AVONDALE — The nation’s outlawed chemical weapons stashed in 780,000 steel shells here at the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot — 2,613 tons of molasses-like goop designed to inflict blisters, blindness, and burns from World War II through the Cold War — have been destroyed, international arms treaty overseers certified.
But this military base on 36 square miles of what once was short-grass prairie along the Arkansas River still is bleeding TNT (trinitrotoluene), which causes liver and nerve problems, and TCE (trichloroethylene), which causes kidney cancer, in underground plumes of contaminated water. Thousands of old bombs, grenades, and other munitions are scattered under the wind-whipped topsoil and weeds.
Colorado officials estimate cleaning the site to meet an industrial-use standard will cost more than $600 million, a cost the U.S. Department of Defense, which owns the site, is legally obligated to cover — though Colorado wants the land back. But if Congress fails to maintain a long-term focus and provide funds each year, state health officials and redevelopment authorities warn, the once-healthy prairie will remain a wasteland — more of a burden than a benefit.
“We cannot re-use the property if it is not clean,” said Russell DeSalvo, executive director of PuebloPlex, a state entity created by lawmakers in 1994 to redevelop the site.
“We just want to make sure the Army fulfills its obligation to clean up this property. It will hamper our economic development efforts if the property is unusable due to environmental contamination. Our congressional delegation will have to be diligent over a long time to hold the Department of Defense accountable to do what they say they are going to do for the people of Colorado,” DeSalvo said.
“It is unsellable if it is not cleaned up. It becomes a burden for the community and for the Army and for the state to monitor this contamination in perpetuity if it is not handled appropriately,” he said. “People could be killed if they find a piece of unexploded ordnance that may be live.”
Mustard gas gone
For 80 years, the land served World War II and Cold War military purposes of storing the deadly “mustard gas” weapons. Then the United Nations-backed Chemical Weapons Convention, ratified by the United States in 1997, prohibited making, stockpiling, selling, and using chemical weapons. U.S. military officials contracted with Bechtel to build a $6 billion plant to destroy them safely. Starting in 2016, a carefully trained force of 2,600 workers from Pueblo and Colorado Springs ran that plant. Workers wore protective white respirator suits. They operated machines that removed mustard gas by blasting 105-degree water into each of those 780,000 shells.
President Joe Biden last summer praised the workers along with counterparts at weapons storage bases in Oregon and Kentucky for successfully getting rid of all outlawed weapons. On Oct. 6, arms treaty officials at the Netherlands-based Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons sent a letter to Bechtel certifying the total elimination of the mustard agent. The United States was the last of 193 signatory nations to comply.
Colorado’s senators now are pushing legislation to enable a swift transfer of the land, located just east of Pueblo, back to local control, no later than July.
Meanwhile, Army officials are negotiating with the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment to establish a cleanup plan. The federal process for re-using military bases requires that Colorado buy back the land once Army officials formally decommission the base and redesignate it as “surplus.” CDPHE officials emphasized, in a response to Denver Post queries, that “the U.S. Army is responsible for cleaning up all remaining areas as long as contamination remains.”
Bechtel has started dismantling its plant, and company officials estimated this will take 30 months. Workers will break down much of the facility, including titanium pipelines and vats — necessary due to mustard gas residue contamination. They’ll reduce the facility to pieces they can fit into steel drums, which trucks then will haul to hazardous waste dumps.
“We’re doing this for the future,” said Walton Levi, the federal government’s project manager in the plant. “I have a daughter. We want to leave the world a better place.”
Railway and aerospace testing hub envisioned
Colorado officials envision a massive industrial research and development hub — if all goes as planned.
For years, PuebloPlex officials have been working under a master-lease agreement with the Army to sublease safe parts of the property to the Association of American Railways, the United Launch Alliance (a space launch venture by Boeing and Lockheed-Martin), and others. An eventual re-sale would enable, beyond possible jobs, the collection of taxes that could boost the economy in southern Colorado.
The rail transportation work conducted by MxV Rail (MxV is the mathematical formula for momentum) brought an investment of $30 million. MxV installed a 60-foot-thick concrete crash-testing wall and a six-mile rail loop for analyzing high-speed trains and managing derailments. MxV also created a facility for training rail emergency responders.
PuebloPlex marketers tout the proximity to Pueblo’s airport, U.S. 50, railways, and the Evraz steel mill, where employees produce state-of-the-art 1,500-foot seamless rails.
Some 1,000 concrete quonset-shaped storage bunkers, which provide constant 50-degree storage conditions, are available for $1,700 a month. One of the 500 or so tenants keeps a collection of antique cars. A Pueblo organization devoted to helping the homeless stores cots in one, but using the units for housing is problematic because the land at the site isn’t classified as safe for residential use, DeSalvo said.
Antelope roam between the bunkers and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists this fall released 22 black-footed ferrets — an endangered species — in an effort to revive grasslands on the eastern side of the site. The federal government lacked funds to purchase the depot for conversion to a wildlife refuge, as was done in metro Denver with the 11-square-mile Rocky Flats and 25-square-mile Rocky Mountain Arsenal weapons-making sites.
Cleanup concerns
Cleanup anxieties have intensified since Biden trumpeted the destruction of weapons. Toxic groundwater and potentially explosive old munitions could prohibit re-development by increasing liabilities for future owners, DeSalvo said. “We have to be super careful so that we don’t acquire any liability.”
