Class 2 permit modification (Basin F)

The U.S. Army is applying for a Class 2 permit modification to Rocky Mountain Arsenal’s Basin F Post-Closure Plan. For info, see CDPHE and below:

This is a public notice that the U.S. Army is applying for a Class 2 permit modification to the Basin F Post-Closure at Rocky Mountain Arsenal.

Public comment period: April 27, 2023 through May 26, 2023

Written comments should be directed to Susan Newton, Project Manager CDPHE HMWMD 4300 Cherry Creek Drive South, Denver, CO 80246 (susan dot newton at state dot co dot us).

The draft hazardous waste permit modification and supporting documents are available for review on our website: https://cdphe.colorado.gov/HMWMD-public-notices

** A public meeting to discuss this permit modification request may be scheduled upon citizen inquiry or request for a meeting.
Inquiries regarding this facility should be directed to:

Venissa Ledesma, CDPHE, Marketing and Communications Specialist at 303-692-3432 or venissa dot ledesma at state dot co dot us
or
Patty Lee, U.S Army at 303-298-0300 or patty dot l dot lee6 at civ dot mail dot mil.

The permittee’s compliance history during the life of the post-closure plan is available from Ms. Susan Newton of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.

The U.S. Army manages the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Basin F Former Surface Impoundment and former Basin F Wastepile, collectively referred to as Basin F, that contains hazardous waste from the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal site. Basin F is currently managed under a Post-Closure Plan that was approved by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment on July 2, 2009.

The U.S. Army is applying for the following Class 2 permit modification to the Rocky Mountain Arsenal Basin F Post-Closure Plan Rev. 2, April 10, 2023.

This modification includes updates to the inspection and sampling frequencies for the Basin F Cover that are based upon best management practices developed from experience gained over 10 years of managing the site. This proposed modification also includes numerous editorial updates.

Procedures for reaching a final decision:
The public is obligated to raise all reasonably ascertainable issues regarding any condition in the draft permit modification during the public comment period as required by 6 CCR 1007-3, Section 100.509. In accordance with 6 CCR 1007-3, Section 100.61, only those portions of the permit subject to the modification are reopened for public comment. FAILURE TO RAISE AN ISSUE OR PROVIDE INFORMATION DURING THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD MAY PREVENT YOU FROM RAISING THAT ISSUE OR SUBMITTING SUCH INFORMATION IN AN APPEAL OF THE DEPARTMENT’S FINAL DECISION. ONLY MATTERS RAISED DURING THE PUBLIC COMMENT PERIOD MAY BE CONTESTED IN ANY APPEAL OF THE PERMIT (SECTION 6 CCR 1007-3, SECTION 100.506 (D)(1)(VI)).
The Division will consider all comments on the draft permit prior to making a final decision on it. Following the public comment period, the Division will issue a final decision and a response to comments in accordance with 6 CCR 1007-3, Sections 100.511-512.

CDPHE v U.S Army (Again)

Big surprise.

The Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment’s (CDPHE) Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in April to compel the U.S. Army to comply with standards set by Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund.  There are “four claims for relief” that range from lack of dewatering of the Shell Trenches to demanding the Army provide a plan concerning surface water standards for former Basin E.

A copy of the lawsuit is located here: RMA_19cv1105_CDPHE sues Army_April2019

Deep-Well Injection

A newish CRS report titles Human-Induced Earthquakes from Deep-Well Injection briefly discusses the Army Chemical Corps decision to dispose of its wastes through deep-well injection. The CRS report describes the process, that lead to

an M 4.8 earthquake that struck northeast Denver, on August 9, 1967 was generally accepted as the largest recorded human-induced earthquake in the United States. The M 4.8 earthquake was part of a series of earthquakes that began within several months of the 1961 start of deep-well injection of hazardous chemicals produced at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal defense plant. The earthquakes continued after injection ceased in February 1966.21 The disposal well was drilled through the flat-lying sedimentary rocks into the underlying older crystalline rocks more than 12,000 feet deep, and injection rates varied from 2 million gallons per month to as much as 5.5 million gallons per month.

For additional background, see the original report on deep-well injection (posted below) and of course, that historical treasure, The Blue Book.

 

The Devil’s Bargain

I recently came across this short film titled The Devil’s Bargain created by students whose school is in proximity to RMA:

 

The National Contingency Plan

Confusing letters between the RMA Subcommittee and the EPA on 10 x -6 risk and Superfund.

