Posts tagged Rocky Flats
NOAA: Boulder IS the windy city
Feb 18th
Everything you have wanted to know about high winds in Boulder, and then some.
In a nut shell: In 42 years worth of data, 175 days recorded winds of 70 m.p.h. or greater. Eighty six of these occurred in December and January. The highest wind gust recorded was 137 m.p.h. on Jan. 16-17, 1982, with 20 gusts of greater than 120 m. p. h. Forty percent of all Boulder buildings sustained damage. Most of the highest winds were in south Boulder.
Boulder has some of the highest peak winds of any city in the US.
For data and tables, go to:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/boulder/wind.html
Vote Polis, Proud to Be a Boulderite By Scott Hatfield
Oct 31st
By Scott Hatfield
For too long, our Rep in CD 2 has downplayed their connections to Boulder even though Boulder County might make up 55% of the voters. We now have a Congressman who is proud to be from Boulder and to represent our values. Folks here should appreciate being embraced rather than shrugged and support Polis at the polls. Jared Polis grew up in the City of Boulder and was extremely well known in town personally even before running for Congress.
Jared Polis formed his core values protesting Rocky Flats with his parents while growing up. Given his stated priority for the morality of stopping an ever escalating nuclear arms race, there is a reasonable expectation that he cares about the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) more than most Democratic Reps. The NPT has been the cornerstone of foreign policy for many nations, not just the USA and Russia. The NPT obliges its signatories to work in good faith toward a nuclear weapon free world as well as guaranteeing the right to nuclear energy and uranium enrichment. As the President has stated, that includes Iran. While knowing and publicly stating that Iran is not attempting to produce a nuclear weapon and simultaneously beating the drums of war over the guaranteed right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, elements in the USA and Israel could be more interested in undermining the NPT. The nuclear weapons industrial complex is very powerful and wants its profits back. We need a Congressman who can stand up to these entrenched interests. A strong NPT makes the world a safer place for all nations.
Education has been a cornerstone of Jared’s priorities for a long time as well. He was on the Colorado School Board for 6 years and founded five schools. His work to get more kids headed to college should serve the University of Colorado and its role in Boulder well. He believes that education is the single most meaningful investment America can make in its economic future and in its people. Having the University here in town puts the role of the educational system into great prominence locally.
Jared Polis also prides himself on being a champion for environmental issues which has been a CD 2 legacy.
Scott Hatfield has been a member of the Central Committee of the Colorado Democratic Party and the Executive Committee of the Boulder Democratic Party since 1996.
CU Boulder’s toxic avenger and teacher dead
Sep 20th
By Ron Baird
Adrienne Anderson had been an anti-toxics crusader⎯ helping poor communities and labor unions battle corporate polluters and crooked government agencies⎯for 30+ years.
Her targets included Rockwell International, the former operator of Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and the subject of a federal Grand Jury investigation for environmental crimes at that facility; defense contractor Martin-Marietta, whose rocket fuel was suspected of polluting the groundwater of communities with high rates of cancer in southwest Denver; and ASARCO Metals, which has been accused of environmental violations at 94 sites across the country, including the recent revelation that it had incinerated 5,000 tons of hazardous waste from which it was supposed to be recycling heavy metals.
For more than a decade, the University of Colorado/Boulder Environmental Studies instructor taught her students to use the Open Records and Freedom of Information acts to ferret out and make public those dirty little (and sometimes big) secrets that lie in thousands of pages of public documents that are stacked on shelves, packed in cardboard boxes and file cabinets in government agencies like the Colorado Department of Health and Environment and the EPA.
She managed to survive 11 years mostly due to student support. But it was always a battle.
As a college instructor, Anderson and her students took on about 150 companies, collectively known as the Lowry Coalition, which had dumped unregulated hazardous waste into Lowry Landfill for decades before it was designated a Superfund site and closed. All, including the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News, had signed a once-secret agreement with the City of Denver and Waste Management, Inc. to treat groundwater from the landfill and blend it with the effluent from a massive sewage treatment plant operated by the Metro Wastewater Reclamation District. Sludge from the plant is used to fertilize agricultural operations in eastern Colorado and the “treated” water is pumped into the South Platte River.