The CDPHE for decades has been charged with regulating all activities at the Pueblo Chemical Depot. State environmental officials say they regularly review work plans, conduct inspections to verify complete cleanup, and evaluate water and soil sampling data to ensure state standards are met — in this case conditions safe enough for industrial use. If standards aren’t met, state officials can impose controls on future land use.
A new permit specifying what the Army now must do should be completed this year and made public, health officials said.
“The Pueblo Depot will be cleaned up,” CDPHE hazardous materials and waste management division director Tracie White told The Denver Post. “Our primary goal is protecting human health — the people who are using that water. We still monitor, very closely, the off-site contamination.”
Nearby residents said they still feel vulnerable. Two miles south of the depot, people in the Avondale farming community (population 500), including former depot workers, had filters and water-cleaning systems installed by the Army so that nobody would drink water from wells. Those are still in place but some residents say they buy bottled water.
“Water here is an issue,” said Erica Birner, owner of Chuck’s Place, a local bar and restaurant established in 1928.
A 96-year-old customer advised her to never drink local well water, Birner said. She invested $37,000 to install a water vending machine that dispenses purified H2O for a fee outside Chuck’s Place. She runs that dispenser at a loss because she can’t bear to charge residents of Avondale and neighboring Boone more than 30 cents a gallon for a commodity essential for life, she said.
“We would hope the Army would clean it up before they leave. We are in a disaster zone.”
CDPHE officials said they monitor water in the towns and that plumes extend beyond the depot but there is no evidence drinking water is tainted.
Army committed
At the site, water tests conducted by the Army show a gradual decrease in the TNT and TCE concentrations in groundwater from as much as 250 parts-per-billion in 2009 to less than 60 ppb this year after water is filtered, state officials said. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has set a health advisory guidance level for TNT in drinking water at of 2.2 ppb and a maximum limit for TCE at 5 ppb.
The Department of Defense is committed to full cleanup, said the Army’s Pueblo Chemical Depot commander Col. Rodney McCutcheon, a chemical weapons expert whose experience includes dealing with munitions stockpiles found in Iraq.
“The Army is not going to leave here until everything is 100% good to go,” McCutcheon said. “We housed a strategic deterrent against our enemies the Russians for years. We did that safely and securely. And, now, the community here will benefit.”
However, on a recent ride around the land, he and DeSalvo acknowledged that Congress must stay the course for cleanup to be done.
“We need Congress to function effectively,” DeSalvo said. “We need long-term environmental remediation. Congress needs to authorize that each year. ….. When there’s no funding, cleanup just gets delayed. Some projects, if they were fully funded up front, could be completed quickly.”
Unexploded munitions
Colorado officials said the most costly cleanup task will be clearing a 7,000-acre area where munitions are buried. On Aug. 6, 1948, a lightning strike at the depot triggered detonations and the scattering of explosives, according to military records.
First, electromagnetic surveys must be done to locate explosives. Of 62 sites where unexploded materials are concentrated, 22 are classified as problem areas, said Dustin McNeil, leader of the CDPHE’s federal facilities remediation and restoration team.
Another long-term challenge will be monitoring and filtering out the toxic pollution from groundwater, which was contaminated after Army operators spilled industrial solvents and dumped explosives, McNeil said. Much of the toxic material has been confined to the property. “There are some off-site excursions,” McNeil said.
Largescale water-cleaning systems have been running for years and must continue to remove and contain contaminants.
The groundwater flows south from the base toward farm fields and the Arkansas River, about two miles south of the depot. At one of the treatment plants, TCE-contaminated water pumped to the surface is aerated — treatment that could be compared with “bubblers in a fish tank,” said Ann Mead, the Army’s remediation project manager. The cleaned water then is reinjected into the ground. At the southwestern side of the site, pumps raise groundwater to the surface where it is circulated through charcoal filters to remove TNT and other contaminants.
State data provided to the Denver Post shows that Army water-cleaning systems last year pumped more than 215 million gallons of water from 78 wells for treatment to remove TCE and TNT.
“The point of this is to stop the contamination at our boundary,” Mead said.
However, sustained water treatment over the next 25 years, she said, “depends on funding.”
Jobs uncertain
U.S. Sens. John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet were not made available to discuss cleanup issues. Hickenlooper staffers, in emails, did not respond directly to Denver Post queries about cleanup.
They’ve introduced legislation in Congress that would direct the Army to close the Pueblo Chemical Depot no later than July, a year after the completion of the chemical weapon destruction. Then, under the military’s Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, the site would be sold to PuebloPlex, the local redevelopment authority.
PuebloPlex officials said they will take ownership later this year of a 16,000-acre portion of the site. The legislation would enable a transfer of the remaining 7,000 acres from the Army to PuebloPlex.
The primary objective for Colorado has been generating jobs in the economically ailing southern half of the state. During the Cold War, the weapons depot employed as many as 8,000 workers, second to Pueblo’s steel mill in sustaining the southern Colorado economy.
Now Bechtel’s workforce is shrinking gradually and notices posted at the plant advise employees of upcoming opportunities for retraining. “We’re going to lose about 2,000 jobs over the next five years,” DeSalvo said. “That will have a huge negative economic impact. And that’s why we’re ramping up our efforts.”
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