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300,000 students barred from making field trips to Rocky Flats

April 29, 2018 By Bob Kinsey

Nearly 300,000 Colorado public school students now barred from making field trips to Rocky Flats
Denver Public Schools latest, and biggest, district to ban school visits to soon-to-open wildlife refuge

Andy Cross, The Denver Post
A bull elk runs to catch up to his herd at the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Sept. 25, 2015.
By John Aguilar | jaguilar@denverpost.com | The Denver Post
April 29, 2018 at 6:00 am

Almost 300,000 students from metro Denver school systems will be barred from school-sanctioned trips to Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge after it opens this summer, with the state’s largest district enacting a ban last week on visits to the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site.
Denver Public Schools joined half a dozen other local school districts that say Rocky Flats, with its legacy of plutonium contamination that was often shrouded in secrecy, is too much of a risk for visiting schoolchildren.
“We live in the state of Colorado, where there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy the outdoors,” said Lisa Flores, a member of DPS’s school board, which Thursday brought forward a resolution forbidding its nearly 100,000 students from taking field trips to the 6,200-acre site, which sits 16 miles northwest of Denver. “This is a site we can take off that list.”
Boulder Valley School District and St. Vrain Valley School District passed similar resolutions last year, while superintendents at Adams 12 Five Star, Adams 14, Westminster Public Schools and Jefferson County Public Schools have issued directives forbidding field trips to Rocky Flats. The refuge is scheduled to open to the public this summer, although no firm date has been announced.
Christopher Allred, a member of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center and who has led the effort to get school districts to sign on to the ban, said the unanimous vote by the DPS board is a “very clear statement on the public’s concern about this issue.”
In the middle of the refuge is the 1,300-acre Central Operable Unit, where the sprawling weapons plant that formally closed in 1992 was actually located. It remains an off-limits Superfund site, a bleak reminder of the toxic history surrounding the former federal facility, where for nearly 40 years triggers for nuclear bombs were assembled.
“This is really about the urgent public health issue around the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service opening up Rocky Flats (for public use),” Allred said. “The fact that the refuge is surrounding an active Superfund site means we need to be cautious.”
But Carl Spreng, the Rocky Flats program manager with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said there is nothing clear — or accurate — about the information school districts are getting from what he characterizes as a “traveling activist group” dead set against seeing the refuge open.
“At the core of this is anti-nuclear sentiment,” Spreng said. “They’re using scare tactics.”
He doesn’t deny the environmental problems that have been caused by Rocky Flats, which saw two plutonium-releasing fires in the 1950s and 1960s and an infamous storage pad where barrels leaked a noxious stew of plutonium-laced oil and solvents into the ground. But he said a decade-long cleanup, completed in 2005, was a success.
The rolling property between Arvada and Superior, he said, has been exhaustively tested for contamination over the years — with hundreds of thousands of surface and subsurface soil samples taken — with no areas inside the refuge’s boundaries found to have plutonium readings above what the state considers a health risk.
Radiation levels at Rocky Flats, Spreng said, are in line with background levels found in other parts of the state. According to the CDPHE, the average Coloradan is exposed to up to 650 millirems of radiation a year — a dosage that falls somewhere between a mammogram and a CT scan. A year’s worth of Rocky Flats radiation would add less than an additional millirem to that exposure level, Spreng said.
He said the losers in the effort to ban field trips to Rocky Flats are the kids, who won’t get to enjoy the sight of deer, elk, coyotes, prairie falcons and songbirds traversing the tallgrass prairie in their natural habitat.
“School districts have denied their students the opportunity to see an urban wildlife refuge,” Spreng said. “I’m frustrated by that.”
Worse still, he said, is that several of the school districts never contacted his office or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to get the other side of the story before prohibiting school visits.
“The districts are making their decisions in the absence of full information,” Spreng said.
DPS’s Flores acknowledged that the district should have spoken with state health and federal officials before accepting the Rocky Flats opponents’ argument on its face. Not that the outcome of last week’s vote would have been any different, she said.
“In retrospect, yes, it would have been good to hear from these entities,” she said. “But the fact that it was a nuclear Superfund site had the larger bearing on the issue.”

Filed Under: News

About Bob Kinsey

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Disarmament Quotes

Viewing Trinity Test July 16,1945: "Now we are all Sons of Bitches"

Kenneth BainbridgeDeputy Director Manhatten Project

“Everything I did at Kings Bay was a result of my faith and my commitment to challenge the idols whose only purpose is to destroy human life on an unimaginable scale. I went to Kings Bay to use my body to refuse to bow down to these idols. I went to try to bring attention to the idolatry that it is requiring of our nation and its people. I went in a spirit of prayer and repentance. I went in hope that this witness might invite other people to reflect on the obscenity and on the idolatry that it is before God.”

Liz McAlisterKings Bay Protestor 2019

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending he sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children...This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron." --spoken to the American Society of Newspaper Editors 1953

Dwight EisenhowerUS President 1953-1961

We are prone to self-righteousness if we call ourselves peacemakers, and yet do not perceive how the peace issue cuts through all the economic and social issues that we often try to keep separate. If the race for nuclear arms is encouraged by our fear of losing the affluent ways of life that we have taken for granted, then we must see how our fears and desires have left so many other human beings naked and hungry.

Malsolm Warford"The Church's Role in a Nuclear Age

A world free of the threat of nuclear weapons is necessarily a world devoid of nuclear weapons…. Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to humanity and our habitat…. Others subscribe to Churchill’s assertion ‘Peace is the sturdy child of terror.’ For me, such a peace is a wretched offspring, a peace that condemns us to live under a dark cloud of perpetual anxiety, a peace that codifies mankind’s most murderous instincts….The beast must be chained, its soul expunged, its lair laid waste.

General Lee ButlerFormer Commander, Strategic Air Command, April 28, 1996

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