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3 days ago
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Beaver Fever
The Los Potreros wetland, with Chimayó visible in the distance. (Nadav Soroker/Searchlight New Mexico) Twice last year, in the spring and fall, water burst from the Rio Santa Cruz and poured into the tiny northern New Mexico community of Santa Cruz, between Española and Chimayó. It cracked concrete ditch liners and spilled into houses and a trailer park. Irrigators along the streams are frustrated and worried about the time and money that beavers could cost them. The memory of the 2024 floods looms — a flood or a block can cost tens of thousands of dollars and leave farmers without reliable access to water in a season when they need it most. With drought intensifying, they're under increasing pressure to share a limited resource and don't want to navigate another area of stress. Investigating the first flood, acequia commissioners and mayordomos — the elected leaders of New Mexico irrigators who've used the water from hand-dug ditches for centuries — discovered an abandoned beaver dam. It had been there a while: the wood had softened and whitened, and willows had grown up around it. It had trapped more than seven feet of wet silt. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. The spring flood, which occurred after a heavy rain, spread so much silt that it was impossible to remove the dam. Come October, the river swelled again during another storm and carried branches, basketballs, stumps, shoes, brush and bottles downstream. The willows around the dam caught the debris and the water rose up against the heap and rushed over the banks. Dredging the channel and raising the banks required use of a bulldozer, a backhoe and a trackhoe. More than once, the equipment sank into the silt. In all, the surrounding ditch organizations had to spend around $35,000 to repair the damaged waterways. Acequia organizations typically have very little money. After they spend what they raise from member dues on maintenance and repairs, they're usually left with a couple of thousand dollars in their annual budgets, at most. That year, the acequia spent whatever extra money they had on flood repair, getting assistance from Rio Arriba County (around $18,000) and the East Rio Arriba Soil and Water Conservation District (around $5,000). The flooded area was in Santa Fe County, but, acequia leaders say, they couldn't get assistance from Santa Fe officials. Because Rio Arriba constituents were affected by the flooding, the two Rio Arriba entities agreed to help. In the past few years, citing evidence that beavers can make a place more drought-resilient, Santa Fe County and a prominent national conservation nonprofit, Defenders of Wildlife, have encouraged the presence of the big, paddle-tailed rodents in a stream system that includes the Rio Quemado and the Rio Santa Cruz. Stemming from those rivers is a dense network of dozens of acequias, which, with gravity and gates, make it possible to divert water to farmers' fields. People in the communities around Española and Chimayó depend on it to irrigate their chile, corn, melons, berries, stone fruits, greens, carrots, flowers, alfalfa and other crops. Irrigators along the streams are frustrated and worried about the time and money that beavers could cost them. The memory of the floods in Santa Cruz looms — a flood or a block can cost tens of thousands of dollars and leave farmers without reliable access to water in a season when they need it most. With drought intensifying, they're under increasing pressure to share a limited resource and don't want to navigate another area of stress. 'Now we have to worry about beavers?' says Brian Martinez, a parciante (water recipient) on the Acequia de la Puebla in the community of La Puebla who grew up digging ditches in Chimayó. 'I don't know of any acequia that would be doing somersaults to do that.' Several acequias leaders contend that they've received inadequate communication about planning by the county and Defenders of Wildlife — some find the communication they have received to be disrespectful and condescending — and many view the two organizations as outside entities that shouldn't be able to impose their ideas about local waterways without significantly more community input. The issue is especially fraught, given the history of Santa Fe-based environmentalists in northern New Mexico, who have, more than once, argued that they know better than Chicano residents how to take care of the natural world, and who have sometimes blocked them from practicing traditional agriculture. 'They need to come and see what our issues are,' Ross Garcia, commissioner on the Acequia de los Ortegas in San Pedro, says. 'We've been irrigating for generations.' In recent years, environmentalists around the world have been singing the praises of beavers, pointing to them as a natural solution to the climate crisis. The dams they build alter the flow of water, slowing and spreading it. Their storage tactics allow the ground to soak in water, which, during dry stretches, can seep back out. Streams throughout the western U.S. that once ran year-round started running dry during droughts; when beavers took up residence again, the streams began to flow year-round once more. The wetter an area is, the less likely it is to ignite in a wildfire. And studies indicate that beavers' aquatic engineering revitalizes biodiversity and mitigates dangerous bacteria. Beavers are native to the mountains and valleys of northern New Mexico. Hoping to establish the positive trends the creatures can bring about, Santa Fe County and Defenders of Wildlife have implemented projects that involve welcoming the animals — who move in on their own and are not released — into wet areas around Chimayó. Various laws make it illegal to remove beaver dams and kill beavers, and conservationists argue that learning to live alongside them is well worth it. Peggy Darr, a wildlife biologist who worked with Santa Fe County during the creation of a controversial wetland and now advocates for beaver conservation with Defenders of Wildlife, is planning to install beaver dam analogs (BDAs), which mimic beaver habitats, on the Rio Santa Cruz and the Rio Quemado. BDAs can attract beavers to take up residence. 'One of the goals of BDAs is to have beavers take over and improve upon our restoration work, as there are not enough resources, financial or otherwise, to do the critical work beavers do for free,' Darr wrote in an email. Santa Fe County also encouraged beavers to move into a Chimayó wetland, called Los Potreros, which the county has worked to conserve over the past few years. Historically a wetland and then a grazing pasture, the area was put up for sale and slated for development in the 1990s. In response to community concern and advocacy, Santa Fe County eventually purchased the area in the name of 'cultural preservation and conservation of traditional agriculture and natural habitat,' according to county communications coordinator Olivia Romo. In 2021, with a grant from the New Mexico Environment Department, the county contracted with Ecotone, a Santa Fe-based landscape planning firm, to restore the wetland. Ecotone built structures that emulated beaver engineering, and beavers moved in and built dams. The results have been striking. Water has spread across the pasture, turning the grasses emerald. Ducks erupt out of the marsh, and redwing blackbirds trill from the tops of cattails. Meanwhile, the beavers, who tend to come and go, have moved on to other areas in the stream system. Several community members say they were excluded from the planning processes for these projects. About four years ago, someone reportedly destroyed a beaver dam at Los Potreros — other dams were breached with a shovel — which prompted Santa Fe County to put up signs saying that the area is under surveillance camera and that 'It is illegal to vandalize beaver dams, molest beavers or kill beavers on Santa Fe County Open Space Property.' Some residents found the sign and the camera insulting and viewed it as an instance of the county defending animals instead of the rights of people. (No one, as of now, appears to be planning to molest or kill beavers.) Acequia leaders are worried about how much water is being diverted from the Rio Quemado into the field. The few meetings the county hosted to discuss its plans left residents feeling confused and unheard. 