A Navajo Nation community has running water after waiting nearly 25 years
Residents of Westwater, a small Navajo subdivision in Utah, set their sights on water in the early 2000s. Now, after years of effort, their dream is turning into a reality.
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WESTWATER, UTAH
It took nearly 25 years to figure out how to supply running water to homes in Westwater, a small Navajo community in southeastern Utah. At Thomas Chee’s house, the final waterline connection took 8 minutes.
The construction crew needed just seconds Tuesday to clip a pipe — formerly the connection between a cistern and the house — and reconnect it to brand-new plumbing tied to the nearby city of Blanding. Within 6 minutes, Chee and the crew turned on and checked the faucets.
“There you go,” Chee, the community’s president, said as the kitchen faucet ran. “It’s beautiful.”
In the 21-house community, Westwater residents have been watching construction machinery trundle from house to house, removing cisterns and connecting pipes since March 13. The sight was long-awaited: The community and its partners spent years pulling together a budget of $4.3 million, overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, dealing with delays and wrangling support across government jurisdictions to make the water project happen.
☀️ PREVIOUS REPORTING
One Navajo community finally gets electricity after more than 10 years. It’s still waiting for water.
Westwater, a small subdivision in Utah, has run into barrier after barrier for more than 20 years as it tries to bring clean, running water to its residents. Read more
Now, the community has clean, reliable running water instead of relying on storing water in underground tanks and hauling water jugs from nearby filling stations. The Westwater project is one of many efforts to provide reliable water to communities around the 27,000-square-mile Navajo Nation reservation, where 30%-40% of homes lack access to running water. Residents are already looking ahead, whether they are shopping for washing machines, making garden plans or exploring ways to use their experiences to help other communities.
“It took a whole lifetime just about,” Chee, 47, said Tuesday, his voice choking up slightly as he stood in his kitchen while the construction crew wrapped up outside. “I know my grandparents would be happy. They’re smiling upon us right now.”
Westwater is a tight-knit subdivision with 29 plots spread across 120 acres of desert scrubland outside the main Navajo Nation reservation in San Juan County, Utah. From their backyards, Westwater residents can see homes in Blanding — fully outfitted with amenities like sprinklers, internet and electricity — less than 1 mile away across a narrow ravine.
Blanding, population 3,400, is a hub for Utah State University, medical care, agriculture and tourists headed out to Monument Valley, Bears Ears National Monument and the national parks in Moab.
It’s also a region where water — the lack of it and the quality of it — is always a concern. Utah straddles the drought-ridden Colorado River, a vital water source for 40 million people spread across seven states, 30 tribes and Mexico.
Westwater is not alone in relying on hauling water for drinking and irrigation. Colorado has 27 water hauling organizations regulated by the public health department. People haul water on the Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute reservations in southwestern Colorado. About 15% of Southern Ute tribal members don’t have running water in their homes, according to past news reports.
Building infrastructure and resolving water rights have been ongoing challenges for tribal nations in the Colorado River Basin. Together, tribes have rights to about 25% of the basin’s water, but about 12 tribes were still working to settle their water rights as of 2021, including the Navajo Nation. Settling rights is a legal step that must be done before water can be used and infrastructure built.
Near Westwater, the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes have settled water rights but can’t access the water because of the high cost of federal operational fees and new delivery systems. The Navajo Nation, Hopi, San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe and Arizona are in the midst of negotiations to gain congressional approval for a $5.1 billion water settlement that could resolve water claims and fund infrastructure.
In Westwater, community members and Navajo Nation officials decided to take on these challenges in the early 2000s, identifying water access as a main priority. But unique jurisdictional challenges led officials to repeatedly pass the buck. The residents quickly realized electricity had to come first — and then ran into barrier after barrier.
“I always wondered if Westwater, if we ever got water, how it would happen,” Chee said. “Out of all my guesses, I wouldn’t have guessed anything like what is going on right now.”
Ultimately, it took a large, complex network of partners and a once-in-a-lifetime windfall of federal COVID-relief funding to make the utility projects happen.
Ryan T. Barton, a Diné hydrologist for the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, has played a central role in the project. For him, the work is about future generations.
“Their children and their grandchildren — they will have the same opportunities as other people across the United States,” Barton said. “That’s what access to these basic utilities gives people.”
