By ADRIENNE ANDERSON

Digging up history can be a risky business, as stuff some might wish to keep buried can be unearthed.

So it is with a piece of land looming above the fertile fields east of Boulder, as students in one of my “Environmental Ethics: Race, Class & Pollution Politics” classes learned back in 1998, when they dug into public records for a semester research project. Their inquiry was prompted by one of the students who had bicycled up around a fenced area where an old warning sign bore a barely visible radioactive symbol.

Intrigued, he looked closer, and beyond found partially buried 55-gallon drums with cemented contents scattered around. When the students asked if they could dig further into it, they were guided about various research techniques, likely sources of information and other skills needed for independent civic oversight of environmental hazards for protecting public health and the environment, a primary focus of the course.

Apparently, they found some information that authorities who ought to know seem either not to be aware of or prefer to ignore. In any case, what they found warrants careful re-examination today, as important decisions are being made about what to do about a past that may affect the future of the region for eons to come.

The dispute is over the Valmont Butte site in east Boulder, and who knew what when. Plans are underway about what to do with this property and who should own it next. Native Americans consider it a sacred site. The City of Boulder now owns it, and wants to get rid of it. Is it a treasure, or a travesty?

Actually, it’s a hot property, and now a controversy that’s likely to get a lot hotter. Inquiring minds want to know why the City of Boulder in 2000 spent over $2.5 million of taxpayer dollars for butte property where parcels only a few years earlier – deed records found by the students show - had been sold between private corporations for only $10, along with unspecified addtional consideration in some cases. Now, the plan is for the City to transfer the property into the hands of an intermediary party for reported resale to Native American tribes or community groups.

Is this prudent public policy, or a case of environmental racism at its worst? To answer this question, one must look at some of Boulder’s little known hot spots, as my students did.

Let’s start at the intersection of 3rd and Pearl Street in Boulder.

In 1971, an 86-year old whistleblower Francis W. Reed came forward with a warning to city officials, as low-income housing for the elderly was being constructed on city-owned land being leased to the Archdiocese of Denver for $1 a year. He feared the land might be radioactive, having worked at a mill formerly on the site which had processed uranium ores for radium. The mill had closed in 1920 when cheaper uranium ore discovered in the Belgian Congo had caused the U.S. market to drop. After he and a friend blew the whistle on the project, discoveries of high radiation at 20,000 - 50,000 times above normal levels led to the issuance of a cease and desist order. CU Physics Professor Jerry Martin was quoted as saying, “I believe in being cautious and not letting kids play on it.” A nuclear physicist at the then Dow-operated Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant warned that the site may still not be safe for residential housing even after the contaminated surface soils were moved away, suggesting that uranium from the mill’s chemical process would soak the soil to some depth.

The quandary for public health officials was what to do with the hot stuff. One option considered was to send it to the “Dow Chemical disposal site,” likely referring either to the nuclear weapons plant site itself or its wayward dumpsite on the Lowry Bombing Range southeast of Denver. It was reported that Dow, which was authorized to receive radioactive material, “planned to dispose of the waste in Boulder County.” This was later reportedly dropped due to “legal complications.” A health department physicist explained, “it looks like they’re becoming leery about the environmental reactions to disposing in Boulder.”

Where did the wastes too hot to handle by the notorious Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant go? They were trucked by the tons to the Valmont Butte site and dumped among the already radioactive tailings of a mill there, then owned by Allied Chemical. At the butte, the highly radioactive soils and debris has laid leaking for decades, though out of sight, out of mind. Still further contamination from activities of a subsequent property owner - a Nevada company called Tusco and its lessee, the Hendricks Mining Company, have added further insult to injury.

Today, these and other questions regarding what’s being done about these and possibly other hot properties, the adequacy of City clean-up efforts and the fate of such sites all warrant close public scrutiny. Citizens of Boulder deserve full public disclosure of all the facts about Boulder’s hot spots and their history and any remaining hot contents, lest the lessons of their long-lived legacy not be learned.

Adrienne Anderson coordinates the Nuclear Nexus Project of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. A former Environmental Studies Instructor at CU for 11 years, CU’s Student Environmental Action Coalition is bringing her back to the classroom for a “Hot Topics Lecture Series” beginning October 16th on the CU Boulder campus. For a referenced version of this column, visit RMPJC’s website at www.rmpjc.org. The author can be contacted at Adrienne@rmpjc.org.

A version of this column was published in the Colorado Daily October 12. 2007 .

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