'It was done pretty quickly, without much input from the community,' says Michael Diaz, a flower farmer in Chimayó and the mayordomo of the Acequia de los Martinez Arriba, which historically irrigated the former pasture. Diaz has seen the benefits beavers can bring to mountain wetlands. 'I'm totally down for that,' he says. 'But not if it's just for Santa Fe County to look cute.' He's watched the wetland soak up huge quantities of water. He wants to know how much of that water evaporates and whether the absorption limits downstream use. He's also worried that beavers will reproduce and fill the waterways with dams and burrows, which he doesn't have the time or money to clear. The water has spread so far across the pasture that parts of the acequia are difficult, if not impossible, to access for repair. He's not sure how irrigators could get equipment to those areas if there is a breach. Into a bank of the acequia close to the wetland, about a third of the way down the ditch, a creature has been digging tunnels. Diaz and a couple others patched the holes with sandbags and plastic from an old greenhouse. He believes beavers are the culprit. (Jan-Willem Jansens, the owner of Ecotone, says it's more likely a muskrat, a claim that others fiercely dispute. Either way, Diaz has found more tunnels since the wetland expanded.) Darr agrees that beavers don't belong in acequias and says she wants to prioritize helping farmers survey and remove dams from the channels. She worked to implement various beaver-human coexistence measures at the wetland — pond levelers to prevent flooding; wire caging around trees that community members didn't want beavers to chew on; and similar caging around acequia headgates to prevent them from getting clogged. Defenders of Wildlife has funding to send farmers to training sessions about beaver coexistence, Darr says. She's offering to enact a cost-share program to help pay for the challenges irrigators experience. But some of the mitigation tactics seem ineffective to residents: as the landscape of the wetland has shifted, beavers have chewed down supposedly protected trees. And the idea of having to take on more expenses and tasks to coexist with beavers strikes several commissioners, mayordomos and farmers who are working around the clock, often for free, as impractical. 'It doesn't seem fair to the acequias, because they're already financially strapped, and they're strapped for labor,' says Brian Martinez. 'To expect an acequia to cost share whatever amount of money it might be isn't tenable.' Defenders of Wildlife has also hired a farmer, Emilio Borrego, to talk to community members about how they might make use of the advantages beavers offer. Borrego is the chairman of the Acequia de la Otra Vanda in the community of Córdova, upstream from Chimayó. 'I get that it's not so black-and-white, and it's an issue that takes time,' he says. But he believes he's benefited from the presence of beavers. He says that upstream dams have acted as speed bumps for the water during heavy storms, and they've played a crucial role in protecting Córdova from severe flooding. Borrego also accesses regular waterflow for the crops that he grows. Córdova's environment is different from the communities between Chimayó and Española. It sits at 7,146 feet in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, about 1,000 feet higher than Chimayó, with a higher stream that feeds it. But it's still a dense community reliant on acequia water, and Borrego believes beavers will make the entire watershed more resilient to climate change. He also notes that beavers move in on their own and 'are extremely hard to work against.' Taking apart a dam can cause a bigger mess than leaving one in place, he says. 'They're really tenacious little creatures. They work super-fast. There already is a beaver presence all along the whole watershed.' Currently, people don't know how many beavers live in the rivers, nor do they know whether the wetland is storing more water than it loses to evaporation. The dearth of information is amplifying acequia users' frustrations about communication. Steve Finch, a hydrogeologist who has worked with all 64 acequias in the stream system, hasn't seen data indicating how much water is being stored. He notes that beavers can be beneficial in higher reaches of the watershed, but he's concerned about the extra labor that the presence of beavers would require from acequia users lower down. 'It's already too much effort to maintain the acequias without beavers,' he says. Acequia users 'are out there every day, managing, maintaining, operating, and the last thing they want are beavers in or around the acequias.' Community members want more data, something they emphasized at a meeting that the county and Defenders of Wildlife held in Chimayó on the evening of May 29. The gathering was designed to show that both organizations hope to prioritize conversation with the parciantes, commissioners and mayordomos. But word about the meeting reached very few people. Less than ten residents of the surrounding area were there; some found out about it only after others already there texted them. Coursing through the conversation was deep anger that people who don't actively depend on acequias are making decisions that seriously affect the flow of water. 'It seems like we have a majority of people working on this project than people that live in this community,' Diaz said. Although a couple of the county employees and a contractor with Defenders of Wildlife are acequia users from northern New Mexico, the divide between community members and meeting organizers was palpable. People frequently cut each other off and talked over each other. A beaver proponent grew visibly upset as acequia leaders expressed their anger. 'You guys just want to just protect a certain little area here where you guys can collect your money and have your little group meetings,' said Isaac Martinez, president of the commission of the Acequia de los Martinez Arriba. 'Where's the community?' There was also a generational divide. Borrego, who's in his 30s, argued the value of working with the beavers; several of the commissioners and mayordomos in attendance who don't want the beavers in the water ways belong to older generations. 'I'm going to be doing this for a long time, and I know that the climate's changing a lot, and that's the thing,' Borrego said. 'If we don't have a healthier water system, or if we take away these things that are actually helping there be more water in the water system itself, we're going to be screwed. It's going to be way different by the time I'm your guys' age.' Attendees said that going forward, they need more information that will take into account the harms beavers can enact in their particular community. Shelley Winship, an administrator and former supervisor of the Santa Fe-Pojoaque Soil and Water Conservation District, asked that the county perform a cost-benefit analysis for the valley around the Rio Santa Cruz. 'You talked about the services and benefits beavers provided, but you haven't quantified the cost to the ecosystem that beavers are causing in an acequia community,' she said. She noted that acequias, too, provide benefits to the ecosystem, also slowing water and delivering it to plants, and that negative impacts to acequias would result in the loss of those benefits. 'If you don't understand the particular ecosystem that you're looking at, you're going to make recommendations that are going to cause problems,' she said.