LEFT: Thomas Chee gets ready to fill a water tank with drinking water from a pump station operated by the city of Blanding, Utah, on Feb. 20. Like other Westwater residents, Chee’s family has depended on hauling water for years. Their home was connected to running water on March 18. RIGHT: Chee watches the sunset while waiting for the tank to fill. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
Barrier after barrier
In order for Westwater to have water, the community had to have electricity and housing.
When the Navajo Nation bought the undeveloped land in 1986, Navajo families jumped on the affordable living option even though the property had no water, electricity or sewer services. It was like the Oklahoma land rush of 1889, said Teresa Showa, a retired principal hydrologist for the tribe’s Department of Water Resources.
“We pursued the housing construction first. … Once you get housing, then electricity and water comes with it,” Showa said. “So that was the plan.”
People brought in manufactured homes and traditional Navajo hogans. Some built houses from the foundation up. They used kerosene lamps and flashlights inside at night or relied on generators or solar panels for electricity.
They’d go get water at family member’s houses, other towns, stores and water-filling stations and store it in underground cisterns. Sometimes families would split up as people decided to move to more urban areas.
“Just thinking about how it would have been in the old days, it was almost like living in the 1800s,” Chee said.
Growing up, Chee would fetch water from an artesian well next to a creek at the bottom of the ravine to help his grandmother or his neighbors.
“My grandmother taught me to be strong”
Listen as Thomas Chee, president of Westwater subdivision, recounts growing up in Westwater and helping his grandmother haul water. When she couldn’t carry jugs from the artesian well at the bottom of the ravine anymore, Chee stepped up, he recalled.
“I was taught to get water at a young age when my grandmother couldn’t do it no more, so I stepped up,” Chee said. “It’s been a positive thing in my life that my grandmother taught me to be resilient and strong. Not to give in, just to keep going.”
But the plan to bring running water to the community proved to take longer than Showa and her partners expected.
To have electricity, they needed to establish home-site leases with the Navajo Nation. But to get homesite leases, they had to do neighborhood cleanups, conduct environmental analyses, talk to planning and zoning commissions, look for archaeological sites and figure out taxation requirements. The process took 14 years.
They gained momentum, then lost it. Proposed projects stalled. Each time, the community would have to start the planning process all over again, while both the scope and cost of the project ballooned over the decades.
They dealt with complex jurisdictional overlaps. Because Westwater is land owned by the Navajo Nation outside of its reservation, it took a while to figure out whether the county or state should take the lead alongside the tribe, said Barton, who took over the Westwater project when Showa retired.
It was like a jurisdictional black hole, officials said.
At times, frustrations mounted. Former Blanding officials seemed to place more barriers in the way of progress. Nearly to the last minute, some residents doubted the projects would happen. Politicians had come, made promises and never fulfilled them, they said.
But leadership changes at the local, state and tribal levels also helped push the project forward, Barton said.
Eventually, the state of Utah, San Juan County, Blanding, Navajo Nation electric and construction enterprises, federal agencies, the Utah-Navajo Trust Fund, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the nonprofit Dig Deep helped make the utility projects happen.
Throughout, the Westwater residents came together to drive the process. They established leadership, held regular meetings and voted on how to manage their community, said Clayton Long, a Navajo resident in Blanding who has helped Westwater residents organize.
It changed how people living outside of Westwater viewed the community.
“I think they have a high regard for Westwater now,” Long said. “They’re considered like they’re dreamers.”
LEFT: Construction workers from the Navajo Engineering and Construction Authority prepare to connect the first home in Westwater to a new running water system on March 13. RIGHT: Five days later, construction workers test the flow of water after installing an outdoor spigot at Thomas Chee’s home. The spigot is part of the new running water system. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
“Now I can breathe”
By 2022, Westwater had electricity and a plan in motion to give homes access to reliable drinking water.
The water project’s goal was to connect Westwater to Blanding’s municipal water system — across the ravine without overly disturbing plantlife. The project includes a new deep well, a treatment plant to remove naturally occurring arsenic and 50 acre-feet of water to support the Westwater subdivision and benefit the city of Blanding.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
Construction crews drilled under the ravine — through bedrock — to cross the 1,150-foot distance from a new master meter in Blanding to Westwater. They drilled under an archaeological site in Westwater, installed fire hydrants and built a new system of pipes.
The completion date moved from Thanksgiving to Christmas, then to February and finally March.
