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Jan and Jennie Hrdlicka crank pedals up to the new Indiana Street bridge entrance to Rocky Flats with a sense of history that's well above average.
They know the wildlife refuge they are about to enter made atomic bomb parts until 1989, if not all the details of how Rocky Flats as a weapons plant produced 70,000 plutonium explosives, each holding the power of the Hiroshima inferno.
They know that a mile to the west, just over that berm topped by stunning Flatirons views, an EPA Superfund site had to dismantle rooms whose radioactivity registered to infinity, and ship out a million barrels of flammable toxic goo.
They know plutonium drifted east from the site for decades, borne on 100 mph storm gusts and plumes from spontaneous radioactive combustion in the bomb factory, toward their home of 27 years in Arvada. They know there was a settlement compensating area homeowners, because their accounting business helped neighbors who sued determine whether the payments were taxable -- though perhaps they've forgotten the total price tag: $375 million.
What the Hrdlickas know without hesitation is the same calculation made by federal officials and leaders in some western suburbs: Many of Colorado's other breathtaking open spaces are getting paved over, and the impulse to just keep riding, hiking, recreating, makes what is now Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge a lure instead of a trap.
As they roll to a stop at an as-yet blank entrance sign to the trail bridge, they have only one remaining question: Is it open?
"Don't use it if you don't want to," Jennie Hrdlicka says. "We're all going to die of something."
The controversial new trail connectors into the circa 2018 wildlife refuge, with links to open space managed by Boulder County on the north and Westminster and Jefferson County to the east, are, in fact, open, though you wouldn't know it from an official ribbon-cutting or news release.
Seldom has a public access project soft-launched so quietly, far from the eyes of photographers from political campaigns or public agencies. A spokesperson for Jefferson County Open Space, one of the few local agencies still willing to speak in favor of the new connections, said "at this point there isn't a set opening date," and no ceremony was planned.
On a hot late morning in the last week of July, both the bridge and the underpass were open to traffic, whether adventurous, oblivious or precisely calculating.
But the debate over what exactly to do with the 5,200-acre Rocky Flats is not over, despite the new multimillion-dollar bridge at Indiana Street on the east, and a new underpass at Colorado 128 to the north. The new links are meant to further an eventual 80-plus-mile greenway trail through the suburbs, western foothills and on to Rocky Mountain National Park.
Westminster and Broomfield, originally part of the coalition backing the Rocky Mountain Greenway and new, safer connections through Rocky Flats, dropped out in recent years after public opposition mounted from contamination concerns. The Hrdlinkas and other trekkers currently approach the east end of the Indiana Street bridge on weedy, bumpy social trails rather than the wide, crushed-gravel greenway model, because Westminster City Council wanted no part of it on their adjacent open space.
Westminster's concession to Jeffco and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is paying for 83% of the connection costs, was to agree not to block off the entrance entirely.
Now Westminster and other area officials are reviewing language for the entrance signs, a linguistic and symbolic effort as fraught as the half-century of history the signs must encapsulate.
Peace and health advocates argue for big yellow-on-black radiation warnings and text underneath that begins, "Persons on the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge may become exposed to radioactive and other hazardous materials through dust in the air or through contact with the soil."
Atomic amnesia, the feeling goes, is not the responsible way to get past atomic anxiety.
Federal language, on the other hand, starts with the views and "239 species of wildlife," with the combustive "infinity rooms" nowhere to be found. "If you visited the refuge hundreds of times in a year, your dose still would be much less than a medical X-ray," one current federal signpost reads.
The long list of people who don't want to set foot on Rocky Flats or make it easier for others to do so cite two main reasons for their objections.
First, it's a moral failure to celebrate recreation on a spot where the nation's world-ending nuclear arsenal was built, and which still exists dispersed in missile silos, bombers and nuclear submarines from sea to shining sea. Second, everyone agrees there is still plutonium, alongside other toxins, under the Rocky Flats topsoil, and that there is no safe level of contact with the ionizing radioactive substance.
