have the new environmental impact statement, then we will be able to talk about the federal government compensating the state," said Marta Adams, senior deputy attorney general.

Said Allen Biaggi, director of the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources: "We have every expectation of the federal government cleaning up the Nevada Test Site. . . . It would cost a lot, but our groundwater is worth it."

Howard Hughes and the atomic bomb

Why the Central Nevada Test Area conducted only one nuclear test puzzles even the aficionados.

Steel well casing marking the location of the 1968 1-megaton Faultless hydrogen bomb test in the old Central Nevada Test Area. Ralph Vartabedian / Los Angeles Times

By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times

At the center of a desolate valley in the middle of Nevada, more than a dozen miles from the nearest paved road, one of the few signs of human activity is a rusty steel well casing that juts oddly out of the desert floor.

Nobody lives here, but it has a name: the Central Nevada Test Area. It was once a hub of scientific activity. Today, it is an abandoned outpost of the Cold War.

In the lore of the nuclear arms race, the Central Nevada Test Area has occupied a special place of mystery. Only one test was ever conducted there, and even for aficionados, the reasons have never been entirely clear.

Amid the emptiness, an 8-foot-tall cylinder bears a message to future generations from Glenn T. Seaborg, once chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

"Project Faultless January 19, 1968: A nuclear detonation was conducted below this spot at a depth of 3,200 feet," reads a brass plaque on the casing.

The explanation of its purpose is terse: "The device, with a yield of less than one megaton, was detonated to determine the environmental and structural effects that might be expected should subsequent higher yield underground nuclear tests be conducted in this vicinity."

At the bottom of the vertical shaft, there's a load of radioactive rubble.

"No excavation, drilling and/or removal of materials is permitted without U.S. government approval within a horizontal distance of 3,300 feet from the surface ground zero," the plaque warns visitors.

Just why the government detonated a bomb here is even more puzzling given that the sprawling Nevada Test Site was already set up officially for nuclear testing about 100 miles south.

Philip Coyle, the former test director of the Nevada Test Site, has rarely spoken about the issue, but he does know the answer. It involves a peculiar effort by the government to placate one of the wealthiest men in the world.

In the 1960s, the U.S. and Soviet Union were engaged in an all-out nuclear arms race to see who could build and then detonate the biggest weapons -- almost a nuclear war by proxy. But in this fight, each side bombed itself.

Every time a big hydrogen bomb was detonated on the Nevada Test Site, the tremors would shake the penthouse suite atop the Desert Inn in Las Vegas about 75 miles away and the frayed nerves of its sole resident, multibillionaire Howard Hughes.

At the peak of testing, a bomb was going off about every three days. Before there was a national environmental movement, Hughes became the most unlikely -- and no doubt most powerful -- opponent of nuclear weapons testing during the Cold War.

"Has anybody ever tried to compute the price paid . . . for the privilege of laying waste, mutilating and contaminating for all the days to come millions of acres of good, fertile, vegetated Nevada earth . . . through the damage wrought by these explosions?" Hughes wrote in a 1967 memo to his aide Robert Maheu.

At the time, Hughes not only controlled the Las Vegas Strip and part of the nation's oil-drilling industry, but also one of the nation's largest defense contractors, Los Angeles-based Hughes Aircraft Co.

Hughes wrote a rambling letter to President Johnson, asking him to stop nuclear testing. And he dispatched aides with envelopes each containing tens of thousands of dollars for many of the candidates for the 1968 presidency, according to the authoritative Hughes biography "Empire."

It was long assumed that Hughes' efforts were ignored.

But Coyle said in a recent interview that the Atomic Energy Commission was under so much heat from Hughes, as well as other hotel owners, that the agency ordered a test to see whether a big detonation farther from the Strip would reduce the shaking there.

"Howard Hughes was unhappy with the situation and complained about it to the AEC," Coyle recalled. "That's why Faultless was done."

The Faultless test involved one of the biggest hydrogen bombs ever detonated in the Lower 48 states. Unexpectedly, the violence of the blast caused the earth to sink 8 feet and opened gaps 3 feet across. It did not reduce the problem of shaking in Las Vegas, either, Coyle recalled.

Although many of the practices of the U.S. nuclear weapons program during the Cold War are incomprehensible by today's standards, the very survival of the nation seemed to hinge on its success.

"It is surreal to look back on some of these things," Coyle said. "It was a different time."