A coal power plant demolition serves as a poignant historical moment for the Navajo

In a small plane flying west out of Farmington, N.M., America’s energy transition appeared to be proceeding in an orderly fashion — a sea change measurable in megawatts, acreage and emission particle parts per million.

Mike Eisenfeld of San Juan Citizens Alliance was our tour guide, his voice crackling over the intercom.

“We’re heading toward the San Juan Solar Project,” he said. “It’s the biggest project going right now, economically.”

Rows and rows of black rectangles planted in bone-dry earth stretched out below us.

Then the plane headed south, where two enormous coal-fired power plants crouched on the landscape.

“At one point San Juan Generating Station and the Four Corners Power Plant, according to Los Alamos National Lab, were the largest source of point-source pollution in the United States,” Eisenfeld said.

But on this day, the San Juan Generating Station sat dark and inert — it shut down two years ago. As we flew over the Four Corners Power Plant, puffs of white smoke told us it was still producing energy.

“This is the last coal plant up here,” Eisenfeld said of Four Corners. “All the others have been retired. Gone.”

When Eisenfeld first moved to the area nearly 20 years ago, coal mining and coal power were on the rise in northwest New Mexico. Today, several large-scale solar projects are in the works.

He’d scheduled these tours with EcoFlight on Aug. 24 to showcase these big changes but also to witness the demolition of the San Juan Generating Station. That was the day its long, slender smokestacks collapsed into dust.

The quick work of demolition

From the air, the coal and solar power facilities look like pieces like a gameboard. On the ground, the emotional weight of the energy transition is heavy and the complexities are palpable. Public Service Company of New Mexico, signaled years ago that it would decommission San Juan Generating Station; the plant burned its last load of coal in 2022. But the smokestacks are visible from hundreds of miles away. They have been a monumental presence on this landscape since the 1970s, and they’ve become powerful symbols to the people who live in the region — especially Navajo people.

The Aug. 24 demolition was a poignant moment in the Navajo Nation’s long and complex history with energy development. Over seven decades, coal and the energy made from it have become entwined with the Navajo’s cultural beliefs, community life and the Navajo Nation economy.

On the morning of the demolition, employees of Public Utility of New Mexico transported visitors in a passenger van to a dirt lot on site. We drove past the massive concrete block of a building, weaving between heaps of scrap metal slated to be recycled.

There was a whiff of post-apocalypse in the air.

Dozens of contract laborers arrived in trucks and cars to watch the industrial carnage. Elsewhere on site, where former plant employees and local elected officials were gathered, the mood was somber. Still more spectators — those without an invitation — parked on the road outside the gates.

For the demolition team, a California contracting company called Integrated Demolition and Remediation, which has demolished dozens of smokestacks at coal power plants all over the U.S., this was business as usual.

“I’m going to do a loud ‘10, 9, 8, 7, 6,’ ” said Rodrigo Roman, an explosives expert with the demolition team. “Then I’ll do a silent, ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1.’ He’s gonna yell, ‘Fire in the hole.’ You’re gonna hear a click. And then it’s game on.”

Another member of the crew instructed me to lean back against one of the trucks.

“You’re going to feel a shock wave,” he said. “It’ll push you back a bit.”

Everyone gazed up at the 400 concrete cylinders, bathed in yellow morning sunlight for the last time.

But for at least one Navajo woman, the moment was too heavy to bear.

“I didn’t attend the demolition because I’d probably cry,” Christina Aspaas told me when I met with her in the nearby town of Kirtland, N.M. “Knowing all that I know of how many jobs lost, the impacts that I’m seeing as a school board member to our district. Going to this demolition? I don’t think that would have been good for my whole being.”

Aspaas’ family history is embedded in the coal economy here. Her earliest memories of San Juan Generating Station date back to when she was a child.

“It was just some place we dropped my dad off at work,” she said. “He was a welder, but he helped build that power plant.”

Grandfathers, uncles and aunts worked at power plants and coal mines across the region, and eventually, Aspaas joined them as a utility worker in one of the mines.

“I worked two jobs before,” she said. “Both those checks put together, did not even come near the first check I got as a utility worker. And when they told me how much I was making, I thought I was rich.”

Decades later, she’s a journeyman electrician at Navajo Mine and a union member. Her income supports dozens of family members.

“It provided for me and my daughter,” she said. “And I’m connected to four different clans and my wealth is not accumulated to myself. When I hear of ceremony or other things going, I help with food, groceries, cash.”

