Back to Cotter
The road to decontaminating a former uranium mill in Fremont County is met by three groups that, even with a common goal, don’t always see eye to eye.
By Kara Mason
“Does it look different, Emily?”
Donna Murphy and Emily Tracey looked across a plot of land that that was one a major polluter of uranium and molybdenum, among other radioactive elements. The contamination is not physically evident. Piñon trees and native grasses paint the landscape.
From 1958 until 1979 the land was the location of Cotter Corp.’s Colorado uranium mill — mostly where yellowcake for atomic bombs was made. After 1979 the mill still ran, but only intermittently. In 2006, the mill finally closed for good. But there’s still work to be done at Cotter.
In 1984 the Environmental Protection Agency designated 2,600 acres south of Cañon City a Superfund site on the agency’s National Priorities List. The uranium mill had been careless in its operating years, contaminating soil and groundwater on their property and the nearby Lincoln Park neighborhood. The ponds where tailings were put — waste from the alkaline and acid leach processes — were unlined and caused the contamination.
“During the mill’s years of operation crushing ore into ‘yellowcake,’ a form of concentrated uranium, dry tailings were carried off-site by winds and raffinate leached into groundwater beneath the mill and flowed north toward Lincoln Park along the Sand Creek channel,” according to facts in a 2003 10th Circuit Appeals case concerning Cotter.
In 1983 Colorado sued Cotter for damages to natural resources — that led to the designation and future clean up of the site.
The scene Tracey and Murphy were looking at on a windy Thursday afternoon in March, from a Cotter-owned van, was different than the last time they saw it.
Tracey last visited the property in the early 80s when most of the buildings were still standing and ore was still being milled. Now those buildings are buried in an old tailings pond — now properly lined.
A shop and offices, painted in bright blue, still exist. Cotter has a staff still at the site. Steven Cohen is the most recent plant manager, responsible for moving the cleanup of the Cotter property along. But the process, a long and involved one, is far from being close to completion. A series of steps is required before the land and groundwater are once again clean.
Tracey, Murphy and three others are part of a community advisory group that are part of the cleanup process. While the Colorado state health department and the EPA deal with several technical issues of the cleanup, the CAG acts as a mediator between the government groups and Cotter and the community.
At monthly CAG meetings, the citizen group of a dozen or so ask questions. The agencies, Cotter and the CAG all share a common goal: returning the property to federal regulation conditions. But how to do so often divide the CAG from Cotter and the governmental groups.
The back and forth over the replacement pipeline conveys the tension between the groups. Their relationship is a dance between hurrying the clean-up process along and doing it the best way possible.
The CAG is often critical of the decisions state and federal workers make. While the CAG members want to see a timely cleanup, they also want it done to the best ability. In meetings it’s clear there is little trust from the mostly older-aged CAG members who have followed the issue, seen the mill missteps and the consequences: contaminated well water, difficulty selling homes and the decline of orchards in the area.
Since Cohen’s hiring in December 2015 there has been a heightened sense of urgency to move the project along. In an interview with the local newspaper in Cañon City, Cohen said his goal was clear — that decommissioning the plant is what he was hired by Cotter to do.
Once Cohen and the Cotter staff successfully decommission the site the property will be turned over to the Department of Energy.
Cohen has worked on Superfund sites before, they’re no stranger to the East Coast transplant. But the groundwater situation makes the Lincoln Park site trickier. Though, Cohen has told the CAG on many occasions that he has seen worse.
During the tour with the CAG, Cohen easily points out where old buildings used to stand and where old boundaries were even though he has never actually seen them. For what Cohen can’t answer, somebody who’s been at Cotter for a while can usually speak to.
Along the way the van and shadowing truck of CAG members would occasionally stop. The group, fitted with hard hats, would emerge and look around.
Then there were questions.
A major point of interest was where Cotter was replacing some notorious pipeline. Several leaks on the property the past few years have been traced back to the aged pipeline. Last August, 7,000 gallons of contaminated leaked over the period of a weekend, due to a hairline fracture. Another time the pipeline was impaled by a rock.
Gathered around the pipeline, laying in a shallow, excavated trench, Murphy surveyed the pipeline with her hands on her hips.
“It curves down there,” she muttered to herself.
The CAG notices details. Sometimes to an extent the state and federal agency officials have to remind the members that a certain detail is probably more minor than the CAG assumes.
Like the curved pipeline.
Eventually another CAG member speaks up and asks why the pipe wasn’t laid in a straight shot from pond to pond.
“Well, we got it as straight as we could,” Cohen told the group. “But you should have seen it before.”
Later on, Cohen shows the CAG members from the tour what the seam in the welded pipe looks like. Each glances thoughtfully before murmuring an “mhhm.”
The .78 inch thick pipeline has been the source of dissent between the CAG and the agencies and Cotter.
From the beginning the CAG wanted the pipeline to be engineered, but Cotter opposed and when the agencies finally stepped in they sided with Cotter — which reinforced to the CAG that the state health department is too easy on Cotter.
The CAG also felt like Cotter was dragging its feet on replacing the pipe and the state health department was allowing it.
“Cotter has strung this project along and now claims that winter is approaching and the pipeline must go in quickly,” the CAG commented on a pipeline proposal from Cotter.
CAG members also charged Cotter with taking short cuts, something Cohen sternly objected. The state wasn’t going to require the pipeline to be buried, but Cotter did anyway. Cohen also claimed the company’s replacement proposal being submitted without prompting from the state was a sign that they’re proactive and taking extra precautions to replace the pipeline.
Matters weren’t made much better when a week after the tour a 4,100 gallon-leak occurred on the pipeline as Cotter workers were connecting a portion of the new 3,200 feet of pipeline to an existing area of pipeline. A valve blew and left the excavated trench filled with water.
Cohen reported that the valve failed right near where the CAG had been observing on their tour. Had the pipeline been engineered — like the CAG had requested — the valve likely still would have caused the leak.
There was no preventing this one. The valve was frail, Cohen told the Cañon City Daily Record.
The back and forth over the pipeline conveys the tension between the groups. Their relationship is a dance between hurrying the clean-up process along and doing it the best way possible. But in between the moments of frustration and finger pointing are ones of humor.
During the tour when Cohen advised the group that his boss said no pictures, a CAG member shot back that she thought he was the boss. Cohen sighed, hung his head, laughed a little and said, “I too have a boss.”
They all giggled, as it was a reminder that they are all aware of their common goal to fix the dirty practices that led to contamination on the property, no matter who the boss is.
Kara Mason regularly covers the Lincoln Park Superfund Site for the Cañon City Daily Record. She is also the news editor for PULP Newsmagazine.
