Dirty Deeds

RMPJC HOT FLASH

By Adrienne Anderson
DENVER 2007-08-17, updated 2007-9-24

Twelve cents per acre?

Yep, that’s all. That’s what eighty acres of land in the heart of Denver's prime real estate market cost for a Littleton-based company which snapped up the property last year for the price of nine candy bars and two Cokes. Wow, my daughters had that much in their piggy banks, if we’d only known. There’s a beautiful view of the mountains, and even a creek running through the property. It’s close to Cherry Creek where you can shop at Neiman Marcus and grab lunch in one of those upscale little restaurants nearby. And it’s next to the Mira Vista Golf Course where you can spend an afternoon putting.

Now that’s a hot deal.

Oh, just one other thing: it’s a radioactive waste dump.

LAFB-Landfill Whoever bought it must have had some pretty good connections.

Here’s how it worked. At the end of 2000, and just as GW Bush would take over the White House with a Lockheed Martin-stacked cabinet, a company called International Risk Group, LLC was set up by folks in fields of insurance risks and environmental liability management for the likes of corporate and government clients including Lockheed Martin, Rockwell, Shell, ASARCO, and the Department of Defense - some of the very polluters at sites like “Lowry Vista” that dot metro Denver and similar toxic and/or radioactive sites around the country. So configured, IRG set out to acquire the “impaired properties” of their friends in the military industrial complex with plans to turn them into profit making enterprises at contaminated Air Force-related sites in Denver and elsewhere around the country, all posing looming environmental health threats and costly clean-ups. Notable among them are properties that were considered the most hazardous of sites within bases or other installations that the Pentagon's branches refused to remediate, including an area once mapperd by the Air Force itself as a "radioactive disposal area" on maps from decades past at the Lowry Air Force Base.

Sounds like liability laundering? IRG calls it “risk management,” and they tout it as a “win-win” for the community and the Air Force at Lowry, which contaminated the site and other areas like it around the country the military wants to get rid of. But is this really a “win” for residents neighboring such sites and prospective tenants? By transferring toxic and radioactive sites into private hands, the public’s mandated right to oversight of decisions about clean-up of toxic and radioactive sites morphs into a PR game controlled by a private corporation with a profit-making motive, and deals done largely behind closed doors and that the public doesn't become aware of until it's too late to act effectively in their own interests, or after the fact, if at all. The more effective they are at convincing the public through slick colorful brochures that there’s no risk, the more money they would stand to make. Cleaning up radioactive waste sites is costly and must be done with great care. Less costly is covering up a hot site with dirt and doing little else.

For the “Lowry Vista” project in Denver, IRG proposes a better cover-up, literally. They’d turn the “soft cap” now covering the dump into a “hard cap.” Translation? Dirt now piled over the top of the radioactive dump (ID'd as "OU 2" on agency maps) would be covered with concrete instead. While a Colorado health official this week said the area should be dug up and handled elsewhere, that would cut into IRG’s now lucrative profit prospects over its $10 deal.

While serving on the CU faculty and teaching students how to investigate environmental hazards such as these, one group opted to research the development patterns on Lowry, finding that the most contaminated areas had been slated for low-income housing and units for the homeless, while the less polluted parcels were reserved for million dollar home sites. Environmental racism? That’s what the students evaluating the records concluded, as they presented their findings to a committee of Lowry residents while Air Force officials bristled.

The legacy of “Lowry Vista” is one tied to the nuclear bomb and related activities in metro Denver. Plutonium cores for the atomic bomb fashioned at Rocky Flats northwest of Denver and near Boulder would end up atop ICBMs manufactured in Littleton (southwest of Denver) at the Martin Marietta plant (now Lockheed Martin). The missiles would be trucked from Martin east along Titan Road in Douglas County and then northward into Denver to a hangar at the Lowry Air Force Base. There, behind blackened windows, the missiles would be loaded with their atomic payload and await transport to the silos on the Lowry Bombing Range, the auxialliary military training grounds three miles east. Positioned into 200 feet deep silos there, the missiles were readied for launch at the push of a button, designed to obliterate any city on the other side of the globe then targeted as a threat to U.S.'s interests and natonal security. Back at the Lowry AFB, radioactive, toxic and other wastes from warhead maintenance and other Cold War activities were buried along Alameda Avenue, records show, in a landfill that had operated since 1948, and until 1989. Now, cancer-causing chemicals like TCE and radiation ooze from the site into the region’s groundwater and adjacent Westerly Creek.

