In some Navajo Nation regions, like Oljato on the Arizona-Utah border, a single fixture on the road is the only water source around for nearly a thousand residents. In other areas, residents have to drive miles into town from their rural homes to buy all the water they need for drinking, cleaning, cooking, and livestock. There’s no piping infrastructure to bring water to families.
Jerry Williams, president of the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation, said:
“When you have an average family of five or six in a household, and they have a herd of sheep and maybe a couple of horses and cattle, the water doesn’t last too long. They have to make another run into town. Some families are fortunate enough to have 225-gallon tanks on their pickup trucks so that they can haul more water at once; others are not.”
These two scenarios are how 40% of households in the Navajo Nation live – without running water. According to DigDeep, a Navajo person is 67 times more likely to live without running water than any other American.
“Navajo without running water limit their consumption to around 10 gallons a day per person, which doesn’t go far: A low-flow showerhead uses two gallons a minute, and washing dishes efficiently by hand drains eight gallons. Forget about flushing toilets; many Navajo make do with outhouses. Meanwhile, residents of the Southwest’s boomtowns go through 100 to 200 gallons per person a day. The fountain outside Las Vegas’ Bellagio hotel alone loses 12 million gallons of water annually to evaporation and leakage.”
There’s also the issue of groundwater pollution. Many wells in the region are contaminated due to decades of coal, uranium, and other mining, as well as arsenic and other naturally occurring toxins. People draw from these sources anyway because they don’t have a choice, and many have fallen ill.
And now, with the pandemic, the Navajo Nation has the highest COVID-19 infection rate per capita (roughly 2,500 per 100,000 residents) in the country because residents can’t easily access water to wash their hands. The problem is magnified by their having to go into town frequently to buy water. Access to running water because a top priority because of the coronavirus crisis.
Fortunately, local Navajo governments and Navajo Power partnered up with the public benefit corporation Zero Mass Water. This company supplies Source hydro-panels that use sunlight to absorb moisture in the air. The initial demonstration project consisted of 15 houses receiving two Source panels that connect to a tap inside the home for free. The setup provides six to ten liters of fresh water per day.
Cody Friesen, Zero Mass Water CEO, said:
“These homes are very rural. You could drive for 10 minutes down the highway between homes; you’re never going to get a pipe [installed]. This land is about the same size as the state of West Virginia, with a population of 175,000—54,000 of which have no water. This is a solvable problem.”
Zero Mass Water hopes the Source panels prove to be an adequate solution for the people’s water crisis. The technology can scale. However, to outfit every home that needs water with Source panels would cost between $40 to $70 million. That may sound expensive, but it would cost over $700 million to update water infrastructure and get everyone on the reservation hooked up with safe tap water.
The Navajo Nation received $714 million this year in CARES Act funding to cover expenses caused by the public health emergency. Making sure that everyone has water to wash their hands seems to fall into this category. Providing every household that doesn’t have running water with Source panels would only account for 5-10% of the total allotment.
