Doom With a View: Jeffco Health Director Looks Back on Rocky Flats

“You and Jefferson County killed my husband!” The woman on the telephone was almost screaming now. The emotional anger and mental agony were palpable as she spat the words at me. “I will never talk to you or anyone from Jefferson County,” she shouted as she slammed her telephone receiver down.

It was the summer of 1990. I had recently been appointed as the executive director of the Jefferson County Health Department. Jefferson County, metropolitan Denver’s gateway to the Rocky Mountains, contained the Rocky Flats Plant, the Department of Energy’s industrial site that made plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs. It had been a year since Operation Desert Glow, the raid on the Rocky Flats Plant by the FBI and the US Environmental Protection Agency. As the government official statutorily responsible for protecting the health of Jefferson County’s residents, I was trying to learn all I could about the nuclear weapons fabrication site and its potential impact on the health of the community.

I knew little about Rocky Flats when I took the job. I had dated a girl from Boulder in the late 1960s who had pointed it out to me one day as we drove by on US Highway 93. “That’s where they make atomic bombs,” she said. I couldn’t see anything of interest going on there. I had also heard about the antinuclear protesters who had picketed Rocky Flats. I thought it was ironic that they had not been able to surround the plant when they attempted to hold hands and form a human chain around it. That was about all I knew about Rocky Flats until I applied for the job in Jefferson County.

I subsequently learned that Rocky Flats was a very controversial place. In fact, Rocky Flats should never have been built. Its proximity upwind from a large population center, with prevailing winds moving in that direction, as well as its history of not-infrequent hurricane-force winds, should have disqualified the site before it was ever chosen. Allegedly, those assigned to find a site for an atomic bomb trigger facility used wind maps from Stapleton Airport, on the east side of Denver, instead of wind maps from Rocky Flats. Fires at the plant, as well as leakage from drums stored on site that were full of radioactive and hazardous waste, were known to have contaminated the site and the surrounding environs. The controversy was around how much contamination had taken place and how dangerous it might be. It still is.

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