Readers are advised to scan over 40 CFR 300 before reading our letters; our assumption was that cleanup standards/cancer risk for RMA would follow 10 x -6 as outlined in the National Contingency Plan, not 10 x -4 as applied to the Arsenal and in many CERCLA cleanups.

first letter | EPA response | SC response…then we gave up.

Lots of RMA History & Documents

History, lots of history…

• The Blue Book (Parts 1 and 3 not included).
• CDPHE [1995] Citizen Health Summary.
• CDPHE press release on the 10th Circuit decision.
• Chemical Agent Program History [no author – a contractor doc?].
• City and County of Denver comments on the Onpost proposed plan.
• Colorado Dept. of Health [1975], Chemicals & Spills.
• Colorado Dept. of Health [1993], Concerns, Offpost Proposed Plan.
• Conceptual_Agreement, Sierra Club comments, [1995].
• Corrective Action Management Unit, Sierra Club comments to CDPHE, [1996]: The Arsenal was one of the first federal facilities to reinvent cleanup via the CAMU. It is my understanding the original intent of the CAMU was to provide a framework for the development and use of alternative and innovative technologies by allowing flexibility in the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) Land Disposal Rule (LDRs). But at one time, the use of CAMU subverted the LDRs rule by allowing untreated dioxin laden waste landfilled without treatment. This capricious misapplication of the rule is contrary to the law, and was not the intent of Congress, the EPA and the Colorado Hazardous Waste Commission which promulgated LDRs. EPA changed requirements in 2002 [see 3.3 of this EPA doc].
• Department of the Army [1970], Review and Analysis.
• Draft EIS, USFWS wildlife refuge, Sierra Club comments to USFWS [1995].
• Daigle v. Shell Oil.

• EPA Factsheet on RMA, [1992] | EPA Q&A on the SQI [Submerged Quench Incinerator].
• EPA [1993], Operation of the Basin F Liquid Incinerator.
• From Weapons to Wildlife (EPA).
• Hazardous Spills and Leaks [1975].
• History of Basin F.
• History of Building 1727.
• History of the Complex Trenches.
• History of the Hydrazine Blending and Storage Facility [owned by the Air Force but operated by RMA from 1962-82].
• History of the M1 Settling Basins.
• History of the Motor Pool area.
• History of the NW Boundary System.
• History of Rocky Mountain Arsenal [1980].

• Installation Action Plan [March, 1997; no author].
• Kuznear, Casimir and Trautmann, William L. History of Pollution Sources and Hazards at Rocky Mountain Arsenal [September 1980].
• Labaton,  Stephen. [1987, Nov. 16]. Business and the Law; Big Courtroom For Toxic Web. The New York Times.
• Larry Land testimony [100th Congress, 1st session, H.R. 816 allowing rancher Larry Land, to bring suit against the Army for DIMP (diisopropylmethyl phosphonate, a byproduct of Sarin) contamination and related health problems].
• Rep. Pat Schroeder [1973] requesting waste history from the Army.
• RMA waste to Fountain Landfill [n.d.].
• Program Manager for  Demil of Chemical Materiel, Project Eagle, Phase II, Disposal of Bulk GB, M34 Cluster [1973].
• Program Manager RMA Contamination Cleanup, Rocky Mountain Arsenal: An Organizational Historical Perspective [1988].
• Program Manager for Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Authorized Access to and Allowable Activities at Rocky Mountain Arsenal [1991].

• South Plants Remediation Survey.
• State of Colorado comments on the endangerment assessment.
• State of Colorado’s Conceptual Cleanup Agreement press release from Lt. Gov. Gail Schoettler [1995].
• Toxic Tours at Rocky Mountain Arsenal [Sierra Club, 1998] | Sierra Club Rocky Mountain Arsenal Subcommittee letter regarding school tours to view wildlife during Superfund cleanup activities.
• Use and Storage of 2,4-D Spraying History.
• Waste Disposal, A National Problem [author unknown; info on deep well injection, the basins, and pollution].
• Why We Need Good Info to Cleanup Bad Places.

RMA & Shell Oil

Perhaps the most controversial party to RMA cleanup, on April 30, 1952, Shell Oil purchased Julius Hyman & Company, which manufactured “high-potency insecticides.” Hyman officially became integrated into Shell on January 1, 1955 [see Kendall Beaton’s Enterprise in Oil: A History of Shell in the United States, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957].