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23-05-2025
- General
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The boots on Buck Jackson Road
The boot fence, which runs through Eddy County. David Cox/Searchlight New Mexico Posted inFeatured At first, in the haze, they look like birds, perched on fence posts along the road. But they don't shift or take flight, and there's one on every post for as far as I can see. They are upside-down boots. 'I'm so grateful to the people who get up every day and do the work in the grueling and the awful conditions,' says Jozee Zuñiga, an environmental activist and the daughter of a man who worked in the oil fields. 'But I want people to know that, yes, we depend on it. Yes, we need it. But that doesn't mean we have to surrender.' The road, Buck Jackson, cuts south through southeastern New Mexico, across the fields where companies are drilling for oil. I drive for almost three miles before I stop seeing boots above the sparse grasses and the thorned mesquite and the trash. A Chevron sign marks a plot of land beside them, and the heavy silhouettes of pump jacks and processing plants hover behind them. Bootheels point up to the sky. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. The oil workers wore them. Then they retired and hung them up, or traveled to oil fields elsewhere and hung them up, or died, and their relatives and friends placed them there. On a black rubber boot, in white marker, someone wrote '6/13/20, R.I.P.' and a name that has worn away. 'They leave their memories there,' a former oil worker, who asks to go by the pseudonym Diego García, tells me. García, 36, is undergoing chemotherapy treatments for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), which he developed while cleaning sites contaminated with drilling waste. He's worried that employers won't hire him again if they learn he spoke to a journalist. 'Some people leave pants, too.' He laughs. I think about what the workers stood on when they wore the boots — rigs, spilled oil, tanks, truckbeds, caliche — and how many hours they wore them, during shifts that could span five straight days and nights, no sleep. These were hours of absence, when the workers were away from home, and the people who loved them couldn't see them. And the fence becomes a fence between the fields and home. 'A good day,' says Marcos Carranza, 'is a day without danger.' It's 6:30 p.m. or so, November, at a house in the city of Hobbs, about an hour northeast through the fields from Buck Jackson. Two highways that lead to the worksites cross through town: State Road 18, north to south, and U.S. Route 62, west to east. Billboards for injury attorneys mark city boundaries. At night, the neon signs and floodlights of hotels and motels illuminate the highways. The parking lots are full of work trucks. The hotels are interspersed with smoke shops and restaurants and stores that advertise workboots and beer. Rows of houses, mostly brick with pitched roofs, line the quiet streets that stem from the highways. The Carranza family's front door is wide open, a rectangle glowing bright on the dark row of houses. The children and grandchildren of Carranza and his wife, María Elena, sit together on big couches beneath family photographs. The rich smells of rice and chicken with mole rise out of pots and pans on a table in the back of the room. Carranza is at the table, exhausted. He got home maybe 20 minutes ago from his job constructing pipelines for an oil company. 'A bad day is an excess of hours working and a lot of danger, because you can fall asleep driving, or on-site, and a machine hits you, and you can lose your life,' he says. (We're talking in Spanish, which I use when interviewing most of the workers I meet.) On previous jobs, Carranza says, he's had to enter tanks where oil and natural gas are stored, to clean them. The containers are metal and round. They usually range in size from 10 feet tall and 12 feet wide to 30 feet tall and 15 feet wide. Even in bigger ones, it's difficult not to feel claustrophobic inside. They contain hydrogen sulfide, a gas found in natural gas deposits. Exposure to low levels can cause nausea, headaches and insomnia. Exposure to high levels can cause memory loss and death. 'Sometimes when you wash the tanks, hydrogen sulfide is released, and when that happens, you can pass out,' Carranza says. 'That would be a very bad day.' Though he's never passed out himself, he's seen fellow workers collapse many times. Sometimes they survive falling into the liquid at the bottom of the tank. Sometimes they don't. Over the chatter of television news, Carranza's children and grandchildren are teasing each other and arguing about politics. His voice mixes with theirs as he tells me about a slower, quieter toll the industry has exacted on him over the past 17 years. He's 67 and technically retired, but he receives no employer-sponsored benefits, and the meager Social Security payment he gets — around $1,000 a month — isn't enough to sustain his family. He's continued to work for the oil and gas industry, at $16 an hour, 50 or 60 hours a week, because it's 'the economic activity of New Mexico,' he says. The companies that have employed him haven't consistently provided proper safety training or equipment, and the exposure to dangerous chemicals and loud machinery is gradually separating him from the world. He can't smell the dinner María Elena prepared. He thinks it's because he's inhaled so much hydrogen sulfide, which can cause olfactory paralysis. He's losing his vision, hearing and memory. Because he's losing his memory, he loses hours on the road. He'll be driving somewhere and suddenly can't remember why he's there or where he's going. He can't drive María Elena to medical appointments because he has to work during the day. He turns his head to show me a golf ball–sized lump in his neck and says he's not sure whether he'll be fired when he asks for a day off to go to the doctor. 'The money that one earns, one pays a very steep price for,' he says. 'There are times when I've felt depressed. You work so much, but it's not worth it, because health can't be bought. And there are irreversible effects, and you can't be the same as before. As much as I want to think well, see well, I can't now.' Because of his disabilities, he can't find other work. He's so experienced at building pipelines that he can keep doing it despite the challenges he faces. No one else will hire him. 'There's no alternative,' he says. 'My back is against the wall.' When I look out my car window at the gas flares leaping into the sky, I imagine the roar and snap of flames. According to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 60 percent of all workers in the 'mining and oil and gas extraction' industry have been exposed to hazardous noise, and a quarter have difficulty hearing. But on the dirt roads beside the flare stacks — the tall metal chimneys where gas is being burned off the crude oil so that it doesn't explode — all I hear of the flames is a rush of heat through metal pipes. It's hard to distinguish it from the whoosh of moving trucks, which you could pretend is the sound of the ocean that filled the Permian Basin hundreds of millions of years ago, were it not for the clank and rattle of equipment and the constant machine buzz. The sea creatures and algae in the ancient ocean decomposed into the oil that a water-well driller found south of Carlsbad in 1901. Speculators began drilling throughout southeastern New Mexico. Nearly three decades later, in 1928 — with crews working 12-hour shifts and sleeping in bunkhouses full of rattlesnakes, and wooden rigs catching fire and burning to ash — they struck