In the span of a decade, thousands of middle-class Navajo people have lost jobs connected to the coal economy; many have moved out of state. When utilities decommissioned the Navajo Generating Station near Page, Ariz., in 2019, the Navajo Nation lost more than $40 million in revenue. New Mexico labor data shows that displaced energy workers are making nearly $30,000 less a year on average since the San Juan power plant closed in 2022.

As a school board member, Aspaas is concerned that in five years, student enrollment has dropped 25% and student homelessness has tripled.

“What industry do we bring in here immediately to make up the tax revenue that’s lost?” she asked.

Navajo activists celebrate

On the morning of the demolition, Elouise Brown drove more than an hour to park her car outside the gates of the San Juan Generating Station.

“I wanted to witness this with my own eyes,” she said. “We’ve been working on this for a long, long time, and I was very, very excited to see this.

Brown also has memories of the plant from childhood, driving in the car with her grandparents.

“It looked like a huge stove,” she recalled. “When my grandma said they burn coal, I was thinking, ‘Jeez, how much coal would you burn to make all that smoke come out of those smokestacks?’ ”

As an adult, she became concerned about the haze of air pollution all over the reservation.

“It didn’t look safe!” she said. “How could you have a healthy life if you have a lot of smoke?”

Brown became an anti-coal activist in December 2006, after she learned that former Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley was backing a new coal-fired power plant in the region. The so-called Desert Rock project would have put a third coal plant within a few miles of the other two.

Brown sleuthed around online and discovered that construction was already underway. She drove to the site and started ripping out survey flags. When a semitruck hauling construction materials arrived, she maneuvered her car to block the driver.

“I went off the road, and I went right in front of him,” she said. “He had to stop, he had no choice.”

It was the beginning of her journey as an activist.

“He was a huge guy,” Brown said of the driver. “He was looking at me and just yelling at me. And I said, ‘I don’t care what the Navajo Nation president told you. He has no right to do what he did without informing us. So you’re not coming through.’ ”

Later, Brown blockaded the road with other activists. She picketed in the New Mexico Capitol building in Santa Fe for 60 days straight, and she fought the project until it fizzled in 2009.

“In our Navajo way of life, you don’t mess with Mother Earth. You don’t mess with the resources inside,” she said.

Navajo carbon sovereignty

For more than 75 years, Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, have forged a complex relationship with coal. Since the 1960s, utilities have burned coal on or near Navajo land, sending electricity to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego and Albuquerque.

For some Navajo people, this story is simply a modern kind of colonialism, according to Diné sociologist and historian Andrew Curley.

“How these non-Native communities, especially white communities prey upon Diné people and resources, replicating a pattern of colonial marginalization and dispossession that goes back more than a hundred years,” Curley said.

Curley’s book Carbon Sovereignty explores the Navajo relationship with coal. Many Diné workers he interviewed said their labor in the coal industry was intrinsically and even culturally meaningful.

“[Coal work] became a form of empowerment,” he said. “It was a form of identity-building between workers at a site.”

In the 1970s, with the rise of the Red Power movement, Navajo workers and elected officials began to leverage their sovereignty.

“Our tribal leaders started to negotiate royalty rates with extractive companies operating in Indian Country to give more money back to the tribe and give more rights to Diné laborers,” Curley said.

As coal declines and new resources power the grid, those replacement industries are not supporting Navajo workers the way coal did.

“Oil, gas, solar, wind — we’re not seeing the same type of benefit to workers within any other kind of energy,” Curley said. “And they’re not getting that social mobility through coal work that we in the social sciences were able to demonstrate existed.”

A poignant, slow-motion moment

On the morning of Aug. 24, as the clock ran down, the demolition team shouted out a five-minute warning, then a one-minute warning, followed by the shrill sound of a siren.

For activist Elouise Brown, the demolition was a long time coming.

“I felt chills come down my whole body,” she said. “I was telling my family, what a great way to start your morning. What a blessing.”

Coal mine electrician Christina Aspaas watched a video of the implosion later that day on social media.

“It just brought back memories,” she said, as she wiped away tears. “My childhood, my dad, my mom.”

Aspaas posted a few words online to honor the generations of Navajo workers who have labored in coal.

“We took them for granted,” she said. “I just wanted them to know that I remember you.”

The detonation and shock wave pushed spectators backward, and then, in slow motion, the columns seemed to fall, concrete dissolving into air.

It takes less than a minute to demolish smokestacks.

It will take years, maybe decades, for Navajo communities to come to terms with what they’ve gained and what’s been lost.