Reservation's toxic dumps a multilayered nightmare

"I'm ashamed of what happened here, but you can't lie about it," said the Torres Martinez tribal member. "You have to own up when you do wrong."

Not far away, bulldozers piled up mountains of junk from AuClair's illegal dump, a dump so toxic it has been declared a Superfund site by the Environmental Protection Agency. He now faces millions of dollars in fines.

AuClair's site isn't unusual. Illegal dumps are spread across the Torres Martinez reservation like ugly wounds, making it the most polluted tribal land in California, Nevada and Arizona. Vast swaths of desert have been transformed into toxic trash heaps threatening the tribe and nearby communities. There are at least 26 illegal dumps here, including the largest one in the state. Federal officials struggle to shut them down, but new ones pop up all the time.

"I would say this is in its own league," said Clancy Tenley, EPA's tribal program manager. "I don't know of any place that has this level of pollution."

Unlike the nearby Agua Caliente, Morongo and Cabazon tribes, the Torres Martinez are poor. They don't have luxury hotels, spas or, until recently, even a casino.

But they do have land: 24,000 acres of it stretching from Riverside to Imperial counties, and even under the Salton Sea. And as development in the Coachella Valley has exploded, some tribal members have cashed in by offering land to those looking to cut corners on waste disposal costs.

Golf course trimmings from clubs throughout the Coachella Valley have arrived in unmarked trucks, and drums of oil, car batteries and sewage also wind up there. Even waste from nearby cities found its way onto the reservation via unscrupulous contractors. And when the pile gets high enough, it's often just burned.

The result, federal officials say, has been widespread contamination along with toxic smoke drifting over cities, schools and farms across the Coachella Valley.

"We find new dumps on a regular basis," said Ray Paiz, battalion chief for the Riverside County Fire Department in Coachella. "What has occurred out there is not only wrong, but it's a shameful criminal act."

So far AuClair, 50, is the only owner expressing any shame.