Down in the Dump

That kind of brush-off doesn't go over well with the neighborhood. In fact, the EPA's abrupt change of policy and the state's novel interpretation of Colorado law has convinced some community members in Overland Park that there's "something more" behind the effort to cement Shattuck's toxic soup into place.

"The governor's been particularly silent on all this," Teresa Durrant notes as she thumbs through one of her notebooks. "We'd like to know why that is."

Roy Romer did receive a $20,000 campaign contribution in 1994 from Dwayne Andreas, the chief executive officer of the Archer Daniels Midland agribusiness leviathan and a member of the board of directors of Salomon, Inc. But the governor's office denies any connection between its support of the health department's decision and the campaign contributions.

"The governor has been kept continually apprised of the situation at Shattuck," says press secretary Jim Carpenter. Carpenter says the governor is aware of the difference of opinion between Denver health officials and state health officials but has been "supportive of what the state health department has been doing." Any suggestion of the Dwayne Andreas influence, Carpenter adds, "is just ridiculous."

Despite the neighbors' questions and Shaun Sullivan's impassioned constitutional arguments, there is virtually nothing stopping Shattuck from starting the final step in cementing the Monolith in place. The EPA projects that crews will begin pumping fly ash into the mountain of dirt within the first two weeks of July.

The irises in Irma Zimmerman's yard are still in bloom, swaying back and forth in front of the sign she has pounded into her yard protesting the Shattuck site. But she has all but given up. "I don't know what they can do once they start cementing it all in," she says. But every day she still walks the block and a half to see how much has been done "in the pit." And every day she reports back to the others--Durrant, Sandy and Orr--on whether the tractors have been moving, or if part of the fence is missing, or if new graffiti has appeared on the mound. Zimmerman watches with the same interest, the same tenacity, that kept her glued to her back porch in 1988 when the twister came down the street and took the roof off her neighbor's house. Now, like then, the thought of an unstoppable force is somehow hypnotic.