enough oil to start a boom. Within two years, 20,000 people flocked to Hobbs, according to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. New Mexico's dependence on oil and gas revenue is historically high: Roughly 40 percent of the state's general fund comes from fossil fuel production in the Permian Basin, in the state's southeast corner, and in the San Juan Basin, in the northwest corner. Drilling in the San Juan has been slowing down, but the Permian, which covers roughly 86,000 square miles in eastern New Mexico and west Texas, is booming. It's the most productive oil field in the United States. Almost half of all U.S. oil comes from the basin, and about a third of that comes from New Mexico. As a producer, the state is second only to Texas, which has a larger share of the resource. In the counties of Lea, Eddy, Chaves, Otero and Roosevelt, New Mexico's Permian covers around 13,000 square miles. When people fly over the region, they see a flat, mottled landscape with various small cities — Hobbs, Artesia, Carlsbad, Lovington — clumped around highways. Throughout these communities, you can smell the hydrogen sulfide. People suffer from cancers, respiratory illnesses, chronic nosebleeds, headaches and thyroid problems — all conditions that have been associated with industry air pollution. Creosote and mesquite choke out native grasses. Among the creosote and the mesquite are old tires and beer bottles and Red Bull cans and broken pipes. Birds ingest toxins and have been seen falling dead out of trees and sky, and the noise and the floodlights interfere with animals' circadian rhythms. 'They can't sleep, they can't eat properly, they can't properly forage for food and they can't reproduce,' says Charlie Barrett, a field ecologist and thermographer with Oilfield Witness, a nonprofit that uses infrared cameras to expose emission levels. In Hobbs, there are pump jacks on signs and murals around town. In Carlsbad, Jozee Zuñiga, an environmental activist, tells me that representatives of the oil companies give children coloring books and tell them about how they protect animals in the fields. 'The school I went to my last two years of high school has a 'Thank you, Chevron' on its sign because Chevron donated to fix the school's labs,' she says. She tells me that support for the industry drowns out any talk of workers' conditions. At local boutiques, she sees hats that say 'Rig Daddy' and shirts that say 'Permian Proud.' She went to a feed store to pick up dog food and heard a man at the register shout at the cashier, 'Drill, baby, drill!' 'It's not only their livelihoods, but it's the culture that they participate in,' she tells me. 'If you speak out, or you go against the grain, you are considered a threat. And not just a threat to a company or a specific procedure or operation. People consider you a genuine threat to their personhood, their lives.' Zuñiga's father was a supervisor in the oil fields before he passed away in 2016. She still has his work number in her phone, and his work clothes and boots are in a closet. She describes herself as privileged, because his hours were somewhat regular, but he was always on call, even during vacations, and he woke up at three every morning to head for the job. 'I remember hearing him walk down the stairs,' she says. 'And I remember being so excited some days coming home from school, because, from the road, I could see that his truck was already there, and he had come home early. But that was not all the time.' Some days, coming home, she still looks for his truck. 'I'm so grateful to the people who get up every day and do the work in the grueling and the awful conditions,' she says. 'But I want people to know that, yes, we depend on it. Yes, we need it. But that doesn't mean we have to surrender.' On the roads and at gas stations, there are workers everywhere. Trustworthy data on the size of the workforce is hard to find, however. Fossil fuel employees account for less than three percent of New Mexico's total labor working population, according to the state's Department of Workforce Solutions (NMDWS), but other estimates are much higher — closer to 10 percent. A study done by the University of New Mexico found that around half of oil and gas workers are Latino, but advocates in the Permian say that the number is probably much higher. Jorge Estrada, a public relations coordinator at the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED), told me it would be 'extremely difficult' to provide a complete list of oil and gas companies operating in New Mexico's Permian, a claim reflected in state documents. Driving around the region, I pass dozens of company names on buildings and vehicles. In 2024, almost 400 fossil fuel companies were operating across the state, including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, EOG, Coterra and ExxonMobil, according to an annual production report from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division. Together, these companies ramped up production from around 800,000 barrels of oil per day in 2019 to a little over 2 million barrels per day in 2024. Just how much oil money funds the state is in dispute. According to the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, in 2024, oil and gas brought in $13 billion in state and local revenue, $7.4 billion of which went to the general fund. Ismael Torres, chief economist of the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, says that at least $4.7 billion from the industry went to the general fund, though he noted that the figure could be higher. Either way, the money is used for public education and health and human services, among other state programs. But politicians and state officials, who receive large donations from fossil fuel companies, rarely acknowledge the toll the industry takes on workers. Scanning thousands of pages of state legislation from the past 30 years, I found few mentions of the workers. I saw no bill that has as its sole aim bettering their workplace conditions, and no memorial acknowledging the costs of what they do — though I did find memorials honoring uranium workers and promoting safety in the mining industry. Some bills contained sections intended to help fossil fuel workers transition to other industries, or to direct agencies to implement rules for their safety. Those didn't pass. In the 2025 session of New Mexico's legislature, the House signed a memorial recognizing 'the oil and gas industry … for its vital contributions to the state' with no substantive mention of the workers. The office of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham declined my request for an interview. Grisham, alongside state lawmakers and political action committees, received roughly $800,000 from fossil fuel companies in 2023. State agencies seem to be taking little action to protect workers. Estrada wrote that the NMED's 'primary attention is on maintaining the well-being and safeguarding of all employees or workers,' noting that New Mexico established a safety program in 2005 to 'reduce fatalities and catastrophic events' and to enforce the New Mexico Occupational Safety and Health Act (NMOSHA) industry-wide. 'The potential for serious accidents, catastrophic accidents, and worksite fatalities has been recognized for the Oil and Gas Well Drilling and Servicing Industry,' says an official state notice announcing the program. 'Statistical data shows this industry accounted for a far greater percentage of workplace fatalities and serious accidents in New Mexico than would be expected for such a relatively small workforce.' The program aims to conduct 25 random, unannounced inspections per year, though they only did 23 last year. In a landscape of close to 400 companies, that number is hardly comprehensive. 