A few scanned files:

• Ben Nighthorse Campbell [1995] calls for Shell to cleanup RMA | Shell responds
• The (infamous) Blue Book (Parts 1 and 3 not included).
• Colorado Department of Health to Shell: Cease and Desist, [1973]
• Colorado Department of Health to Shell regarding “unauthorized discharge of pollutants” [1975]
• Congresswoman Pat Schroeder asking the Secretary of the Army for records on Shell releases [1973]
• Cooperative Agreement between the Colorado Wildlife Federation, the National Fish and Wildlife Federation, Shell Oil Company, the U.S. Army Program Manager’s Office at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• Diana Hembree and William Kistner’s Shell Game article on No Pest [Vapona] strips that were once manufactured at RMA [E Magazine, December 1992] | Denver Post article written by Mark Obmascik Vapona & testing on infants [missing the second page, so head to your local library]
• Maret, Why We Need Good Info to Cleanup Bad Places
• Shell, Declaration of Covenants [1996]
• Shell Oil Co. v. Winterthur Swiss Ins. Co and “willful acts.”
• Shell responds to reporter Mark Obmascik’s Denver Post articles on cleanup costs | Holmes, Roberts & Owen’s letter to the editor defending Shell’s involvement as a Principle Responsible Party (PRP)
• Shell’s Concepts in Remediation [1985]
• Shell’s Statement of Settlement Issues [September, 1994]

–

The Puzzling Case of the NSCMP and RMA

In 2000, a press release was drafted from us gals in Sierra Club and the Chem Weapons Working Group (CWWG ) asking the Army to consider alternate means of disposing of sarin bomblets. At the time, the Army was using open detonate “technology” for dealing with potentially unstable materiel, setting off the bomblets in the Arsenal acreage. While we understood the volatility of these weapons and urgency of disposal, open air detontation of Sarin bomblets compromised air quality, public health, and the safety of neighborhoods surrounding RMA.

After much discussion between Colorado Department of Health and Environment (CDPHE), Army, and the U.S. Army Chemical Materials Agency’s Non-Stockpile Chemical Materiel Project (NSCMP), the Explosive Device System (EDS) was brought to the Arsenal from its testbed in Porton Down, UK, as an alternative technology to replace open detonation of bomblets and crude air and weather monitoring.

A huge part of the EDS story involves the NSCMP in providing me with an on the ground education in understanding programmatic authority and other issues involved in using the EDS at RMA. Below are behind the scenes conversations between the CDPHE and myself about the bomblets, NSCMP authority, and the EDS:

my original email | CDPHE response EDS | additional EDS discussion

Also relevant to the EDS discussion is the NSCMP’s Survey and Analysis Report, (2nd ed.); note the section on the Arsenal, but yet the NSCMP’s role was relegated to observer status in Arsenal cleanup. This was of constant amazement (and consternation) to many citizens who served on the Arsenal’s Restoration Advisory Board and the Site Specific Advisory Board. The existence of this report – issued BEFORE the Arsenal’s Record of Decision – would have influenced a better informed cleanup and indeed strengthened the programmatic authority of the NSCMP in working on other nonstockpile sites throughout the country. The history of NSCMP participation on former chem weapons sites remains compelling case study into (I think) DoD, and specifically, Army culture.

Wildlife [exposure & biomonitoring] and RMA

• Army on the Integrated Endangerment Assessment,1993
• Avian Mortality, 1952
• Biota  Remedial Investigation and Comprehensive Monitoring Summary [CDPHE to the Army, 1992] | another doc on the subject [1992]
• Building 111 bird deaths [Rec’d via FOIA, 1994] | USFSW to the Army on Building 111 bird deaths, 1994
• Cooperative Agreement between the Colorado Wildlife Federation, Shell, U.S. Army, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• EPA to the Army on the Endangerment Assessment
• EPA to the USFWS and USFWS on the Detailed Analysis of Alternatives [somehow these docs melded together during scanning]
• Final EIS Wildlife Refuge [TOC & summary only] | Sierra Club comments
• Fortuitous samples, [obtained under FOIA, 1993]
• Fortuitous sampling chart, USFWS [1993]; by species, probable cause of death.
• Kestrel Briefing Statement, USFWS
• Necropsy study [1993, obtained under FOIA].
• Restoration Advisory Board [RAB] April 6,1995 minutes that contains good info on fortuitous sampling
• Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge Act of 1992
• Sciple, Study of avian mortality on three lakes @ RMA, [1952)]
• Shell on fortuitous sampling, [1994]
• USFWS letter to EPA regarding biomonitoring, [1995]
• U.S. Fish and Wildlife Eagle and Wildlife Property Repository: Draft EA for a crematorium @ RMA

