Update:  January 26, 2010

The Denver City Council has voted 12-1 despite overwhelming public opposition to rezone the site of an old military radioactive waste dump at the former Lowry Air Force Base in Denver for residential and commercial development by controversial private developer, International Risk Group.  

The vote occurred after a marathon public hearing January 25th, 2010, with a wide majority of citizens packing the council room to speak against the rezoning until after 2:00 a.m.

The lone dissenting vote was by cast by Councilman Paul Lopez, who afterward explained his opposition was based on health and safety concerns for workers who would be at risk from exposures to the toxic site's hazards.  

 Watch for an update soon.   

Twelve cents per acre?

by Adrienne Anderson

DENVER August 8, 2007, updated September 24, 2008

 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.

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 mapped 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, by workers fully protected from on-the job exposures and adequate monitoring for surrounding communities.  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 no doubt cut into IRG’s now lucrative profit prospects over its $10 deal.  The property is jointly owned by two IRGs, the International Risk Group and Industrial Realty Group, in partnership with a third entity, Bear Creek Capitol.  For the former dumpsite plans, the IRGs also operate under a sub-entity they created, "Lowry Vista, LLC." 

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 an official Air Force contractor's environmental assessment prepared during 1995-1996 (Versar) that one of my CU students obtained in 1999 from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for her semester research project, 100% of groundwater wells tested by another Air Force contractor (SAIC) in 1990 at the former Lowry AFB dump were radioactive, most at exceedingly high levels above that considered "acceptable" by the EPA (See attached page from the report, "Lowry_AR_337", Versar Corporation, "Final Work Plan, Operable Unit 2, Landfill Zone, Focused Feasability Study, Lowry Air Force Base, February 1996).  

 Still, over fifteen years later, nothing’s been done other than to cover it up, literally, with a couple of feet of dirt.  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 on the south side of Alameda, or there is another source of radiation there that is moving northward.  Aerial photos from decades past show the area across the street from the Lowry AFB - on the south side of Alameda - also appeared to have been used for dumping prior to the building of residential units on that ground.  The Air Force refused to investigate that area further and instead declared it "upgradient" of contamination on the north side of Alameda.  

Review of archive aerial photos suggest that there may have been base dumping in that area, as well, south of the current route of Alameda Avenue.  No investigation of this appears to have been conducted in any of the studies, despite suggestions made to do so as a result of the students' findings.

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 was the head of oversight for the various toxic sites in Colorado related to Department of Defense activities, said that he would look into it, said "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.

By turning 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, which in meeting after meeting, they appear to be attempting. 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 if the site is not cleaned up.  

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 the IRGs and friends, this hot property bought for $10 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.

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UPDATE:  August/September 2008 

The International Risk Group has submitted a plan to CDPHE with their intent to dig 60 holes into the landfill. The Denver City Council on August 11, 2008 approved the creation of a Special District for IRG, that would allow the developer to lay the infrastructure including pipelines, utilities roads, for its proposed mixed use development. Three Denver councilpersons, Rita Montero, Paul Lopez and Doug Linkhart, voted against creation of IRG's Special District, citing lack of public confidence. Councilman Lopez also raised concerns about worker safety and heath.  

UPDATE:  

Sunday, March 8, 2009, a former Air Force landfill at Lowry in SE Denver Goes Up in Smoke 

About the researcher and author: Adrienne Anderson 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 domestic and international weapons production, testing and use in a war-oriented society.   Anderson coordinated RMPJC’s new “Nuclear Nexus Project, Working to End the Local Hazards and the Global Threat" and established RMPJC's "Safe Water" project.  She continues to support RMPJC on joint projects where labor and neighbors can unite for safer workplaces, communities and the environment.  

 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 government cover-up of extensive plutonium and other radioactive contamination at the site.  The Lowry Air Force Base contributed wastes to that dump, as well.

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.  Operational history and other records show the sites are intermingled, however, the US Air Force at the Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, dumped some of its wastes at the Lowry Landfill in Arapahoe County, three miles east of the base.  Lowry AFB also dumped some of its wastes at Rocky Flats, which in turn - records show- dumped some of their wastes at Lowry Landfill.  Lowry AFB also dumped volumes of their wastes for decades on their own property in Denver, at the site that is now slated for IRG's development as "Lowry Vista."  

Both "Lowry Landfills" are highly radioactive, records reviewed show, and given the nature of the wastes, will pose potential health and environmental risks for eons to come.

Copyright: Please Do Not Reprint Without Author's Permission