Federal agencies and Colorado boosters like to obscure the insidious nature of Rocky Flats weapons work by calling the plutonium products "buttons" or "triggers" instead of atomic bombs, said University of Colorado professor emeritas Len Ackland, author of "Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West." While those plutonium cores had to be matched with other parts at a Texas plant to make a working bomb, Ackland said, each of those 70,000 "buttons" was a plutonium explosive as powerful as what leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The unspoken soft opening of the trail connections came just after the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico, and just before the Aug. 6 and 9 anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that same year.
"The history of Rocky Flats is that our community, the Denver-area community, for more than 40 years, was engaged in manufacturing plutonium bombs capable of destroying our human species, and even though the buildings are gone, the products of Rocky Flats remain with us," Ackland said.
The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center in Boulder is among those who have protested at and about Rocky Flats for decades, with human encirclements, condemnations of the weapons, and challenges to sampling and safety studies allegedly proving most of the site is safe for recreation.
A 1,300-acre zone in the middle of the Rocky Flats, where the production buildings once stood, remains a Superfund site, fenced and off-limits to the public. Scraped off of that toxic core were the buildings where geiger counters registered radioactive "infinity," and where periodic spontaneous plutonium fires had sickened workers and clogged filtration ducts to the point where toxic atoms were shunted into the skies above Standley Lake.
The group calls holding politicians and agencies accountable for the physical legacy of nuclear energy and weapons "nuclear guardianship," member Chris Allred said. "Making future generations aware of the hazards of nuclear weapons and radioactive waste contamination."
"We believe that there is still a very serious contamination issue, and we've studied the range of science. There's a significant public health risk remaining from nuclear bomb production," Allred said. Shiny residential subdivisions, meanwhile, keep cropping up around the edges, like the Candelas neighborhood to the south, whose alluring lifestyle website includes extensive links answering challenging questions about next-door Rocky Flats.
"So when it is being sold to the public as a place for recreation and residential and commercial development, it's putting people's lives at risk," Allred said, "and it's covering up the history of weapons of mass destruction and the impact that has on the community."
Jeffco, Boulder County, Arvada and the city of Boulder remain in the greenway coalition, contributing 17% of the matching price of the new Rocky Flats connectors. When the broader coalition of seven local governments joined in 2016 to apply for the federal greenways grant, the impetus was securing recreation in high demand amid relentless population and commercial growth in metro Denver.
"From our Jeffco Open Space perspective, part of our mission is to provide healthy nature-based experiences," said Tom Hoby, the county's director of parks and open space. "The connection into Rocky Flats is, in our view, really about choice. If the area that is Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge, that's been open for half a dozen years or more to the public, has been deemed safe for public access by the EPA and CDPHE and others, our reliance is on those official organizations to tell us."
The new, currently blank signposts at the improved entrances can talk about everything from Indigenous peoples' historic use of the area, the Cold War history that led to weapons production, what happened in the buildings, and the cleanup efforts, Hoby said.
"And let people make their own choice, on whose science that they want to believe, and whether or not they want to go and enjoy some pretty spectacular scenery and wildlife. Or not," Hoby said. "It's really as simple as that to us."
That's a lot of history to jam onto one small placard, but let's give it a try.
The Atomic Energy Commission, now the Department of Energy, started building Rocky Flats to make key atomic bomb components in 1951. Private contractors Dow Chemical and Rockwell International took turns running production, and thousands of workers hazarding extreme conditions eventually ramped up to producing 1,000 to 2,000 nuclear bomb cores each year.
Airborne plutonium at the levels of downwind atomic bomb testing immediately leaked into neighboring sites that were or would become Arvada, Westminster, Broomfield and more. Plutonium blocks handled in rudimentary glove boxes spontaneously ignited, clogging filtration systems. The contractors repeatedly lied about or covered up damage from fires and leaks of toxins.
