[CPEO-MEF] LOCKHEED MARTIN-USAF TITAN MISSILE TOXIC LEGACY

[andersa@spot.Colorado.EDU]

FYI,

Adrienne Anderson
Environmental Studies Program, Instructor
Ethnic Studies Department, Instructor and Research
University of Colorado at Boulder
Ketchum 24F
CB 339
Boulder, Colorado 80309-0339
Voice Mail: 303-492-4747

Denver Post
Plans to tap Chatfield water raise taint fears
Residents cite nearby Superfund site
By Joey Bunch
Denver Post Environment Writer


http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%257E53%257E1073206%257E,00.html

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Thursday, December 26, 2002 - A plan to pull drinking water from
Chatfield Reservoir early next year ignores history and public health,
contend activists who say the water was tainted by rocket fuel and
industrial chemicals decades ago.

"It's like building houses on Rocky Flats," said Candace Logue,
referring to the former nuclear weapons factory north of Denver. Logue
is convinced the water she drank in the early 1980s killed her newborn
son, Michael, in 1984 and left her next child, Kimberly, with a wrecked
immune system.

Despite a stack of government studies that say the Denver Water supply
from the region is safe, Logue and a handful of other activists and
former residents of the community are unswayed and worried. The
reservoir in Jefferson County shares creeks and underground water
supplies with a Superfund cleanup site - the neighboring U.S. Air Force
Titan Missile testing ground.

Some residents like the Logues say they may have already drank
pollutants from the site. Until it closed in 1984, the Kassler Water
Treatment Plant between the reservoir and the testing site handled
whatever came downstream from the rocket facility and eventually put it
in the drinking supply, critics say.

Since Kassler closed, the runoff from the testing site has either stayed
in the soil and groundwater or passed through the reservoir. Further,
the state and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are spending $2.5 million
to study the possibility of doubling the amount of water in Chatfield to
help quench the region's thirst during future droughts. Chatfield
Reservoir, built in the mid-1960s for flood prevention, today is enjoyed
by 1.5 million visitors a year. The 1,450-acre lake attracts swimmers,
boaters, anglers, hikers, campers and wildlife watchers.

A few miles away, the military is still cleaning up the contamination
that put the site on the list of the nation's most polluted places in
1989.

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