Worker Health & Safety

Very little information has been released by the Army on the health of former Rocky Mountain Arsenal workers. I wondered about this…but then I began to study secrecy. Late one September night as I was reading Chapter 13 of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, my eye caught the following paragraph and subsequent footnote(s) [emphasis-added]:

In the case of research related to chemical and biological warfare, the military issued a secret edict that published articles be cleansed of any reference to military purpose. [70] In many cases the opportunity to obscure the full purpose of research by careful wording was obvious.

As a DOD document put it, “the term ‘radiobiology’ is so flexible semantically that, depending upon the investigator’s point of view, any project could be classified as ‘clinical’ or ‘basic’ or ‘nuclear weapons effects.’ ” [71]

Footnotes to the above quote:

70. W. G. Lalor, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.), Secretary, Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Chief of Staff, U.S. Army et al., 3 September 1952 (“Security Measures on Chemical Warfare and Biological Warfare”) (ACHRE No. NARA-012495-A), 2. In the memo to the service chiefs of staff, the Joint Chiefs decreed that “responsible agencies” should “[e]nsure, insofar as practicable, that all published articles stemming from the BW [biological warfare] or CW [chemical warfare] research and development programs are disassociated from anything which might connect them with U.S. military endeavor.”

71. Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Thirtieth Joint Medical Research Conference, minutes of 8 January 1964 (ACHRE No. DOD-062994-A), 3.

` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` ` `

In a previous work, I stressed that bureaucratic language is essentially linked to power; language, coupled with outright omissions of information,  can be used to  conceal  information.  By applying the broad category of “radiobiology” or  “cleansing” the literature of any reference to the military experimentation or projects, the military undermined the time-honored practice of scientific peer review as well as obfuscated informed consent of volunteers and the public’s right to know of the military’s [covert] contribution to the research literature.

This manipulation of language – not an uncommon occurrence as a technique of secrecy keeping – jeopardizes historical understanding and sorely tarnishes public confidence in government research. This situation calls to [my] mind sociologist Max Weber’s observation in Economy and Society, where Max asks

“…how can there be any guarantee that any powers will remain which can check and effectively control the influence of this stratum? How will democracy even in this limited sense be possible at all?”

With this in mind, consider the following:

Look over the Department of the Army, RMA Review and Analysis, 4th Quarter 1970, a doc I received under FOIA. The doc mentions demil and two projects: Project GEMS and Project LEACHE [Long Term Effects Anticholinesterase.] There is no mention of informed consent on the 148 “exposed personnel.” I wonder: were the workers mentioned in the LEACHE study the “industrial workers” of the Holmes and Metcalf study (below)?

The Metcalf and Holmes study, (June 23, 1969, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences), which disingenuously characterizes the study as “industrial and agricultural workers” exposed to pesticides. RMA [chemical weapons] workers are a component of the study cryptically indicated by “RMA” (circled) printed on Table 1.

At the January 26, 2000 EPA [Bob Martin] Ombudsman’s hearing on RMA, Dr. Robert McFarland testified to treating Sarin-exposed workers at Colorado General Hospital during the late 1950s while a resident. The medical school (University of Colorado), McFarland said, was doing a Army funded study on an antidote to Sarin exposure using 2PAM, or pyridine 2-aldoxime; this antidote was investigated as an alternative to the traditionally used atropine in cases of Sarin poisoning. Dr. McFarland reported the physicians who administered the study were ordered by their dean to participate as the medical school “was so hard up for money after World War II we had to take any study we could get.” [Thanks to Dr. McFarland for providing this document].

Miscellaneous McFarland correspondence on RMA worker exposure studies were a “cover” for testing a Sarin antidote, 2-PAM.  Workers eventually sued the University of Colorado.

Former RMA worker Ray Laughbridge tells his story in Denver magazine September, 1976. Note: Dr. Joseph Holmes of the Metcalf and Holmes study worked for the Army Chemical Service.