By Adrienne Anderson

Worried about contamination of your drinking water?

In Colorado, you should be.

Why? Recently, this state’s health department, now under Governor Ritter’s administration, has been involved in alarming actions that pose potential, if not likely, risks to public health and safety that must be immediately reversed.

At issue is the Lockheed Martin plant southwest of Denver and its voluminous amounts of a deadly substance called n-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, for short. The toxic compound was in a top-secret liquid rocket fuel mix developed for use in the Titan Missile program in the 1950’s to fuel nuclear weapons-topped ICBMs aimed at targeted cities during the Cold War.

For decades, rocket fuel from engine test stands was freely dumped on the ground, and even flushed illegally down creeks at the mountain-side facility and which regularly contaminated the drinking water supply below, records show. On site, NDMA now pollutes regional groundwater at levels many thousands of times above those considered safe to protect human health, and has also been detected at illegal levels in surface water flowing downhill, as well.

 

 

During the 1980’s and beyond, there has been controversy over children’s deaths from cancer and birth defects in neighborhoods once receiving water impacted by these discharges. The public outcry prompted the closure of the downhill Denver Water facility in 1985 after the contamination was made public, though amidst official denials and obstruction of information that the high incidence of babies and toddlers dying from cancer and birth defects in suburban areas then receiving the tainted water was anything more than a “mystery.”

After publicity waned and frequent droughts strained existing supplies, the nearby Chatfield Reservoir - which had previously been used for only for flood control along the South Platte River and recreational use - was quietly pressed into service as a municipal water supply to ease several drought-starved systems, including Denver’s.

The tiniest traces of the potent rocket poison - which soaks the Lockheed Martin/USAF plant site in Colorado and at several other sites around the nation - can pollute a huge body of water at levels capable of inducing a wide variety of cancers. How much of this substance is dangerous, and capable of producing cancers?

Less than a ¼ of a teaspoon of the substance would contaminate a volume of water equivalent to 500 Olympic sized swimming pools and at that tiny level would be capable of producing cancers in populations receiving the water.

Still worse, the pollutant cannot even be detected by usual laboratory testing techniques at levels which would provide warning before harm could already be done to unsuspecting residents through their faucets. This produces a public health threat so potent that state health regulators in states like California and Massachusetts have been closing drinking water wells where only minute fractions of the substance have been found nearby, and regulating the compound at very stringent, precautionary levels.

Yet in Colorado, the opposite is happening.

Recently, our state health department recently approved or the U.S Air Force managed Superfund site at the center of Lockheed Martin’s property, a daily discharge of NDMA at levels over 70 times ABOVE those considered safe for human health by existing state and federal standard. This is depite the fact that the very same compound was at issue in the childhood cancer cluster of prior years.

Where does this discharge go now, flushed each day from the core of the military contractor’s property? It is piped downhill to wastewater discharge ponds Lockheed Martin constructed several years ago with health department approval along the west bank of Chatfield Reservoir, now being used as a drinking water supply serving thousands of residents in the metro area, including Englewood, Highlands Ranch, and in some circumstances, Denver as well.

When RMPJC at a November 7th meeting questioned why citizens in states like California and Massachusetts are getting better protection from dangerous NDMA exposure by those state agencies than what Colorado is allowing, our state health officials simply shrugged. They claimed the State of Colorado knows what is doing, the other states do not, and are "unneccessarily alarming people."

Lockheed Martin, which finances the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Engineering Management Program, doesn’t mention to its students that its own Colorado plant was engineered to illegally pipe large volumes of its most toxic, cancer-causing wastes toward the public water supply downhill, and for decades was piped to various points throughout the Denver metro area. Officers of the company, including a key CU donor, were not prosecuted or subject to jail time for criminal water pollution violations occurring under their watch. Instead, one rose to the highest levels of power in the Bush administration.

Since 9/11, Lockheed Martin's revenues have soared. For 2006, they were over $39 billion, and recent earnings have further soared by another 34%, due to the increased production and sales of combat aircraft, including the F-22 and F-16 fighter jets.

Now the world’s largest military contractor - selling weapons to countries throughout the world, including some in violation of the federal arms control act, and engaged in other routine violations of state and federal laws here and elsewhere – Lockheed Martin appears to dance to its own tune. Seeing themselves as above the law, a waiver of Colorado’s environmental laws regulating NDMA is now being sought, on claims the U.S. Air Force Superfund site on its property can’t be cleaned up to levels protective of public health under current standards. The dangerous compound now saturates an entire geological limestone formation known as the Glennon Limestone. The eons-old formation transects the Lockheed Martin/USAF property and serves as an essentially permanent channel for the potent poison to flow downward to contaminate water below.

Do you think Lockheed Martin should be able to do its business in our public water supplies? If not, it’s time to get involved and take action to protect our water from war-related toxic contamination in Colorado.

The life you save could be your own.

 

A version of this story was published in the Colorado Daily on November 23, 2007
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Watch this short video clip, produced by Gerald Trumbule of Denver Direct TV. Listen to comments made by Denver Water and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment representatives present at a November 7th, 2007 meeting of the Restoration Advisory Board of the U.S. Air Force's PJKS Superfund site within Lockheed Martin's poperty in Jefferson County, southwest of Denver.

The officials are responding to concerns raised about NDMA's impact to a public water supply source by RMPJC's Adrienne Anderson and Joan Jacobsen, a citizen member of the advisory board who once resided in the Friendly Hills subdivision southwest of Denver.

In the early 1980's, Anderson and Jacobsen led an independent citizens investigation to determine the cause of scores of children suffering from cancer or birth defects and other major disorders, many of which died. Several prominent medical experts attributed the children's deaths, defects and diseases to their exposures to NDMA and other poisons contaminating the water supply source which was then being piped to the area.

Citizen action forced the shutdown of a contaminated Denver Water well downhill of the Martin/USAF complex in late 1984. In 1985, the entire water facility known as Denver Water's Kassler plant, was closed. Denver Water officials have denied the century old water facility was closed due to contamination, incredulously claiming to the public in this arid, often drought-starved region, that "they no longer needed the water."