Rockies Menace

Toxic waste at an arsenal

On the outskirts of Denver, a storehouse of potential death sprawls across 27 sq. mi. of rolling prairie. It is the site of the U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which produced weapons and chemical agents until 1969. It now harbors corroded canisters of mustard gas, lethal phosphorus wastes from incendiary bombs, unexploded rockets and mortar shells embedded in a former firing range, millions of cubic yards of soil peppered with pesticides and an abandoned five-story production plant contaminated with nerve gas. Two vast man-made lagoons, once used as dump pits for toxic chemical and biological wastes, are the worst menaces of all. Toxic wastes have leached out of both ponds, infecting the area's ground water and killing crops.

Since 1956 the Army has been wrestling unsuccessfully with the problem of containing contamination at the installation, which currently concentrates on the destruction of old weapons and poisonous materials. Early this month the Army conceded the magnitude of the problem and signed an agreement with the Colorado department of health and the Environmental Protection Agency to detoxify the area.

Said the arsenal's commander, Lieut. Colonel Richard Smith: "Full-scale purification would rank as one of the biggest cleanup jobs ever."

During the past six years, the Army has spent about $50 million in an attempt to tidy up the area. An accelerated evaporation process has shrunk the murky green liquid in one lagoon from 200 million gal. to 55 million gal. The water, however, is still so polluted it occasionally kills birds. To scare them off, the Army in 1976 put flashing lights on barges and ringed the lake with Zong guns, which make siren and gunshot noises. It also built a giant barricade of bentonite slurry, 6,700 ft. long with a foundation 35 ft. deep, to help purify the water. But in the late 1970s two more contaminated underground water ways were discovered, both of them polluted by chemical agents.

If the area is sanitized, Denver would like to use it to expand nearby Stapleton International Airport. But that may take a while. Congress has yet to appropriate money for the cleanup. Experts estimate that complete detoxification would cost a hefty $6 billion.

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