In a report from 1995 that one of my CU students obtained from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in 1999 for her semester research project, 100% of groundwater wells tested by an Air Force contractor in 1990 around the former Lowry AFB dump were radioactive, most at exceedingly high levels, many times about levels considered safe. Still, over fifteen years later, nothing’s been done other than to cover it up, literally. Furthermore, there was evidence from one of the Air Force's own contractors showing high radiation upgradient of the dump. This suggests that either the radioactive groundwater plume has also migrated southward, and under the Windsor Gardens housing units, or there is another source of radiation there that is moving northward. Further, the data showed that there was migration of the hot groundwater below the dump into the surface water stream of Westerly Creek, which meanders northward through the redevelopment area and on further through other residential areas of northeast Denver before entering a tribuary to the South Platte River. RMPJC repeated its requests to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to answer this mystery by requiring further tests. Jeff Edson, an official in CDPHE's Hazardous Waste division, who for years has overseen all the toxic sites in Colorado related to Department of Defense activities, says that he will look into it, and that "they are not done with this site."

In recent months, IRG personnel have been making the rounds with city and state officials, including Denver City Councilwoman Marcia Johnson, whose district includes the former Lowry base. IRG has held meetings with her constituents around the polluted parcel to tout its plans for the hot property. When asked this week if she was aware of the property’s history as a radioactive dump, Councilwoman Johnson said no. Perhaps IRG just forgot to mention this little detail about their land’s lurking legacy, after Denver refused to take it as “open space,” citing the environmental liabilities.

Turning a sow’s ear into a silk purse, or a radioactive waste dump into a residential development, IRG’s associated companies stand to make millions if they can successfully sugar-coat their lands’ liabilities. They stand to benefit from a less than fully-informed public, who may end up with the lion’s share of liabilities for poisoned water supplies, prospects for cancers and birth defects in our children, and dashed dreams.

Absent some mechanism for the public’s interest to be fully protected, the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center will make sure that the public knows what looms below and behind this plan. For IRG and friends, this hot property is a neat deal, so long as the public doesn’t get the drift or inhale any radioactive dust. Otherwise, it's got the smell of yet another dirty deal over dirty deeds in Denver that warrant watch with a wary eye.

Adrienne Anderson, a former member of CU Boulder’s Environmental Studies faculty, coordinates the Nuclear Nexus project of the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, working to end local hazards and the global threat.

Author's note: A version of this story was published as a column in the Colorado Daily on Friday, August 17, 2007 . It should also be noted that this radioactive dump written about here, a landfill on the Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, is not the same site as the Lowry Landfill on the Lowry Bombing Range in Arapahoe County, a Superfund site that has generated major public controversy over a continuing govermment cover-up of extensive plutonium and other radioactive contamination at the site. This was made public in a federal whistleblower case - filed in 1997 and in subsequent public revelations by this author, investigative research conducted as a community service while a member of the University of Colorado at Boulder's Environmental Studies faculty, and as a denver mayoral appointee to the Metro Wastewater sewage plant's board of directors to represent occupational health and safety concerns of workers who would be potentially exposed to the hazards without adequate protection.

Denver took ownership of the Arapahoe County dumpsite in 1964 after the government and its contractors had used the area for its own toxic dumping in years prior. In effect, there are two "Lowry Landfills" - a) the one in southeast Denver on the former Lowry Air Force Base site at Alameda Avenue and east of Quebec Street, and b) the one three miles east of that site on the outskirts of Aurora at the intersection of Quincy Avenue and Gun Club Road. Both are highly radioactive, records reviewed show, and pose public health risks.