The political heat was cranked up to “broil” after Anderson discovered a 1991 letter from the Lowry Coalition to the EPA admitting groundwater test wells at the landfill contained high levels of plutonium and americium and pointing out that those radioactive components could only have come from Rocky Flats. After she went public with the information, Metro Wastewater executives engineered a smear campaign against Anderson, who was on the plant’s Board of Directors as a delegate of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union, which represented the plant’s workers.
She subsequently filed a whistleblower lawsuit against Metro Wastewater.
Most if not all of Anderson’s accusations were supported by Pulitizer Prize-winning investigative reporter Eileen Welsome in her 2001 series “Dirty Secrets,” published in the Denver weekly newspaper Westword. Welsome reported that Lowry officials have bolstered their case that no nuclear waste is present by sealing up dozens of wells that had tested hot, which made further testing impossible. Then they drilled 35 new test wells outside the area of historic contamination, along with a slew of other Machiavellian sleights of hand.
Anderson’s continued saber rattling on the issue prompted a flurry of derogatory emails from two top officials in the Colorado governor’s office to CU administrators in late 2004 and early 2005.
Under this pressure, the high ratings and student support was not enough to protect her, and the faculty of Environmental Studies voted on Jan. 28, 2005 not to renew Anderson’s contract. They claimed the vote nothing personal; it was simply due to departmental “resource allocation priorities” and a “change of direction.”
Not even the Rocky Mountain News bought that bureaucratic backwash and published an editorial on Feb. 10, 1995, saying, “CU Making the Right Call on Anderson,” describing her as “an instructor whose rhetoric on environmental issues has been almost as reckless as the ranting of Ward Churchill.” Churchill was a CU faculty member who generated considerable controversy by calling some victims of the 9-11 attacks “little Eichmanns.” He, too, was fired from his job.
Anderson’s subsequent appeal of the decision was denied. But this time, it has been the CU faculty members who had come to her aid. They asked members of a prestigious faculty committee representing the four CU campuses to investigate. Their report revealed that the emails had been passed down to the same administrators who denied her appeal.
“If the intent of the emails was to put pressure on the university, the way they were handled ensured that this pressure was felt at all levels,” the report said. The committee recommended rehiring Anderson and funding her course.
Anderson released the report at a press conference on Sept. 17, 2006 organized by the American Association of University Professors.
At that time, English Professor Paul Levitt accused the administration of “abject cowardice” and in danger of becoming “a hand maiden of industry and government.”
Not everyone in high places had a problem with Anderson. David DiNardi, a federal judge assigned to hear Anderson’s whistlebower harassment case against Metro Wastewater, awarded her $450,000 in damages in 2001, as well as taking the somewhat unusual step of ordering Metro Wastewater to place a full page apology to Anderson in the Sunday Denver Post.
The judge noted in his ruling that then-Denver Post Editorial Page Editor Al Knight had become a “third-party agent” in the case by printing Metro’s allegations as facts.
In the decision he wrote, “This entire case is about a dedicated, conscientious and public-spirited citizen who, in following the tradition of Karen Silkwood, Erin Brockovitch… and others, has spent her entire adult life in pursuing union and environmental activities and in attempting to correct perceived wrongs and problems in society.”
Anderson has decided to forgo the final step in the appeal process because the same administrators who had been biased by the emails would be sitting in judgment again. Instead, she’s appealing to the court of public opinion, as she has for the past 30 years.
The judge’s ruling and award was subsequently overturned by the Bush administration’s Labor Department on a technicality. And that decision was upheld by a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals panel on a 2-1 vote. The two judges who upheld the Labor Department’s decision were recent Bush appointees to the court. This association is relevant in that the Bush administration has waged a relentless war on whistleblowers in federal agencies and even censured, harassed and dismissed federal scientists who have reported information that runs counter to his administration’s policies of promoting big business interests over public welfare. Recently, the EPA closed most of its libraries so that citizens like Anderson would not have access to information damaging to his friends and campaign contributors.