Workers say nitrate contamination that killed 71 horses came from Nellis complex

While investigators from state and federal agencies are trying to pinpoint the source of nitrate contamination that killed 71 wild horses at the Tonopah Test Range, a woman who worked there says it's no mystery to her.

The comments made last week by Lorie Marie Fox echo those of two other former workers in the Nellis Range Complex who say environmental controls at the sites were lacking and that toxic chemicals were routinely dumped illegally there.

Fox said it was common knowledge among contractor and Air Force employees that tanker trucks filled with urea de-icing solutions, high in nitrogen content, were routinely flushed near a dry lake bed where the horses drank water.

"I don't know how often they washed out their trucks, but they washed them out in the watering hole," Fox said Friday as she sat in the living room of her Las Vegas home, tethered to an oxygen tank and wearing a sweater depicting wild horses like the two she boards in her backyard.

The 78-year-old Fox worked for a contractor at the test range, 210 miles northwest of Las Vegas. She held several jobs when she worked there from 1987 to 1993, including keeping logs of chemical inventories, launching weather balloons and drafting floor plans of buildings.

Fox also held a position in the Tonopah Test Range security department.

"It takes a lot of stuff to de-ice the runway. There's a lot of snow days," she said, referring to the high desert airfield where F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter jets were once based. Other military aircraft used the range to conduct logistical tests with dummy bombs.

"They've been doing this for years, this urea stuff," said Fox, whose last name was Christie when she worked there.

Over the years, she saw many dead wild horses, including some that she said security guards claimed to have shot. Wild horses overpopulated the range and often died of thirst or starvation, she said.

"We had thousands of them up there," Fox said.

She later worked as a volunteer in the wild horse adoption program for the Bureau of Land Management, one of the agencies that's investigating the 71 horses that veterinarians confirmed died in July of acute nitrate poisoning.

Other sources who worked at the Tonopah Test Range or the classified Air Force installation along the dry Groom Lake bed, known as Area 51, have said wild horses were considered a nuisance because they would sometimes wander onto airfields or get struck by vehicles at night.

But Fox said she doesn't think personnel at the Tonopah range killed the animals out of hatred.

"Some people do things for the hell of it," she said.

For example, after de-icing fluids had been dumped near their watering hole, wagers were made by some security guards on how many would die, Fox said.

"The guards had a big poster that showed where each of them were taking bets," she said.

For 14 years until Friday, Fox had not spoken openly about her knowledge of the horses' deaths while she's been embroiled in a worker's compensation case over her bout with lung disease that she says is linked exposure to toxic substances at the Tonopah Test Range.

A Sept. 5 letter from a doctor at The Lung Center of Nevada describes her illness as "occupational lung disease with scarring and emphysema caused by exposure to asbestos, radioactive sands, and other toxic materials when she worked at the Tonopah Test Range."

Her story about de-icing compounds parallels that of former Area 51 worker Fred Dunham and former Air Force Tech Sgt. Kevin Dye, who worked at the Tonopah Test Range from 1990 to 1998. Both have said in recent interviews that urea in solid or fluid form was widely used at their work locations and allowed to run off into the desert uncontrolled or hauled to remote areas and dumped.

On Thursday, Dye said he had no knowledge of guards taking bets on how many horses would die. Airmen risked punishment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice if they killed a wild horse, he said.

But, he said, there is history of environmental non-compliance at the test range, where safeguards followed by civilian airports to prevent contamination from de-icing chemicals were not in place. Such safeguards would include gutters to capture pollutants and facilities to treat and dispose of them.

Every time it snowed or rained at near freezing temperatures, urea would be sprayed on the airstrip, Dye said.

"We put de-icing chemicals on the ground," he said. "It just ran onto the ground and there it went."

At least once a year in July or August, a de-icing truck would be driven to "an inconspicuous place where nobody could see it" and rinsed out before being refilled in preparation for the winter, Dye said.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev, wrote letters Aug. 24 to Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking their agencies to investigate the probable link of the horse deaths to "high levels of nitrate toxicity in the water."

"In light of this unfortunate event, I believe that this is also an appropriate time to take a close look at the land and wildlife management practices used on the larger Nellis Air Force Range," Reid wrote. "While the Air Force holds the primary position in the operations that take place on this land, the same area remains under the purview of the Bureau of Land Management."

None of the three whistle-blowers has been contacted by investigators probing the horse deaths.

BLM spokeswoman Kirsten Cannon said Thursday that the BLM is in the process of contracting with the Desert Research Institute to test soil and water in the area where the dead horses were found

"We're doing tests of water samples of the pond in the playa and other sources of water for the horses," she said.

An Aug. 10 statement from the BLM noted that "high levels of nitrates were found in some water samples taken from a pond the horses used for drinking on a dry lake bed." The levels were at least 66 times in excess of safe drinking standards for humans and 30 times in excess of acceptable levels for livestock.

The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection has authority delegated from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce federal hazardous waste laws and the Clean Water Act.

Last month, division spokesman Dante Pistone said representatives from the division's Bureau of Water Pollution Control made a trip to the place where the horses died, and their preliminary findings "seem to eliminate the airstrip or de-icing materials as possible sources of the nitrates."

That's because the de-icing agents currently used by the Air Force don't contain nitrogen compounds, and the pond near where the horses died is uphill from the airfield, some five miles away, Pistone wrote in an e-mail.

Last week, officials with the Nevada Bureau of Water Pollution Control couldn't tell the Review-Journal the elevations of the watering hole and the airstrip and the distances between them.

"My initial feeling is the pond is lower in elevation than the airfield," said Jon Palm, chief of the pollution control bureau.

He said a team from the bureau is going back to the Tonopah Test Range this week. He said the investigation "just started," but he couldn't say when it started.

"It's going to take us a while to try to get to the bottom of this," Palm said.