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“This has never been done anywhere – flushing plutonium-contaminated wastewater through a public sewer infrastructure,” says former Metro Wastewater board member and former University of Colorado professor Adrienne Anderson. “I call it ‘black water’ because it (contains) hazardous and nuclear waste.”

Between the years 1964 and 1980, the City and County of Denver used the Lowry landfill located east of Gun Club Road and north of Hampden Ave. as a municipal dumping ground for industrial wastes. Radioactive chemicals, cleaning solvents, and pesticides from companies including Coors, Shattuck Chemical Co., and Martin Marietta were all expunged at the site.

In her 2001 Westword article, “Board Games,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome wrote, “The Lowry landfill contains hundreds of radioactive and non-radioactive chemicals. Approximately 165 of the 275 chemicals that the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry has declared as presenting the ‘most significant potential threat to human health’ are in the landfill. Only about a third of these substances – fifteen radionuclides and 53 chemicals – are regulated under the Metro permit; the remainder simply flow through the sewers.” 

Funneled at the rate of 10 to 20 gallons per minute from Lowry to Metro Waste- water, the contaminated water joins another 140 million gallons of sewage influent from the 1.6 million Denver residents that Metro serves. It is then processed at the plant before a portion is discharged to Denver Water’s recycling plant for further treatment before being dispersed to Washington Park and other locations across the city.

Recycled water is delivered through a separate system of “purple pipes.” Users include the Denver Zoo, Common Ground golf course, Denver Public Schools, Denver Country Club, and Washington Park.

“They don’t have treatment systems to handle hazardous or nuclear waste and the (Metro) plant is not certified to handle this waste,” Anderson maintains.

“You can’t treat heavy metal, solvents, and radioactive waste with the kind of filtering they’re doing,” adds Larry Ambrose, president of Sloan’s Lake Neighborhood Association. “But they claim they’re treating it.”

Since 2004, Washington and City Park lakes have been filled with reclaimed “purple pipe” effluent. “The city tests the lake water every year, and in their own report it says that the water quality does not meet state standards. They attributed it to the switch to reclaimed water,” says Anderson. “I don’t think that people realized, ‘God, they’re going to take (reclaimed water) and put it in our parks, using a purple pipe.’”

“This is a whole new ball game,” notes Ambrose.

In the winter of 2007, more than 1,000 ducks inexplicably drowned at the Waste-water Reclamation District and in City Park’s Ferril Lake. The cause remains unknown; however, Anderson offers an educated theory. “I think the 1,4-Dioxane  (an industrial cleaning solvent), overwhelmed the water ponds, and the ducks were stripped of the grease on their feathers and down they went; they drowned.”

“My understanding is that there has been extensive testing of that water,” claims Dave Akers of the Colorado Department of Health and Environment. “The contaminants have been characterized, and Metro has indicated that the water is acceptable to be treated to necessary standards.”

In fact, Denver Water’s Lowry webpage states, “The discharge (from Lowry) represents 0.026 percent of the 140 million gallons per day treated by Metro Wastewater. Extensive scientific testing by the EPA over more than a decade has not identified any elevated risk from the Lowry discharge, and there is no evidence that significant radioactive waste was ever disposed at Lowry landfill.”

However, Anderson possesses a copy of an official letter that the attorney for the top 12 Lowry polluters – including Coors and Metro Wastewater – sent to the EPA in December 1991. It explicitly details that high levels of plutonium and other radionuclides were found in Lowry’s groundwater after thousands of samples were tested over four years. The letter attributed Rocky Flats nuclear-weapons plant as the culprit for the contamination.

“It’s just a question of, do you believe some of those agencies that have a history of working with the public, or do you not?” says Joe Sloan, Community Relations Specialist at Denver Water. “The data that they’ve shown us, and the understanding that we have, we don’t see it as an issue.”

 “This is something that we test, normally. Basically, we’ve found that the levels (of radionuclides) that are in the recycled water (are) pretty consistent with what we see in our drinking water,” adds Denver Water Recycled Water Program Manager Abigail Holmquist.

Nevertheless, the influx of the “reclaimed” water filling park lakes remains controversial. Anderson believes, “The (reclaimed effluent) is responsible for the water quality decline in Washington Park’s lake and Ferril Lake and (is) the apparent cause of the death of ducks and fish that have occurred in waves since 2004.

“The polluters that were responsible for the Lowry landfill, with the complicity of the EPA and the CDPHE, are (now) using Denver and Aurora public lake infrastructures as a tertiary treatment system for chemical waste. It’s a transfer system that cannot be neutralized; it’s (simply) being dispersed,” Anderson says.

Learn more about Denver’s dealings with the Lowry landfill and its water by reading Eileen Welsome’s series at www.Westword.com. Further information pertaining to the duck deaths may be viewed at www.rmpjc.org or at www.denverdirect.tv. Denver Water’s information is available at www.denverwater.org, by typing in “Lowry Landfill Facts.”