ARVADA — Sixty-five years after workers at Rocky Flats began making the plutonium pits for America’s nuclear weapons arsenal, the former plant’s troubled history continued to reverberate Monday as dozens turned out at a public meeting to condemn next year’s plans to welcome the first visitors to what is now a wildlife refuge.
One woman stood at the end of an hour-long “sharing session” at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities, put on by a trio of federal agencies and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, and condemned it as a “dog and pony show.”
She was joined by others who held signs aloft during the presentation that read “disagree” and “wrong.” It was the fourth and final meeting to share plans on the opening of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge to the public in summer 2018.
“They want to turn it into a picnic area,” said W. Gale Biggs, head of a Boulder-based environmental engineering firm.
But plutonium buried at the 6,200-acre site 16 miles northwest of Denver has the ability “to move horizontally and vertically with the groundwater,” Biggs said. And that means potential exposure by visitors — be they bicyclists, birders or hikers — to the dangerous and long-lasting ingredient in the chemical and radioactive stew that Rocky Flats workers dealt with for 40 years.
“What they are really saying is that it’s safe enough, in the government’s opinion,” said Sandy Pennington, mayor pro tem of Superior and an alternate on the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council. “But safe enough is never safe enough.”
She cites the on-site burial of building foundations still contaminated with plutonium as reason alone to keep the public off the property. No one has proven that burrowing animals, severe flooding or raging winds couldn’t unearth the chemical element and eventually expose it to the atmosphere, Pennington said.
“Why are we, in health-conscious Colorado, even entertaining the notion of opening up what was one of the dirtiest sites for radiation for recreational use?” she said. “Why are we doing this? I believe it’s because the government wants to put lipstick on a nuclear pig.”
But David Lucas, refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the decade-long, $7 billion cleanup of Rocky Flats that ended in 2005 was thorough and extensive. Plentiful monitoring and sampling for contaminants has shown that the property is safe.
“We are confident in the results,” he said Monday night. “If we determined that it was not safe, we wouldn’t have our employees out there.”
Scott Surovchak, Rocky Flats site manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, said aggressive efforts to monitor the land, where leaks and fires spread deadly chemicals through soil and air over the decades the plant was in operation, continue today.
His agency maintains covers on two old landfills at Rocky Flats, runs three groundwater testing systems and keeps an eye on four water collection systems, he said.
Kim Griffiths, who has lived in Arvada’s Candelas neighborhood for two years, said she has grown tired of the “outrage as a lifestyle” approach that Rocky Flats objectors have adopted. She said the multiple tests that have been done over the years for contamination on the property are what speak to her the loudest.
“Everything has been studied extensively — all of which proves the safety of the Flats,” Griffiths said.
She likened the Rocky Flats activists to climate change deniers who rely on a minority of scientific opinions to assert that warming global temperatures are not human-caused.
“I think there will always be a segment that won’t believe, regardless of how much science you put in front of them,” Griffiths said.
For many who turned out Monday, however, recreation is not suitable for a site that was given over to intensive industrial and military-related activities for four decades.
Most telling, critics say, is the 1,200-acre portion of the property, dubbed the Central Operable Unit and still an active Superfund cleanup site, that will remain off-limits to the public for safety reasons. It’s the area in the middle of the refuge where once stood a small city of buildings housing the 10,000 workers who contributed to one of the nation’s major Cold War weapons programs.
“I can’t believe anyone would want to build a plutonium playground on Rocky Flats,” said Jon Lipsky, a vociferous critic of the government’s refuge blueprint and a former FBI agent who oversaw the 1989 raid on the plant that ultimately led to its shutdown.
The lead-up to next year’s official opening of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge has been beset by problems and protests. Two years ago, a prescribed burn on refuge property was canceled following a public outcry.
And last year, federal and local officials had to wrangle hard to get half a dozen nearby municipalities to kick in money to help win a federal grant to pay for two access points into the refuge — one on Indiana Street and the other on Colorado 128.
Superior voted not to contribute any funds, while other cities and towns, such as Boulder, put strict conditions on participating in the grant request, including requiring soil analysis testing to determine the level of contaminants that might exist on the property.
There also have been dueling health studies in the past year focused on people living downwind of Rocky Flats. A 2016 survey of the health of people who lived near the former weapons plant showed unexpectedly large numbers of cases of thyroid cancer and rare cancers, although the survey’s results were considered inconclusive overall.
But a study by the state health department released two months later uncovered no evidence to conclude that contamination from the plant has caused a cancer epidemic.
In the meantime, concern about the safety of Rocky Flats recently began to spread beyond the core group of activists that often denounce government plans for the site. In March, the Boulder Valley School District’s Board of Education passed a resolution banning classroom field trips to the refuge. Last week, St. Vrain Valley School District’s board endorsed a similar ban.
St. Vrain board President Bob Smith said the decision was one made with safety as a top concern.
“We have reasons to believe that Rocky Flats is not the best place to take kids,” he told The Denver Post on Monday. “There are so many other places to visit in Colorado.”
Whether the bans on field trips spread to other school districts and stand out as a particularly powerful denunciation of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge as a public recreation amenity is not yet known. But Pennington said she hopes “it will spread” to other public school districts.
“Hopefully, we can educate people to stay the heck off of Rocky Flats,” she said.