Denver - January 15, 2008

By Adrienne Anderson

They say it’s a “puzzle,” why ducks are dying in Denver.

Now for a second winter in a row, ducks have been found drowning in the sewage treatment ponds of the Metro Wastewater plant, and also in other water bodies around the the metro Denver area.

It’s a puzzle, true. But what’s most puzzling is why the area media keep ducking the issue of what’s likely behind these tragic wildlife losses and allowing absurd statements of government officials to go unchallenged, especially when the most obvious piece of the puzzle is being ignored.

In the winter of 2007, over 1,000 dead ducks were collected around metro Denver, the bulk of them drowning in a holding basin at the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District along the banks of the South Platte River in north Denver, near Commerce City. In an early TV broadcast over the duck deaths, Jennifer Churchill, a PR staffer for the Colorado Division of Wildlife was interviewed at the Metro Wastewater plant site. She said it appeared the ducks were drowning because they had lost the waterproofing on their feathers. Claims were made in subsequent weeks that testing by both DoW and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would be conducted, and that the public would be notified of the results. However, officials have since back-paddled over this.

Ducks stripped of their natural oils that had not yet drowned were netted from the sewage treatment basin and transported to wildlife rehab facilities. At one, the Greenwood Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, personnel noted that the ducks brought to them appeared to be coated with a contaminant, described as a gooey and sticky substance. Washing the ducks of the gunk and giving them a safe place to preen their own feathers back to normal with their own protective oils allowed them again to float on water. Thus many of the captured ducks survived and were released back into the wild.

Any 6^th grade science class could figure out that some contamination problem in Metro Wastewater’s pools was the likely culprit, and that some birds that did not drown after landing there might be able to fly away only to drown later upon alighting on the next water body along their migratory travels. This, then, would focus attention on what’s in the sewage ponds at Metro Wastewater that might be different from scores of other sewage treatment plants where ducks might also gather for a swim before heading further on their way during the frigid winters typical of the Rocky Mountain region.

Ignoring the obvious, the media dutifully reported the most absurd of official statements on the matter without question, as the agencies tried to deflect attention away from the chemical contamination at Metro Wastewater. One, that the ducks just got too cold, given the severity of the winter of 2006-7, as if ducks dying in even very cold weather is somehow normal. That won’t wash, however, now that the duck deaths by drowning are continuing in the much milder winter of 2007-8.

Officials responsible now seem to be scrambling for an alternative thesis to satisfy the public.  

Nonetheless, they are still attempting to duck the most pertinent underlying fact: that the Metro Wastewater sewage plant in Denver is the only known place in the entire United States where a highly toxic and radioactive federal Superfund site - the Lowry Landfill in Arapahoe County - and which has contaminated an estimated 3 billion gallons of underlying groundwater - is being pumped 24/7 to join the public's sewer system in this region, where it ends up at sewage treatment plants which were not designed to treat hazardous or nuclear wastes.   In this macabre deal, enacted against widespread public opposition in 2000, the resulting sludge is dubbed "fertilizer" and trucked by the tons each day to be spread on agricultural land in eastern Colorado, while the sewage effluent/industrial waste-contaminated liquids are routed by massive conduit to an adjacent Denver Water "recycling" facility, constructed at Denver Water ratepayers' expense, and again, against public opposition.  That system is also not designed to fully neutralize the full range of hundreds of toxic and/or nuclear compounds present.

What’s significant about this for drowning ducks, whose feathers are stripped of their natural oils? The fact that the Lowry Landfill, which is saturated with over 138 million gallons of liquid toxic and even radioactive wastes, is loaded with a huge volume of various toxic solvents, whose very purposes were to cut oils in various industrial applications. Coors, the company which dumped the largest volume of toxic solvents at Lowry, used the solvents to clean the company’s huge beer vats. Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) used the solvents to degrease machine parts in its missile manufacturing process. Rocky Flats used the solvents to clean the plutonium of impurities. The Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News used the solvents to clean the inks from their printing presses. These same papers and associated media’s failure to report about this permit allows their own and other corporations’ poisons to be flushed back into the public domain without proper treatment. The continuing ducks deaths are just the tip of the iceberg and should serve an early warning system for broader public health considerations.

One particular compound, 1-4 dioxane, is a particularly troubling solvent contaminating not only Lowry Landfill, but points beyond the boundaries of the Superfund site near Aurora. In September 2005, the State of Colorado set a new surface and groundwater standard for 1,4-dioxane at 6.1 parts per billion. Yet in the permit now in effect, and revised before the onset of last winter’s duck deaths, the permit allows this same compound, a stabilizer for solvents, to be flushed at a level of 3,950 parts per billion for every 15 gallons per minute discharged every single day from Lowry to Metro Wastewater. This is nearly 650 times higher than the level set to protect human health, and with little if any apparent consideration for what the potent degreasers at such a volume might do to swimming ducks and their feathers’ protective coatings.

In addition, this particular compound is very stable in water, does not degrade, and does not volatilize into the air as readily as some other chemicals in the toxic mix being flushed to Metro Wastewater, where ducks suffer deaths by drowning. In the cold of winter, this volatilization would likely be even slower than would occur in warm weather.

Our public agency officials need to come clean about this.

The permit to flush Lowry Landfill must be revoked. Ducks can then be clean of the large volume of toxic solvents which now can soak their feathers upon a dip in Metro Wastewater’s holding ponds. If this Superfund Superflush is allowed to continue, ducks will likely continue to drown and we will have failed to heed their warning. On the other hand, if the Lowry Landfill Superfund Site discharge permit is revoked and the duck death epidemic continues each year, the public agencies responsible for the ducks’ protection and our public health can then claim it’s a “puzzle.”

Though with a straight face.

Adrienne Anderson is Coordinator of the Nuclear Nexus Project: Working to End Local Hazards and the Global Threat for the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center. She previously served on the faculty of the University of Colorado at Boulder for 11 years, for the Ethnic Studies Department and Environmental Studies Program. She also served on the board of Metro Wastewater during 1996-98 and acted as a federal whistleblower over the plan to flush Lowry to Metro Wastewater.

This column was published in the Colorado Daily on Friday, January 18, 2008.