Plutonium was found in topsoil around the central core of buildings. Radioactive waste was routinely dumped into creekbeds, and tritium and strontium were found in Walnut Creek and Great Western Reservoir. Flats workers proud of their U.S. defense roles nevertheless began organizing to demand federal compensation for radiation exposure. Opposition to the plant ratcheted up as metro Denver grew through the 1970s, culminating in a 1983 hand-holding encirclement around the 17-mile perimeter by 17,000 activists.
Alleged contamination, lies and cover-ups led to a 1989 FBI raid of the plant, shocking Colorado's public conscience, and a grand jury considered criminal charges against executives. Nuclear production at Rocky Flats ended in 1992 when President George H.W. Bush canceled the last line of submarine-based warheads.
Rockwell eventually pleaded guilty to violating environmental laws and paid a then-record $18.5 million fine.
The infinity rooms, a million barrels of toxic sludge, sloppy landfills, tainted groundwater and acres of topsoil were declared a Superfund site, with a potential price tag of $37 billion to clean up. The Superfund cleanup was declared complete in 2005, the price tag somehow falling to $7 billion, a savings prompting enduring suspicion among activists.
About 5,200 acres of Rocky Flats land, minus the glowing donut hole in the middle, was transferred to U.S. Fish and Wildlife in 2007 to create the wildlife refuge. Trails opened to the public in 2018, with the fears about the glow transformed by marketing into endorsements of elk herd views, bears, moose, prairie dog towns, rare birds and mountain lions.
Is it safe?
"No, I don't trust that it was cleaned up properly," said Kristine Ireland, a longtime resident and Westminster City Council member who was among those who voted against connecting city open space trails to the new Indiana Street bridge. "Especially on a windy day, I wouldn't be out there at all. In fact, I've been asked to come out and tour it, and I'm not doing it."
Two primary forms of testing have been conducted at and around Rocky Flats over the decades, to establish contamination levels and potential human safety threats.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment conducted two major epidemiology studies about cancer rates among Rocky Flats neighbors, one in 1998 and another in 2016, the latter using nearly 25 years of data. The 2016 study was updated again a year later after numerous public requests for a refocus on rates of rare, potentially radiation-related illnesses such as thyroid cancer.
The 2016 report concluded, "The incidence of all cancers -- combined for both adults and children was no different in the communities surrounding Rocky Flats than would be expected based on cancer rates in the remainder of the Metro Denver area for 1990-2014."
The rare-cancer report from 2017 added, "There was no evidence of higher than expected frequencies of thyroid cancer in the vicinity of Rocky Flats. Thyroid cancer was not higher than expected for the entire 10-RSA area combined and for the 10 individual RSA regions for males or females." (The Regional Statistical Areas were nearby neighborhoods, compared to metro area averages.)
The other major testing regime has included a series of soil and water samples taken at various locations and times.
"Low-level wind-blown radiological contamination does occur in a small area of the refuge," CDPHE reports say. "Plutonium has been measured above background levels at a few surface soil sampling locations west of the former east entrance to the site."
Even if the highest of those samples were widespread throughout the area, CDPHE concluded, any potential risk from trail or highway construction on Flats property would not rise to the level of new oversight or intervention by the state. "These risks are respectively in the very low end or the middle of the acceptable Superfund risk range. ... There is essentially no plutonium in the subsurface soils of the refuge," one report said.
As a radiological dose, the state says, the average visitor's exposure to any plutonium in surface soil in downwind areas is 0.3 millirem for an adult, while state standards allow up to 25 millirems of exposure each year. State and federal researchers have often noted that natural Colorado soil, which holds relatively high levels of background uranium -- the state is dotted with past and present uranium mines -- creates everyday exposure for Coloradans well above Rocky Flats levels.
