The post The long path of plutonium: A new map charts contamination at thousands of sites, miles from Los Alamos National Laboratory appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. For years, the public had no clear picture of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plutonium footprint. Had the ubiquitous plutonium at LANL infiltrated the soil? The water? Had it migrated outside the boundary of the laboratory itself? A series of maps published by Nuclear Watch New Mexico are beginning to answer these questions and chart the troubling extent of plutonium on the hill. One map is included below, while an int ..read more

The post Can the Albuquerque Police Department ever be reformed? appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. In the past decade, reforming the Albuquerque Police Department has cost nearly $40 million and generated 5,600 pages of oversight reports under the federal government’s effort to address the force’s excessive violence. But what does the city have to show for it? While the department touts an internal culture change, mandatory body cameras and a slew of other reforms, its officers continue to kill residents at an outsized rate. Even as APD has moved into compliance with nearly every refo ..read more

The post The weight of an empty chair appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. One Saturday a month, Angel Kirby, elementary principal at Albuquerque’s Mission Achievement and Success Charter School (MAS), spends her day off looking for missing children. Some of the kids have failed to show up to school for weeks at a time; others have been unreachable when absences piled up and attendance staff called their parents’ phones. Maybe the family car has broken down, the child suffers from asthma, anxiety or depression, or the parents are struggling with mental illness or substance abuse. Sometim ..read more

The post Fined and stripped of his marijuana license, Dineh Benally keeps on growing appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. Three months ago, New Mexico issued a $1 million fine to embattled Navajo marijuana grower Dineh Benally and — citing him for “egregious” violations — ordered him to shut down his Torrance County cannabis farm. Benally has done anything but. Instead of closing up shop, he has expanded his operation along a rural highway near Estancia. In a March 21 phone interview, Benally alluded to a sovereign right to grow cannabis, which he says is a religious sacrament for N ..read more

The post A New Mexico childhood appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. From the book Whiskey Tender by Deborah Taffa. Copyright © 2024 by Deborah Taffa. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpted by permission. The highway to Silverton, Colorado, is an ear-popping ascent with hair-pin turns and missing guardrails. Dad hugged the mountainside with the van as we climbed, tapping his horn before each blind curve to warn truckers of our presence. We had left the hellish reservation border town we’d just moved to behind and were headed to a vacation paradis ..read more

The post Burning question: What’s the right place for a solar farm? appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. When Eldorado resident Randy Coleman met with representatives from Sen. Martin Heinrich’s office a couple of weeks ago, he received a warning. “They told me I might get called a NIMBY for being against a solar project,” he said, using the acronym for Not in My Back Yard — a derogatory term for people who don’t want progressive projects like low-income housing or wind farms located near their homes or spoiling their views. “But it’s not about that,” Coleman said. As he and others see i ..read more

The post Reading, writing, ’rithmetic and ranching: Why rural New Mexico wants to keep the four-day school week appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. Harding County, the least populous in New Mexico, is the home of the Mosquero Municipal School District — one of the smallest in the state — with only 45 in-person students. Almost all of them are ranch kids who’ve learned to juggle homework with daily chores and who travel long distances — some more than an hour each way —  to go to school in Mosquero, a village of some 98 people. The sun is still just a thin orange glow on the horizon ..read more

The post The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. Sprinkled across five western states, in silos buried deep underground and protected by reinforced concrete, sit 400 intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each of those missiles is equipped with a single nuclear warhead. And each of those warheads is itself equipped with one hollow, grapefruit-sized plutonium pit, designed to trigger a string of deadly reactions. All of those missiles are on “hair-trigger alert,” poised for hundreds of targets in Russia — any one of which could raze all of downtow ..read more

The post When PFAS hits home: Poisoned wells in La Cieneguilla  appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. During the decades that he’s lived in his home southwest of Santa Fe, Jose Villegas was oblivious to the toxic chemicals that were seeping through the aquifer, slowly spreading under his house in the historic village of La Cieneguilla and into the well that supplied his family with drinking water. His neighbors were also drinking the well water, unaware that the New Mexico National Guard had discovered more than a year earlier that the groundwater and soil on its site by th ..read more

The post Drive-by shootings: New Mexico’s ‘hidden in plain sight problem’ appeared first on Searchlight New Mexico. Gunfire from drive-by shootings rang out 302 times in Albuquerque last year. Four bullets tore through a mobile home’s thin bedroom walls, just feet away from two teenage boys. One bullet narrowly missed a state senator’s daughter. Yet another killed a 5-year-old girl in her sleep — and prompted the governor’s controversial move to limit where firearms could be carried. Most of the others went under the radar. Despite their frequency, there is no single database — local, state o ..read more