I was unable to attend the final day of the event held at the Arvada Center June6-8, but a person who did attend provided the following commentary:
I’m a former Rocky Flats employee, employed there at the time of FBI/EPA raid. I attended most of the activities for “Rocky Flats Then and Now: 25 Years After the Raid.” The event that I found the most consistently factual among all panel participants and the most currently useful was the Sunday, June 8th panel discussion “What Do We Know today about Contamination from Rocky Flats?” The panel was moderated by Len Ackland, author of Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, and included panel members David Abelson, Exec. Dir., Rocky Flats Stewardship Council; Niels Schonbeck, Chemistry Prof., Univ. of CO Denver and Regis Univ. and a former member of the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council; Carl Spreng, Rocky Flats Legacy Management Agreement Coordinator for the Colorado Dept. of Health and Environment; and Scott Surovchak, DOE Office of Legacy Management.
Some key points that I got out of the panel included: 1) RF site plutonium soil and surface water cleanup standards are some of, if not the, most stringent in the nation, over 10 times more stringent even than those recommended by long-time RF activist LeRoy Moore; 2) site institutional controls include prohibition against excavations and unauthorized access; 3) limited remaining buried facility contamination is primarily non-dispersible, not easily mobilized, fixed contamination on concrete or inside pipes; 4) cleanup involved extensive opportunities for stakeholder input and well-considered standards development; 5) extensive environmental monitoring has been done and will continue to assure protection of the RF site and nearby neighborhoods; 6) extensive flooding that occurred at the site within this past year provided a good test and confirmation that contaminant levels remained below the established limits; 7) reports and monitoring data are available to the public.
Rocky Flats past and present environmental monitoring information is extensive and has been freely shared with the public and government agencies in reports and at both special-topic and regularly-scheduled public meetings. It was not been restricted under the secrecy required for the site’s weapons-related product. Even panel member Niels Schonbeck, a long-time site critic, admitted that the sampling results of the community monitoring group were consistent with those reported by Rocky Flats.
For members of the public truly interested in factual information regarding the environmental history, cleanup, and current status of Rock Flats, this panel discussion should have given confidence in the efforts taken for public health protection. For former workers at Rocky Flats it should have verified the extensive efforts taken by the plant to protect the public and the environment. My compliments and thanks to the panel members for their participation.
And with that wonderful commentary, I can announce we will return to our weekly schedule of posting a commentary, book review, and description of the origin of an expression at or near each Wednesday.
Thanks to your guest analyst for coverage. I find it interesting that this panel discussion was scheduled near the end of the event. Sort of like a Denver Post story, where the sensational headline and the controversial, often misleading first paragraph are refuted by the real facts back on page 11. I’d be interested to hear an activist’s view of the session, since based on what I have seen I didn’t expect any positive information about RF to find its way out of the proceedings. Not a total backwash, after all.
This panel should make the “traditional anti-Rocky Flats” people happy. They “won” after all. But somehow, like an old fire horse that still jumps when the siren goes off, some reactions seem to be hard to turn off.