“I’ve been waiting this long. I could wait longer,” Navajo Westwater resident Lena Lovell said in February, after her promised connection date was again delayed. “It’s just like my sister says, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it.’”
Lovell used 5-gallon water jugs, a dozen milk jugs and a water tank outside her home to haul and store water. Because she’s nearly blind, she relied on family members to drive her to her daughter’s house to take showers or to fill up the jugs at the local filling station or 7-Eleven.
“It’s going to be nice. I’ll be able to wash dishes, take showers. Do things I normally do at my daughter’s house,” Lovell said.
The community has been watching the construction crews build the new system for months. Some grumbled that the digging removed the gravel on their driveways, which they’d have to replace. Many wondered how much their new bill would be every month.
For non-Native resident Mary Laiwakete, one perk of the new system is silence.
Laiwakete used a loud water pump every time she needed to take a shower, do dishes or wash clothes.
“I’d have to shut the door; we’d have to turn the TV up because it’s so loud. Now, it’s like, throw my clothes in — nothing. No noise. I can even do laundry in the middle of the night if I want,” Laiwakete said.
She has had massive heart attacks and is recovering from hand surgery, which made it hard to haul water or carry water jugs, she said.
Now, she doesn’t have to do that anymore.
“It makes a big difference, a really really big difference, to finally have a home, electricity, running water,” Laiwakete said. “It’s nice. It’s nice to have that.”
For Chee and his family, the stress peaked in the month leading up to his final connection.
The pipe connecting the house to the cistern froze during an arctic blast that swept the region in January. Without the extra water storage, they had to make more trips to the water-filling station or the creek in the ravine.
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It could take over two hours to fill up their 350-gallon tank. When his truck broke down, Chee and his kids, Ammon and Gage Chee, had to take a 9 p.m. trip down to the creek in the ravine to get water.
It was stressful. He was worried about having enough water for his kids. But over and over, he chose to see the extra work in a positive light.
“Yesterday, we kind of ran out of water and I went and walked down there with my kids,” Chee said. “I realized those guys are learning something too. I think when they grow up they’ll carry something with them.”
Now water comes with the simple lift of a faucet lever.
“It’s been hard the last month,” Chee said, standing in his kitchen moments after their waterline was officially connected to the new system.
“But definitely worth the wait,” Briana Austin, his partner, added as two of their children ran around, playing with their new puppy.
“Now I can breathe again,” Chee said.
What’s next for Westwater?
On Wednesday, project planners and officials walked around Westwater inspecting the new system and evaluating remaining tasks to complete.
Some residents have plumbing issues inside their homes to take care of before they can use the new water system. Others have mineral deposits in their pipes from using nonpotable water from one of the filling stations in Blanding. A few homeowners still need to build indoor plumbing or finalize their homesite leases.
The new utilities are already having an impact: The electricity means they can have Wi-Fi satellites installed. Some people said they still plan to drink water from the artesian well at the creek — they don’t like the chlorine taste from tap water.
Others worried about losing touch with their traditions. There will be a generational shift from those who remember the years of hauling water and younger generations who have always had running water, several people said.
Working for every drop of water has made the community strong, Chee said. He doesn’t want that to be lost. Younger children know firsthand how hard it can be to have water — and how necessary it is, Chee said. He hopes they keep that respect for water.
LEFT: Ammon Chee, 14, and Gage Chee, 11, carry jugs of water through the Westwater subdivision after a trip to get drinking water from an artesian well on Feb. 20, before running water was connected in their community a couple of weeks later. RIGHT: Samuel Chee, 9, fills up water at the well next to a creek in the bottom of the ravine that separates Westwater from Blanding. (Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun)
“I believe that maybe they can help other people in the future, even help save water with conservation,” Chee said.
Austin said she is looking forward to having a garden or fruit trees. When her kids have water-balloon fights this summer, they’ll be using the new spigot outside, she said.
Some community members dream of opening up a community building with arts and crafts or a small store at the entrance to the community, said Long, the Blanding resident who has helped Westwater organize.
Chee is already looking ahead to setting up a wastewater system to replace the septic tanks — that’s the next issue to address, he said.
He sees Westwater’s story as an example that might be able to help other communities struggling to get infrastructure around the Navajo Nation.
“I believe they just have to unite together and make an effort and get their voices heard,” he said. “Just a little spark turns into a flame. I encourage all of those people not to give up. To be resilient. … People deserve to be happy wherever they live.”
