Westminster City Council met on Monday (July 15, 2024) to discuss whether the council should pay for a bridge connecting the Greenway Project trails in Rocky flats over Indiana Street. US Fish and Wildlife Service supports the project citing confirmation tests, but concerns remain about ongoing contamination from a nuclear testing that once operated on the land for close to 40 years.
Alexis Kenyon reports.
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Untitled Alexis Kenyon
Audio Transcript:
Kenyon: The study session about whether the city of Westminster will agree to build a bridge to complete the Rocky Mountain Greenway lasted more than six hours Monday night. The bridge, which would cost around $200,000, is the final leg of this stage of construction in the Rocky Mountain Greenway project.
It connects the Rocky Flats Refuge section of the trail to the Westminster section of the trail over Indiana Street. David Lucas is the project lead for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and spoke at Monday’s session.
Matt Lucas, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service: Construction begins on this project on September 9th. We’ve worked with Westminster for a decade, and the bridge will probably go up here regardless of tonight’s decision.
Kenyon: But not everyone supports the bridge or, for that matter, the decision to build a trail through Rocky Flats. That decision came about 10 years after a $7 billion Superfund cleanup of the site.
The cleanup was originally estimated to take about 65 years, but in 2006, less than 10 years after they started, the Department of Energy put a fence around the parts of the land that were most toxic—the parts that remain a Superfund site today.
For the rest of the land, all of the peripheral parts, they handed it over to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They said the land was safe enough for wildlife to live on.
Then in 2016, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked towns around Rocky Flats if they were interested in going in on a federal grant. The grant offered partial funding to create a trail connecting their municipalities via federally owned land. The trail would start in Denver, go west to Boulder, go through Boulder, and eventually end in Lyons. The only problem was to get from Denver to Boulder, the most direct route was through Rocky Flats.
Against protests from community members, academics, physicians, researchers, law enforcement officials, professors, and more, Arvada, Westminster, Broomfield, Boulder, Boulder County, and Jefferson County all got on board. They began construction a few years later.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completed about 15 miles of trails through Rocky Flats this year.
Again, David Lucas.
Lucas: This is not a decision that’s being forced on anybody. It’s their choice to come out, whether or not to view the 630 plant species, all the wildlife, take advantage of the trail system to lead them to other places. That’s in general, where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife stands on this project. It’s consistent with our plans, it’s consistent with our NEPA (The National Environmental Policy Act) process. It‘s consistent with the regulatory agencies and the scientific expertise that we ask for, and therefore we support it and we will continue to push forward with it.
Kenyon: Despite pushing forward, experts continue to say there’s no way people should be walking around this area.
D’Arrigo: Every site that takes on a nuclear action is a sacrifice area.
Kenyon: Diane D’Arrigo is a nuclear energy cleanup expert with Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) who says the reason the land is so dangerous is because there are still trace levels of plutonium from the years of nuclear testing.
D’Arrigo: There should not be a really big pause about how dangerous this material is. It’s one of the most dangerous elements on Earth.
Kenyon: Plutonium is a naturally occurring but highly rare radioactive metallic element.
Scientists at UC Berkeley first synthesized plutonium in the 1940s in the development of the nuclear bomb. Kind of like asbestos, it’s most dangerous when inhaled and can be swept up into the air when it’s disturbed.
Dr. Deborah Segaloff is on the board of Physicians for Social Responsibility in Colorado who recently sued U.S. agencies to stop the Greenway Trail. Segaloff is also a cancer researcher.
Segaloff: Plutonium has a half-life of greater than 24,000 years, and if inhaled, it’s not eliminated from the body. Therefore, it continually irradiates surrounding cells for the person’s lifetime, which can result in cancer initiation and growth.
Kenyon: Randy Stafford of Rocky Flats Public Health Advocates spoke at Monday’s session and cited a study from 2019 by the Jefferson County Public Health Department. The study found rates of thyroid cancer were twice the national average in neighborhoods downwind from Rocky Flats.
Another study of the area found abnormal clusters of breast cancer in young adults. And in new neighborhoods directly downwind from Rocky Flats, including neighborhoods like Five Parks, Whisper Creek, and Candelas, Stafford says they have abnormal rates of extremely rare cancers.
Stafford: So Five Parks, I think it’s about 400 homes, so call it 1,600 people. There have been two cases of cardiac angiosarcoma in that neighborhood, one of them fatal. And cardiac angiosarcoma is a cancer that is so rare that only 10 cases are diagnosed per year nationally and 25 globally. And there were two cases in that neighborhood in the same time period. And there have been other cancers and neurological diseases in that neighborhood and also in Whisper Creek to the north of Five Parks.
Kenyon: Matt Lucas of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says he recognizes that people are concerned, but according to many tests, their experts and governmental agencies, the levels of plutonium detected in and around Rocky Flats are safe.
Lucas: That’s why we did confirmatory soil sampling. This is a tremendous amount of confirmatory soil sampling that’s been done all the way along the route of the trail. We did that on the preliminary design. Now we have the final design that shifts it 10 feet in this direction and 20 feet in that direction. We came back and sampled it again because we want to be good neighbors and we want to be very transparent. The air quality sampling is very similar to that. We recognize that individuals have concerns very much.
Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus at Northern Arizona University, recently detected plutonium in air samples from the Rocky Flats site boundary.
Ketterer: Why are cancers occurring there and not elsewhere? That is the question to be answered. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck.
Kenyon: As Monday’s meeting came to a close, council members seemed torn. One city council member suggested investing the $200,000 the city would be spending on the bridge into education and signage around Rocky Flats. Mayor Pro Tem Sarah Nurmela asked Dr. Segaloff back for a final question.
Nurmela: Is there any level of plutonium that is safe?
Segaloff: Not really, no.
Kenyon: Segaloff says one way to think about how real she considers this risk from plutonium is, when she moved to Colorado in 2018, she moved from Iowa where she and her husband had both been studying radioisotopes at a school of medicine for decades. Unknowingly, they bought a house about a mile and a half away from the Rocky Flats Refuge.
Segaloff: And as we became better educated regarding the ongoing contamination of plutonium there, after a year, we sold our home at a loss to move out of the area. And I think that sums up pretty well what my assessment of the safety aspects of the refuge are.
Kenyon: After hours of debate, the Westminster City Council made no decision on Monday night about funding the bridge to connect the Rocky Flats trails over Indiana Street.
In the meantime, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is facing more Rocky Flats-related obstacles.
As of May, county commissioners in Boulder had stalled funding for another connecting bridge on the other side of Rocky Flats. They were seeking legal advice for the ramifications of staying or leaving the agreement, in part due to an ongoing federal lawsuit.