'It is not possible to keep an accurate or current universal listing of employers or their equipment,' the notice states. Federal labor law has not been consistently enforced in the state — standards for overtime pay have not guaranteed that oil and gas workers will be justly compensated for working more than 40 hours per week. A federal investigation in 2014 found that companies owed upwards of 1,300 fossil fuel workers in New Mexico and west Texas at least $1.3 million in overtime. And the law sets no limits on how many hours employees may work. U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, who serves southern New Mexico, is trying to pass a bill that would require oil companies to compensate workers for respiratory and heat-related illnesses. 'I've personally sat down at the dinner table with folks that have been working in the industry for 16 years and lost their job and were offered a $200 check with no medical care or compensation,' Vasquez tells me. 'That is just outrageous to me, considering the record profits that oil and gas companies are making.' Fossil fuel companies in the Permian are private operations that lease drilling rights on both public and private land. 'No Trespassing' signs are posted everywhere to mark off worksites, and environmentalists documenting pollution told me stories about workers chasing them away from well pads. My attempts to visit worksites and 'man camps' — rows of mobile homes where companies house employees, with as many as 20 people reportedly crammed into a single trailer — got nowhere. Using state documents, I contacted 40 companies listed as producing large amounts of oil in the region. Three smaller companies politely declined what one secretary described as 'the opportunity.' The others didn't respond. So I learned about the labor conditions by talking to workers off-site, in parks, restaurants, homes and over the phone. During one call, a former oil field worker named Félix Rodríguez tells me that many workers receive no safety training and have to provide their own safety equipment. He began building tank batteries — collections of tanks that store crude oil before it gets processed — when he was 19. But he quit a year in, after witnessing an explosion. He's now an organizer at the Roswell chapter of Somos un Pueblo Unido, a statewide workers' rights organization headquartered in Santa Fe. Small companies are 'trying to cut costs at all times,' he says, while big companies will often contract with small ones, going for the 'cheapest bidder' and not 'batting an eye at the working conditions.' The small business Rodríguez worked for — which built both tank batteries and flare stacks — provided him with a hard hat. He and his fellow workers had to buy all other safety gear, including glasses and monitors that record hydrogen sulfide levels. The company appointed him safety manager, he says, because he speaks Spanish and English, but he had no training. 'If I didn't have any training, and I'm training these people to be safe, how safe is it?' The state does not appear to have a reliable method for tracking worker deaths. The NMED told me that five workers died in oil and gas extraction and support industries in 2022. The count is less than half of what the New Mexico Department of Health (NMDOH) reported: 11 deaths that year. The agencies are consulting different databases — the NMED count is based on reporting by employers, while the NMDOH count comes from the data an occupational health surveillance team compiled using the department's vital records. Neither includes deaths that were caused by labor conditions and occurred after workers left the fields: fatalities connected to the long hours, grueling effort and diseases developed from exposure to toxic chemicals. Even if it were possible to resolve the discrepancy between the different counts, the numbers would probably still be incomplete. 'Sometimes, companies cover these things up because it saves them a lot of money,' Marcos Carranza says. Even so, by sifting through 20 years of investigations conducted by the New Mexico Occupational Safety and Health Bureau, I found disproportionately high numbers of accidents in the oil and gas industry, compared to other industries in New Mexico. In 2022, for instance, slightly less than half the accidents described in the bureau's investigations for that year involved activities in the oil fields. The summaries listed at the top of the investigations were blunt descriptions of workplace accidents: 'employee is killed when struck by pressurized air and sand'; 'employee is killed when struck by falling support beams'; 'employee is burned when hydrogen sulfide gas ignites'; 'employee thrown from oil well rig platform and is killed'; 'employee is killed by explosion while gauging levels of crude oil'; 'three employees are killed when oil tank explodes'; 'employee sustains burns when sprayed with sodium hydroxide'; 'employee dies from a 90 foot fall'; 'drill field worker is crushed and killed under truck'; and 'employee is struck and killed by flying material.' There were dozens more. One man I interview, who asks to go by the pseudonym Juan Campos for fear of retaliation, shows me one of his hands, which he can't close into a fist. He injured it on a shift in the 1980s while facing pressure from supervisors. He and other workers call the supervisors 'pushers.' He says one pusher forced him to approach a tire that was filling up with air while he was carrying a lighter, and the flame ignited the air. The explosion knocked him to the ground. 'If the pusher didn't pressure you,' he says, 'there would never be accidents.' The harm the industry inflicts on workers goes beyond violent accidents. 'If it's not a full-on explosion, it's rarely talked about,' Rodríguez says. 'This is an industry where you have to be a macho man and have to work hard to succeed. Mental health is downplayed.' Workers and their loved ones suffer from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. According to a 2023 CDC report on 2021 suicide rates by industry and occupation, workers in 'oil and gas extraction and support activities for mining' experience one of the highest rates of suicide of any labor force in the country: 73.9 per 100,000, which is more than double the overall rate in the civilian non-instutionalized working population. Daniel Radabaugh, a chief operations officer at a national pipeline company called Xccelerated Construction Unlimited, has estimated that workers' mental health challenges cost the oil and gas industry $200 billion a year due to high turnover and reduced productivity. A recent survey of 126 workers in the New Mexico Permian — conducted by political scientists at the University of New Mexico Center for Social Policy — found that they often struggle with substance use disorder and mental health issues. The study reports that workers experience loneliness and exhaustion, often having to sleep through their days off. One woman described her husband becoming 'really skinny' and 'drying up' because of exposure to the chemicals required for extraction. 'Those tanks are like death,' she told the researchers. 'We experience disillusionment, impotence and anger because we are completely hopeless.' Close to 80 percent of the oil field employees surveyed didn't want their children to work in oil and gas. Maria Romano, a lead organizer at the Hobbs chapter of Somos un Pueblo Unido, says she's observed workers turning to drugs and alcohol for relief. Campos lost several friends — fellow oil workers — to cirrhosis, and he suspects it's because they drank so much. While building flare stacks, Félix Rodríguez once found himself 50 feet in the air with a coworker who wasn't safely hooked to any part of the structure, and who was high on cocaine. Romano also describes 'a lot of disintegration of the family, many divorces.' She says that her ex-husband — who she divorced 20 years ago — worked in the oil fields when they were married, putting in such long hours that her daughter asked whether he lived in the same house with them. 