Denver Water's Devilish Deal

The Hiroshima Connection in Colorado

By Adrienne Anderson
August, 2006

Sixty one years ago, the United States Air Forces dropped a nuclear bomb named “Little Boy” on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, estimated to have resulted in the horrific deaths of over 140,000 civilians , including those who perished instantly by incineration, and others who suffered slower, anguishing deaths in the aftermath from burns, radiation poisoning and other effects. Citizens in the U.S. were kept in the dark about the true horrors of their government’s actions at the time, and only last year – six decades after the story was spiked by military censors - was the account of the first U.S. reporter on the scene, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter George Weller, posthumously published.

Here at home in Colorado, citizens were also kept in the dark about local operations that formed the heart of the nation’s nuclear bomb and chemical weapons complex and their toxic and radioactive effects, from plutonium bomb trigger manufacturing at Rocky Flats to Sarin nerve gas bomb production at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal. At Coors in Golden, nuclear fuel rods were made to power a nuclear powered airplane that never got off the ground. Titan missiles were assembled at Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin), trucked to the Lowry Air Force Base, topped with the atomic bomb, and taken to the Lowry Bombing Range southeast of Denver where they were positioned in underground silos and readied for launch at the touch of a button to obliterate Soviet targets on the other side of the world. In 1964, the Titan missiles were removed at the order of then-President Kennedy, and leaving several vacant 200 feet deep holes on the military range which, according to a former state law enforcement officer, were used in subsequent years for clandestine hazardous waste dumping by Rocky Flats and others. Missiles of the current era now dot a huge expanse of northeastern Colorado, on hair trigger alert.

In the zeal of the U.S.’ nuclear weapons build-up of the Cold War era, the Atomic Energy Commission was on a frenzied search for uranium sources to fuel their nuclear bomb program, and found the foothills west of Denver of prime value for high grade uranium lodes they were anxious to have mined. Many were along the foothills southwest of Denver, on and near property the Glenn L. Martin Company had acquired for its top secret activities, testing missile fuels then in development that would be capable of launching nuclear payloads thousands of miles away to their Soviet targets.

A woman named Joan Jacobsen in the 1980’s lived in a suburb southwest of Denver called Friendly Hills, which would become embroiled in controversy when our citizens’ investigation upturned evidence that Martin Marietta had been poisoning the area’s water supplies for years, and during a time when over a dozen infants, toddlers and young children had mysteriously died of birth defects, cancers and other fatal disorders, with scores of others surviving with tumors, seizure disorders and other major health problems. Jacobsen, a devout Christian then raising two young daughters at home, became a self-taught investigative researcher, and launched her own mission of discovery, driven by her faith and commitment to get to the bottom of the ills that plagued her community.

In 1988, Jacobsen would be stunned to find records in state mining files revealing that the Denver Water Board, the municipal agency which supplies drinking water throughout the Denver metropolitan area, owns property which they’d allowed to be mined for high grade uranium, at a site just upstream from the intake to Denver’s water supply on the South Platte River, and adjacent to the Martin Company’s top secret operations. The Denver Water Board named their uranium mine “The Seven Devils.” Among the numerous claims in the vicinity were ones staked in 1954 by a Denver Water Board official, Carl L. Carlson, and which he had named “Hiroshima #1” and “Hiroshima #2”, after the city which had been obliterated by a U.S. - dropped nuclear bomb 9 years earlier.

Among the companies allowed to mine the Seven Devils area in exchange for a royalty percentage to the Water Board in the 1950’s and 1960’s were the Continental Materials Corporation and The French-American Metals Corporation. In the 1970’s, the area was again mined by the Denver-based Energy Fuels, a company controlled by uranium baron Oren Benton, a part owner of the Colorado Rockies who later would file bankruptcy and stiff creditors around the globe for between $500 million to over a billion in debts from his various companies’ operations.

The legacy from the Denver Water Board’s devilish enterprise, and the full extent of toxic and radioactive activities in the region, are the focus of inquiry by RMPJC’s Nuclear Nexus Project, to support and expand upon the work of Joan Jacobsen, who now serves on the Citizen Advisory Board for oversight of the Lockheed Martin Superfund site. In 1998, Jacobsen requested an inspection of the Seven Devils Mine (also variously known as the “Bonzo Mine”). Inspectors from the state and EPA documented hazardous conditions, and the spread of radioactive water to the groundwater and the South Platte River, just above the intakes of the Denver Water Board’s Kassler Plant and Chatfield Reservoir. In 1990, EPA investigated upon Joan Jacobsen’s request, and high radiation readings were confirmed in the area, including uranium readings on the slope down to the South Platte River over 80 times higher than background levels recorded.

The DWB had closed the Kassler plant in 1985, after public disclosure of the polluted water scandal and Friendly Hills controversy, while denying the facts of the contamination. An inquiry by the Ombudsman for the Center for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, tasked with determining public health impacts from Superfund sites, determined that there was no risk, given representations by the Denver Water Board that they were not using downstream water for distribution in potable supplies. It was on this basis that the EPA also decided not to designate the area a Superfund site, though warning the Denver Water Board that if water in the area were to be used again, the 900,000 plus users of the system would be considered “target populations” at risk for exposure to the mine’s radioactive releases.