"From a science standpoint and a health risk standpoint, the refuge, all of the refuge, it's all under EPA standards for safety," said Dr. Ned Calonge, chief medical officer for CDPHE earlier in the 2000s and now again under Gov. Jared Polis.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to mention any sort of grand opening for the new connections, though it emphasized funding and cooperation from the U.S. Department of Transportation and numerous local governments to bring the conceptualized greenway around Standley Lake and toward the west. The greenway is eventually meant to link Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge near DIA, to Two Ponds National Wildlife Refuge in Arvada, across the southern and up the western edge of Rocky Flats, and on up to Rocky Mountain National Park.
"This project would not have been made possible without over a decade of collaboration across the entire metropolitan area," USFWS spokesperson Adriana Zorilla said in an emailed statement. "Similar to Jefferson County, the Service defers to the expertise of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment for the most current health and safety data to inform our decisions."
Health and environmental justice advocates have usually rejected those test-based rationalizations.
"As far as the risk to one's health, there is no safe level of plutonium," according to the Colorado branch of Physicians for Social Responsibility. "There are instead legally acceptable levels." Westminster City Council Member Claire Carmelia, who also voted against connecting the city to the new Rocky Flats bridge, is on the physician board.
The half-life of plutonium, the group notes, is 24,000 years, the time it would take for a speck of the element to lose half its radioactive threat. "The Wildlife Refuge will essentially be contaminated forever," PSR says. Allred, from Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice, says those in favor of expanding recreation at Rocky Flats, including the greenway coalition, promise new testing cycles to reassure a public who has reliably shown up at government meetings to voice opposition. Activists and their physician advisors point out the many contaminants beyond plutonium tainting Rocky Flats, and say sampling requires technical sophistication.
"Regulatory capture" occurs when governments become beholden to the industries they are meant to regulate, Allred says. The continual pushing of Rocky Flats on a skeptical public is "regulatory capture and manufactured consent, which has allowed the project to get this far along," he said. "It's top-down directives imposed upon the community."
Somehow, one of the open space links in the ambitious greenway has escaped the perpetually charged debates attached to Rocky Flats, even though militarism is its namesake. Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge may now be known as that placid stroll in Commerce City, with the cute buffalo and soaring eagles, but in the same decades Rocky Flats shaped enough plutonium to blow up the world, the Arsenal concocted mustard gas, sarin and napalm for bombs. The Arsenal is also a Superfund site, having leaked poisons into local water, but it touts a popular visitors' center and the region's children play soccer on former Arsenal land at Dick's Sporting Goods Park.
Trust in Rocky Flats was eroded by 40 years of rogue operations, and is unlikely to be restored by a few trail signs. Rockwell, after all, pleaded guilty to years of violation and cover-ups, and the grand jury that followed the 1989 FBI raid wanted criminal indictments of Rockwell and Department of Energy employees. Their proposed charges were dismissed by the Department of Justice.
Interest groups around the edges of Rocky Flats are well aware that usable open space is at a premium up and down the Front Range, and that a dangerous history lingering on the breezes blowing from the Flatirons will not stop everyone. What they are wary of is the niches they have carved out being somehow tainted by the political or physical fallout the Rocky Flats tends to generate.
Leaders of the Westy Dog Park Guardians don't want their observations to devolve into conspiracy theories. But nor do they want Rocky Flats mountain bikers rolling suspect dust east across Indiana Street and onto their hard-won, off-leash dog trails.
The Westminster Hills Open Space dog park is unique in the metro area, hundreds of acres of roaming-dog heaven with rolling shortgrass prairie in place of the usual scratched-gravel squares. The guardians fend off many threats, while continuing to cooperate with Westminster officials in plotting the best routes for human trails crossing the off-leash areas.
"The possibility of tracking contamination into the dog park is an issue for us," Westy board member Cindy Staudt said. "We are trying really hard not to go outside our borders, but things going on outside our border definitely affect what we think is the health and safety of the users in the dog park."
At the very least, Staudt said, dog park defenders would like to see trail signs -- in both directions -- with "the strongest language."
The activists continuing to question recreational use of Rocky Flats must keep their fighting skills in trim for other atomic issues looming over Colorado, Allred argues. The legacy of nuclear weapons is certainly not over, he said, and neither is a possible return to nuclear power, which poses all of the same radioactive risks.