'When he got home, she was already asleep,' she says. 'And when he left for work, she was asleep.' The girl's teachers assumed Romano was a single mother. Another organizer, Gladys Resendes, who's currently married to an oil worker, says, 'When my children have a problem, they go to me, because he's never there.' Rodríguez says that most of his coworkers were divorced 'at least once.' Workers often say they choose the industry for the money. Annual mean wages range from around $50,000 to $77,000, according to 2023 estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. These wages are significantly higher than New Mexicans' per capita median income between 2019 and 2023, which was $34,823. According to the UNM survey, though, 20 percent of workers who responded were making less than $25,000 a year. More than half didn't have health insurance, and nearly half reported experiencing accidents on the job. Eighty five percent of those who experienced an accident said they felt it could have been prevented. Workers I talked to laughed when I asked whether companies provide access to mental health professionals. Community organizers told me that workers tend to be closed off to conversations about the emotional challenges they endure. Many belong to a population statistically less likely to receive treatment for mental health, for reasons of stigma, racial and anti-immigrant discrimination and poverty. The majority of those who work in the fields are male, and research has shown that men in the U.S. are less likely to seek mental healthcare and more likely to struggle to express emotion. The rate of suicide among men is four times that of women. Studies indicate that Latinos in the U.S. — a significant portion of the state fossil fuel workforce — receive mental health treatment at roughly a 25 percent lower rate than the average population. Several of the workers are undocumented, which makes them vulnerable to exploitation by their employers and less likely to have reliable access to any medical care. 'No one else is going to do the work they do,' Romano says. Usually workers are too afraid of being deported or losing their jobs to consider approaching attorneys, advocates or therapists if they experience abuse. 'A lot of people feel very uncomfortable even reporting an accident,' Rodríguez says. One worker he knew ended up in a coma for two weeks, with fourth-degree burns, after an oil tank he was cleaning exploded. The company paid the hospital bill and gave him $35 in compensation. He stayed on because he couldn't find work elsewhere. 'He's undocumented,' says Rodríguez. 'He can't really fight it.' To make matters more precarious, the future of the industry is not stable, even with President Trump's promise to boost production. Economists predict that drilling won't increase dramatically in New Mexico in the years ahead. And the president's stances aren't consistent — he promises to expand drilling, and he also promises to deport the undocumented people who do most of the work. 'Donald Trump wants to 'drill, baby, drill,'' Rodríguez says, but 'you're not going to be able to without the immigrants.' The threats of deportation and state violence are likely to intensify the pain workers already endure: studies demonstrate that anti-immigrant policies lead to higher rates of depression, anxiety and PTSD among undocumented immigrants. ICE has reportedly been arresting and disappearing people from around New Mexico, including the Permian, but their identities and whereabouts are unknown. Advocates predict that undocumented oil field workers will not be safe from ICE raids, despite the industry's power. Uncertainty stems from the positions of New Mexico's state government, too, as officials discuss a possible turn to green energy and to a new reliance on permanent fund investments. Workers fear they'll be left without jobs. 'Whenever the time does come that oil and gas is shut down — the boom is no longer booming — we need to be able to have an education to be able to transfer to new jobs,' Rodríguez says. U.S. 285, one of the highways that runs through the Permian — Roswell to Artesia to Carlsbad, all the way down to Sanderson, Texas — is known as the 'highway of death.' In the heavy traffic of oil industry vehicles, exhausted drivers lose their grip on the wheel, drift across the road and crash. 'There was an accident almost every single day that we drove there,' Rodríguez says. Then there are the state and county roads that lead to the drilling sites — NM 128, for instance — and have only two lanes. Workers often get stuck behind long lines of trucks they can't safely pass, so even when a workday is over, they have to spend hours waiting to get home — to their houses in Hobbs or Carlsbad, or to the man camps throughout the region. The man calling himself Diego García tells me that he worked such long hours that he lived on the oil fields in his truck for two and a half years. For $23 an hour, he hauled soil — contaminated by chemicals from fracking and drilling — away from work sites to waste sites off 285 and 128, replacing it with new soil and a cleaning agent. 'I don't know the names of the chemicals, but they're chemicals so strong that you don't need to inhale them close-up for them to contaminate you,' he says. 'We worked hard to get rid of the contamination quickly because we knew the wind carries it and spreads sickness.' The soil he cleaned probably contained radionuclides — radioactive forms of elements, found deep inside rock, which are dredged up during the drilling process. For months, García and his team worked 10-hour days, waking at 4 a.m. His body adapted to the schedule so that he'd wake at 4 even on days off. But the hours could 'grow longer.' There would be a site that required immediate remediation, and the supervisors would push workers to go five days and nights straight, without sleep, 'working, working, working.' They agreed to the jobs, no matter the schedule, out of fear that companies would fire them if they said no or set limits. Accidents occurred regularly. Sometimes workers were burned by chemicals or gas, or they lost limbs to heavy machinery. 'One slip-up and there goes an arm or a leg,' García says. Sometimes the machinery blew up. 'I watched machines catch fire,' he says. The men had to eat on the job, often canned soup they'd packed in their trucks. The wind blew chemicals into their food and ruined it. Many downed Red Bulls or Monsters to stay awake. García preferred coffee or cold water. When the weather was bitter, they heated drinking water by turning on their trucks and placing bottles beside the engines. García endured the long hours by listening to music — Vicente Fernández, Los Temerarios, sometimes Christian songs — and by taking care of his team members, just as they took care of him. The hardest times were in the middle of the night, when their bodies bent toward sleep, or the middle of the day, when the sun burned over them. 'We'd say to each other, 'I can't bear it now, I need to sleep a little while,'' he says. Then, as one man slept for an hour or so, the others would look out for supervisors, who docked pay for sleeping. 