Undisclosed to the EPA and CDC at that time or in subsequent years was information that the Denver Water Board was they again began introducing water from the Kassler/Chatfield vicinity into the public water supply systems, serving suburbs of Littleton, Englewood and Highlands Ranch, and available for intermingling with other metro Denver supplies when needed during times of drought, as we have had in recent years. The Denver Water Board has attempted variously to deny, then admit, and again deny use of Chatfield Reservoir water, immediately downstream from Lockheed Martin’s massively contaminated site and toxic drainage, and subject to further impact from their own uranium mines’ drainage upstream. The agency has sought to blunt inquiries about this, once denying records requested from CU Environmental Studies students in this author’s “Environmental Ethics” class on claims of “Homeland Security,” sure evidence that the post 9-11 gutting of our civil liberties is being used to deny citizens rightful access to important information about our communities and the tools for effective democratic oversight of our public agencies, including those determining the safety of our water.

On the 61st anniversary of Hiroshima Day, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, Colorado Coalition for the Prevention of Nuclear War and others gathered together at the Lockheed Martin/Denver Water Board site along the South Platter River, united in a resolve to end the global hazard posed by nuclear weapons worldwide, and the local environmental legacy of poisonous, radioactive threats to our communities from the testing and production of these weapons of mass destruction here in the United States.

While domestically and internationally, calls for the end of nuclear weapons are debated, residents of Denver and its suburbs are left to consider the local aftermath and future of our own hidden “Hiroshima,” with the Denver Water Board’s history in the uranium mining business piling radioactive debris atop a hillside above our city water supply. Currently, there is a renewed threat of nuclear weapons, as the Bush/Cheney White House launches pre-emptive wars and issues calls for increased nuclear weapons production that will fatten the already bloated coffers of corporate arms dealers, including Lockheed Martin. Now local citizens must also wonder, given evidence that our city’s own major water utility set itself up to profit from the nuclear weapons build-up, whether the Denver Water Board, in making a Faustian bargain, may have put their own customers’ public health and safety at risk in the frenzy to produce nuclear weapons, and subjected Denver metro area citizens to become unwitting, uncounted casualties of war, right here at home, in Colorado.

On Nagasaki Day, August 9th, RMPJC’s Nuclear Nexus Project presented the Denver Water Board of Commissioners with a letter of request, seeking an apology to the citizens of Hiroshima for the naming of its uranium mining claims after their Japanese city, in the horrific aftermath of the U.S.’s nuclear destruction of their Japanese city. Requests for review of the Denver Water Board’s records concerning the radioactive mine wastes along the South Platter River, and history of use of potentially impacted downstream water in recent years were also submitted, but have not been provided for inspection, to date, in violation of the Colorado Open Records Act provisions guaranteeing citizens timely access to review of all public records.

While we say “NO” to more Hiroshimas and the continuing global threat posed by nuclear weapons, we also call for clean-up and public accountability for the radioactive Iegacy left behind from the nuclear weapons cycle in the U.S. from cradle - at sites such as the Seven Devils and numerous other uranium mines - to grave, like the nuclear waste dumpsites proposed for Native American lands, posing threats to the health of American.

Today, renewed threats of nuclear weapons use abound, with some Bush administration supporters sending up apparent trial balloons to gauge public reaction. One neo-conservative Republican politician, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, on a national radio show last year advocated, “You could take out their holy sites.” Whether turning Mecca into glass is a real consideration by the Bush Administration or a tactic to goad support for its imperialist agenda, it is a fact that the U.S. is presently ramping up its nuclear weapons production capabilities, with plans to again begin plutonium pit production, likely to occur at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in New Mexico, given the closure of Colorado’s notorious Rocky Flats nuclear bomb plant in 1992, a place a federal grand jury termed as an “ongoing criminal enterprise.”

Nuclear weapons are immoral, inhumane and costly, to our economic health and social well-being. Their existence threatens our security, and does not make us safer from external threats, real or concocted. With widening public support and unity, we can elect intelligent and ethical leaders who will seek peaceful solutions to legitimate conflicts around the globe, with respect for the diversity of peoples of the world and their rights to protect their resources, cultures and security. Here at home, we must take aggressive steps to enact policies toward energy independence, and seek other productive and creative means to enhance our own security here at home and abroad through means other than building, testing, and threatening use of weapons of mass destruction.

In these perilous times, citizens of conscience must work all the harder together now to end the local hazards and the global threat domestically and internationally. If we succeed, perhaps we’ll have grandchildren and great grandchildren who will thank us some day, and who may live healthy and productive lives in a sustainable environment, and among a diversity of people and all the other wonderful living creatures of the earth.

Adrienne Anderson, who served on the faculty at CU Boulder and for over a decade taught highly ranked courses on environmental ethics, environmental justice, and the hazards of weapons production, testing and use in a war-oriented society. Anderson now coordinates RMPJC’s new “Nuclear Nexus Project, Working to End the Local Hazards and the Global Threat.” CU’s students and others continue to fight for her reinstatement to the CU faculty with RMPJC’s active support, given documented evidence of violations of her academic freedom rights by CU in response to external pressure from polluters Anderson and her students have researched, and a campaign by Governor Owens’ administration seeking to blunt the impact of her research disclosures thwart Anderson’s by Governor Owens’ administration.