There's persistent talk of building a nuclear electricity plant in Pueblo once the Comanche coal plant closes, which would be the first nuclear power since Xcel's Fort St. Vrain nuclear generator went dark in 1989. Denver International Airport and city officials announced last week they will spend $1.25 million to study the feasibility of a "small modular nuclear reactor" to power massive growth in and around the airport. Meanwhile, there is still no nationally approved repository for spent nuclear waste, Allred said, and plenty of recent examples of radiation accidents like the leaks at Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant.
"The nuclear energy complex is completely intertwined with the nuclear weapons complex, and it has been from the beginning," Allred said.
There also lingers the possibility of massive new dust clouds on the eastern acres of Rocky Flats, in the form of the beltway proposal with an endless half-life: the Jefferson Parkway. The highway proposal, which was granted a 300-foot-wide strip of Rocky Flats property when the refuge was established, was meant to be the last 10 miles of the 80-plus mile metro beltway that includes E-470 and C-470.
Broomfield dropped out of the toll road project, but Arvada and Jefferson County are still officially in favor, while a clear idea of next steps languishes at the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority.
What scared off Broomfield, said authority chair Bryan Archer, who is also Arvada's city manager, was another iteration of atomic anxiety. The authority was getting ready to pick a private concessionaire to build the road in 2019 when soil testing "showed a hot read," Archer said.
A second sample showed normal readings, but Colorado State University was called in anyway to analyze further tests. The state health review of the CSU study and other recent evaluations concluded, "Together, these efforts paint a consistent picture: remaining Rocky Flats plutonium in the Jefferson Parkway transportation corridor and offsite poses a small risk, well within regulatory limits for radiation."
Analysis of that one "hot read" concluded it must have been, literally, one stray particle, not replicated in any other samples, said James Grice, CDPHE's radiation program manager. But even so, if similar particles had been present throughout the entire parkway construction area, a roadway worker would still only have a fraction of the allowed exposure under state limits, he said.
Review after review, state medical director Calonge said, has shown "there's no additional radiation risk to people who recreate in the refuge area."
When Broomfield dropped out, it agreed to leave in place the chosen highway alignment where sections north of Rocky Flats would cross inside the City and County of Broomfield. The remaining partners, Jeffco and Arvada, "now have met twice to figure out next steps and what they're interested in, and that's kind of where we are now," Archer said. Another authority board meeting is set for later this month.
Even if someone walked into a meeting now, Archer continued, and said "here's a billion dollars, build the road," many other complications have cropped up. New housing communities like Candelas to the south of Rocky Flats may object to heavy traffic, for example.
Arvada and Jeffco are seeking certainty, Archer said, of "either let's move forward and figure out if somebody wants to build this road, or let's move forward and get rid of everything -- get rid of the right of way and all that. There's no reason to hold on to it if the road's not going in."
The federal government and surrounding communities each have their chances and their physical locations to nod toward history.
Westminster City Council directed staff to suggest alternatives for signs in the Woman Creek open space area, on the eastern approach to Rocky Flats, based on these principles:
Ackland, who co-founded CU Boulder's Center for Environmental Journalism in 1992, has thought long and hard on how to best communicate more than just a half-life of Rocky Flats to potential visitors.
The signs should reflect the fact that after 2 million years of human history, Ackland said, in 1945 for the first time humankind created the power to instantly destroy itself. They could mention that official government health organizations have declared Rocky Flats safe, but that other learned public bodies disagree.
Finally, Ackland said, the last line should be, in the largest type possible, "It is up to members of the public to decide whether or not to use these trails."
As a public official, Ackland said, "If you decide that you know enough, and OK, it should be open for anyone who wants to go out there, then isn't it your responsibility to let people know what happened there, and the possibilities of there still being contamination?
"I mean, do you want to put a kid's park out there and let them swing and play in the dust?"