CDPHE's Galant denies that the department is considering revising its standards to accommodate the CDOT plan. "We use EPA's risk standards and toxicity levels, and we always have," she says. "That has not wavered. We want to make sure that people and the environment are safe."
Health officials have other reasons to be concerned about CDOT's proposal, too. Until recently, the data analysis being performed for the agency by a California laboratory, upon which many of the assertions about the size of the plume and the extent of contamination have been based, may have involved some fundamental miscalculations. Last fall, health-department staffers drafted a detailed memo outlining their concerns about the information they were getting from CDOT and concluded that "a large number of false negative data was generated on these projects."
The confidential memo has since leaked further than the CDOT contamination itself, generating questions about accurate data at other hazardous-materials sites around town. The same California lab, Quanterra, is engaged in similar analysis of indoor-air samples at the Redfield contamination site in southeast Denver, once home to a gunsight manufacturer, and at the former Lowry Air Force Base. While there's no evidence the data in those investigations is erroneous, the health-department staffers wrote that the confusion over CDOT's data could complicate the cleanup in several ways.
"It is possible that attempts to commit fraud against the State of Colorado have occurred," the memo warns. "We should maneuver with caution and deliberation to ascertain if this is the case." It was also possible that the errors were unintentional; but in either case, "CDOT may not have appropriately delineated, remediated and monitored the full extent of the area [of contamination]."
Roitman says his department has since obtained several months of raw data collected by CDOT and is satisfied that the lab is now analyzing the data correctly. The new readings aren't radically different from earlier results; if anything, other sources report, the previous data was full of "false hits" that may have exaggerated the scope of the problem. Yet the entire debacle has further delayed the crucial decisions health-department officials must make about the second plume and the standards CDOT will be required to meet.
It's been twelve years since a maintenance crew pulled the leaky storage tanks out of the ground, and CDOT estimates that it will take another ten to twelve years to clean up the damage. The department plans to inject nutrients into groundwater to multiply bacteria that will then devour the contaminants; as the groundwater is cleaned, the need for air monitoring in various buildings also diminishes.
That's the plan, anyway. But Zodrow sees the cleanup effort to date as riddled with mistakes and delays, often to the advantage of CDOT. "If this contamination had any other source, the Superfund program would have stepped in by now," the attorney says.
CDOT may not end up getting all the breaks it wants, but staffers can still consider their situation fortunate compared to that of polluters in the private sector. Last month the CEO of Thoro Products was sentenced to prison for illegal storage and disposal of hazardous wastes. Thoro, a manufacturer and distributor of cleaning products, had allowed chlorinated solvents to seep into groundwater in a light-industrial area of Arvada over a period of many years.
The plume generated at the Thoro site is much larger than the one in Glendale--up to a half-mile wide and 1.5 miles long--and reaches at least one well that provided drinking water for two homes and a local tavern. But there was no evidence of indoor air being poisoned by Thoro, and the degree of groundwater contamination at most test sites was no more severe than that caused by the CDOT leak. Both cases involve careless storage of similar chemicals and considerable delay in reporting leaks after they occurred, yet the cases were handled quite differently. The prison sentence given to Thoro president Richard Newman by Jefferson County District Judge Frank Plaut is believed to be one of the toughest ever handed out for environmental crimes.
The state gave Newman fourteen years. Meanwhile, in a heavily residential neighborhood on the other side of the metro area, the state gave itself another decade or two to make things right.
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