'We always covered each other's backs.' On the road to a job, García sometimes passed workers who'd parked in the desert to get drunk. He laughs when I ask whether the men talked about their feelings. That kind of talk, he says, would be 'rare.' 'We chatted about the funny things, so we wouldn't cry at the wheel,' he says. 'Yes, one carries one's things from work, but one buries them in the truck cab.' One day at dawn on a worksite in the desert, after years of these irregular schedules, García felt a pain in his stomach so sharp he had to lie down in his truck. He woke up at two or three the next morning and got back to work, but the pain returned. 'It was a pain too severe,' he says. It brought him to his knees. He couldn't stand. His friends drove him to a hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with ALL. Around two-thirds of ALL cases occur in children. When it shows up in adults, it tends to affect people over 50. García is 36. Patients are known to develop ALL after being exposed to high levels of radiation. García was responsible for clearing waste that was probably full of radionuclides. Two other men García worked with got sick, though he doesn't know the names of their illnesses. Much of the money they earned had to be spent on treatments. García did not ask his company for compensation, nor did they offer any. His family and friends have supported him through chemotherapy. People choose to do the work 'to get ahead,' he says. 'But it brought me equal consequence, because with so many chemicals — well, look.' He motions to himself. During chemo, he lost his eyebrows, hair and beard. He says he recently passed good friends in a grocery store aisle, and they didn't recognize him. I ask whether he'd hung his boot on a fence post along Buck Jackson Road. 'No,' he laughs, 'because I want to return to work!' It was late January 2022, cold enough that ice glazed the roads. César Gómez, who was in his mid-thirties, had worked every night, maintaining wells and rigs from sundown to sunrise — sometimes past sunrise — for two and a half months. One sunrise, he was riding toward rest in a truck cab. But the driver hit ice, and the truck skidded across the road and rolled. Gómez was thrown through the windshield, shattering his spine and his foot. He woke up from a coma two weeks later in a hospital in El Paso. ''Work,' 'company,' 'accident,' 'lawyer' and 'money': These are the five words that most people think about in this field,' Gómez tells me. With each word, he waves a finger. When I ask if he received compensation from the company, he issues a dry and hollow laugh. Then he nods. 'It doesn't matter the quantity of money I receive,' he says. 'It won't give me back my normal life.' He's wearing a T-shirt that says 'Fatherhood.' We're talking in a back office of Somos un Pueblo Unido. Sitting in a little swiveling office chair beside gray filing cabinets and newspaper clippings and succulents, he tells me about the other workplace, 'el campo petrolero,' which feels distant but is all around us. He started working on rigs 12 years ago, when he was 24, for 'more money, a better life — something like that.' There were no regular hours and no guaranteed holidays. He made $16 or $17 per hour. His day shifts, including driving time, could run from 3:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. His night shifts, including driving time, could go from 5:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. 'Working at night is super, super tiring, stressful,' he says. 'It's a sensation that I don't know how to describe. But it's ugly. Because, first of all, you're not in your five senses. You're sleepy, you're cold.' Supervisors blamed workers for accidents. 'At work, they'd mention that someone had an accident, someone died, someone crashed,' he said. 'We're not indispensable to anyone. We're only a machine to make money for the boss.' As we talk, he rubs his legs to ease the pain in his back. He shows me an X-ray of his spine, which is full of metal pegs, and he looks at a photograph of his face, bruised and swollen and full of tubes, from when he was in a coma. 'I'm talking without crying because I'm trying to hide it. But, obviously, I'm unwell, physically and mentally,' he says. 'I don't like talking about this subject. It sends me back in time.' Gómez says his personality has changed. He can't lift more than five pounds and isn't sure if he'll ever be able to work full-time again. He's afraid of driving, especially in rain or snow, and he's in so much pain all the time, in any position, that it's nearly impossible to sleep. When he does sleep, he has nightmares. He forgets information and events from one day to the next. 'For example, today, in this moment, I'm talking to you,' he says. 'Tomorrow I won't be able to remember parts of our conversation.' His marriage is falling apart. He blames the accident and his resulting despair. As part of the compensation he received from the company, he meets weekly with a psychologist, and he's been trying to talk about his marriage, but the psychologist says that he's not interested in talking about relationships. He's not a couples therapist, he tells him, he's a psychologist of accidents and violent trauma. Gómez's claims adjuster won't respond to his messages. 'The accident damaged my mind most,' he says. To help himself think less about his stress and his pain, he cuts other oil workers' hair, listening to their problems and advising them. The week before we talked, he gave a haircut to a man who has to work Monday through Sunday with no days off. The man's wife is struggling with his absence and has threatened to leave if he can't spend more time with their family. He asked his supervisor for a weekend. His supervisor said no. 'I'm at the point of losing my family, my wife, because I'm working so much,' he told Gómez. Gómez told him to look for another job, one with a set schedule, Monday to Friday. 'I would give everything — everything, everything, everything — to be well,' Gómez says. 'If I could turn back time — obviously, I can't — but if I could, I think I'd like a job in a shop. I don't know. But I would never return to the oil fields.' He imagines walking through the fields, telling the workers to be careful, to leave. 'It's not worth it,' he says. 'You pay a price that's too high.' Searchlight New Mexico is part of the Mental Health Parity Collaborative, a group of newsrooms that are covering stories on mental health care access and inequities in the U.S. The partners on this project include The Carter Center and newsrooms in select states across the country.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Yahoo
A teenager takes his life in foster care
Sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, 16-year-old Jaydun Garcia took his own life at a makeshift home for youth who lack foster placements. Jaydun was the second of five brothers and had a baby sister. He was very close to his siblings, those who knew him said, and a close friend to many kids in foster care. 'He was always building us up, like helping us all,' said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun's who lived with him for months in the Albuquerque office building of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department, where case workers have often housed kids who don't have foster homes available to them. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. 'Hearing that he's gone, it just like broke us, and it took a piece out of us,' she said. Jaydun and Jacie both belonged to a tight-knit group of foster youth — teens who had spent much of their lives in foster care and had spent years held in group facilities. Jaydun loved to draw and was an athletic kid who loved basketball, especially the Los Angeles Lakers — a person whom friends would seek out when they needed someone to talk to. For this story, Searchlight spoke to six people with direct knowledge of the circumstances of Jaydun's death. Most of them asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak with the media, or because of sensitivities related to the case. 'He was always building us up, like helping us all,' said Jacie, a friend of Jaydun's. 'Hearing that he's gone, it just like broke us, and it took a piece out of us.' In an email, CYFD communications director Andrew Skobinsky wrote that the department could not comment because of confidentiality laws. 'We are only authorized to release information when it is determined that abuse or neglect caused a child's death,' he wrote. 'Accordingly, no further information can be provided.' Jaydun's death comes after years of promises by CYFD to stop housing its foster youth in group settings and to provide them adequate mental health care — promises that were made as part of the 2020 settlement of a class action lawsuit that claimed the state's child welfare system was 'locking New Mexico's foster children into a vicious cycle of declining physical, mental and behavioral health.' Now, half a decade later, CYFD has failed year after year to meet its commitments to those promises, according to independent monitors. Instead, it has housed children with serious mental and behavioral health needs in youth homeless shelters and its office buildings, where they have been sexually assaulted, injured by armed guards and exposed to fentanyl and other drugs. 'When I go visit a client who is living in these settings, I see their mental health declining sharply,' said Sara Crecca, an Albuquerque-based youth attorney who was co-counsel for the plaintiffs of the class action suit. Amid mounting criticism from attorneys, legislators and advocates, CYFD in June 2024 began moving youth from its office complex to a new building: a former Albuquerque halfway house built for girls transitioning out of juvenile detention. It was in that building that Jaydun died last weekend, discovered in the bathroom by his roommate, another teenage boy. The death in itself is beyond tragic, friends and attorneys say — a loss made all the more painful by the fact that CYFD had continued to house Jaydun and other youth in congregate care despite barrages of warnings that such housing was a 'clear and urgent safety risk for children,' particularly those who were suffering mental crises, with staffing shortages sometimes leaving kids with nowhere to turn. 'They're supposed to be the one people that we trust, the ones that we go to when we have problems,' Jacie said of CYFD. In the wake of Jaydun's death, nobody from the department had reached out to Jacie to offer therapy or counseling, she said. 'If they really cared, they would be on top of getting us therapy. They would be on top of us having a home — a forever home, an actual home with parents' love — not removing us, not putting us in shelters, not putting us in the office. We're not getting that.' Still, the events of last weekend felt unexpected to those close to Jaydun. 'CYFD had promised him a lot of support' during the last year, a close acquaintance of his told Searchlight, asking that they not be named because of the sensitive nature of the case. 'He seemed to be optimistic about his future.'
Yahoo
31-01-2025
- Yahoo
‘Some of them fell to their knees'
U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrest people during a raid in Houston, Texas, February 2010. Courtesy of ICE On Jan. 29, a Diné woman told Searchlight New Mexico that ICE agents racially profiled and questioned her during a Jan. 22 workplace raid in Scottsdale, Arizona. The incident lasted around an hour and a half, she said, and deeply frightened her and her coworkers. What follows is a transcript of her account, edited for clarity and length. 'It could have been easy for me to say, 'You know what, where's your identification? You're on my land.' But I didn't do that. It would have triggered a problem for me.' I was at work. It happened so fast, we didn't know what we were supposed to do. I mean, it's like you just turned on a light switch and you had to go do whatever the cops told you to do. They came in early, before the administration got there, and they came in from the back, before anybody could stop them. They went through and randomly picked out people. There was no, like, 'I have a search warrant. I need this person.' My office is right by the door, so they knocked and told me to go outside. I was like, 'What for?' I felt racially profiled. It was mostly Hispanics who were taken, and I'm Navajo. Several people got taken: there was probably about 10 of us, maybe 12. They didn't put handcuffs on us or anything like that. They just walked us out to the parking lot and lined us up. But just that right there alone was very scary, the actual feeling of being taken out… I've never prayed so hard in my life. I didn't know what to do. I'm a minority here, and I'm far from home. There were vans. There were already people in them. Some of them looked like they'd been crying. The staff that were lined up, they were crying. I reached for my phone to record. But they told us to put our phones away. They weren't mean or rude. They weren't being violent towards us. They told us if we wanted to we could sit on the curb. They asked us if anybody needed to use a restroom, or to get a drink of water. I wasn't afraid of them. I was more afraid of what the heck was happening. It was like, 'I know I didn't do anything wrong. I have a clear background. Why are you guys pulling us out?' They were speaking in Spanish, and when an agent came to me, I said, 'I don't understand what you're saying.' Then he changed his tone. He was like, 'I'm sorry, I thought you were Hispanic.' I said, 'No, I'm Native American.' He asked me for identification. I said that I had my identification on my phone, and he told me to go ahead and take it out. I showed him my Certificate of Indian Blood and he let me go. It could have been easy for me to say, 'You know what, where's your identification? You're on my land.' But I didn't do that. It would have triggered a problem for me. Once I was let go, I just wanted to help the others. Our company had made sure that we all had documentation. After the agents looked at everybody else's documents, they slowly let them go one at a time. As they came back inside, I gave them water, and we went into a little room, and they just let go. Some of them fell to their knees. They just cried. They thought ICE was coming to get them and take them out to never come back. The only thing you could do was hug them and comfort them, and to tell them that it was okay and that we're going to be alright. The company told us that if we wanted to leave and go home early, that was fine. Everybody was in shock. We heard that morning that it was happening in Mesa, but we didn't think it would happen in Scottsdale. It's an upper-class community. It's run by the richest people. People had taken it as a joke, but when it really did happen, everybody was like, 'Oh, my God, this is real.' We have a school right down the street here. I have a child who goes to the school, and the school notified me that they would not let ICE in, no matter what. Do I wish this upon anybody? No. Do I wish for this to stop? Yes. I called the Navajo Nation president about what happened. Someone told me he was in the meeting and would return my call. To this day, I haven't gotten a phone call. That's what made me more upset: I had nobody, nothing to turn to. This article first appeared on Searchlight New Mexico and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
