In this farming community about 50 miles south of Battle Mountain, rusted steel pesticide drums lie abandoned on the desert floor above a dump where decades of toxic refuse lie buried in shallow trenches.

Government documents show federal and state regulators required the dump site to be safely cleaned up and closed 16 years ago. But in 1993, officials failed to follow through with cleanup efforts.

State and federal officials admit laws and regulations weren’t followed because they said they were busy with other projects. They said the site is probably safe and as far as they can tell it never posed a health risk.

That doesn’t placate some Lander County residents.

“If (the regulators’) mothers or sisters or children lived around here they would have done what was supposed to be done,” said Elizabeth Wear, 51, who lived about a mile from the dump for about six years and has been diagnosed with lupus, a type of auto-immune disease.

“Now they say it’s probably safe. How would they know if they didn’t check it? How do they know anything if they didn’t follow through? It makes me mad that they knew what had to be done and didn’t do it. They just didn’t care.”

Regulators said now that the site has again been brought to their attention by the Reno Gazette-Journal, they will make plans to clean up the area and test soil and possibly wells for pollutants.

Some residents and former residents of the valley want to know why environmental laws weren’t followed. They want to know if the illnesses they’ve noticed – including rare cancers and immune disease cases – have anything to do with pesticide pollution.

“If there’s a chance it’s a health hazard, that dump needs to be taken care of,” said Dolan Miller, who grew alfalfa in the valley between 1984 and 2005. His brother, Daren Kay Miller, died of a rare brain cancer in 2004 at the age of 38.

Daren, a welder and heavy equipment operator, helped his brother in the farming operation. “Daren had headaches that just kept getting worse and worse and it was diagnosed as a brain tumor,” Dolan Miller said. “It was very aggressive…he was very strong and in good shape but he lasted only about a year, maybe close to a year and a half.”

He said he knew at least five other neighbors who contracted cancers in the area over the last 10 years or so. He said he knew the pesticide dump was there but hadn’t made use of pesticides in his operation and wasn’t concerned about the site.

The dump is located just above Caine Creek, a tributary of the Reese River. Both waterways are dry most of the year.

“That creek does run part of the reason,” Miller said. “I can see if there was any contamination there it would be picked up by the creek. …There were tests done years ago and they found that the (well) water supply out here is pretty young. Surface water does get into the aquifer.”

The abandoned dump site came to light in June after a Lander County couple went looking for an environmental cause for what they perceived as a disease cluster in Antelope Valley.

John and Elizabeth Wear lived in a house in Antelope Valley from 1994 to 2000. About a mile uphill from their former home, they found the dump site with its signs warning of “danger, contamination” and its barrels rusting in the sand.

The Wears question officials’ statements that the site is safe and that poisons have probably never migrated to the area’s well water, which they drank every day for nearly six years.