The final price tag to clean up Arapahoe County’s Lowry Landfill, Colorado’s biggest Superfund toxic-waste site, will be more than $82 million, according to an agreement filed Monday in federal court.
The proposed settlement – between federal environmental regulators, and Denver and several companies – represents a milestone in the 21-year effort to stem any public-health threat from the 508-acre site, officials said.
The landfill received an estimated 138 million gallons of liquid hazardous waste between 1965 and 1980, federal regulators say.
Officials estimate the cleanup will cost another $43 million on top of what has been spent and require monitoring and treatment for the next 30 years.
Denver will study the geology under the landfill to look for sandy channels that could lead chemicals under containment walls or into drinking- water aquifers.
The state health department, which criticized progress at the site a few years ago, says the consent decree will allow those studies to move forward.
“It’s a site where there is some investigating still to be done,” said Gary Baughman, state director of hazardous materials and waste management.
The other defendants in the settlement are Adolph Coors Co., Conoco Inc., Chemical Waste Management Inc., Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, Roche Colorado Corp. and S.W. Shattuck Chemical Co. Inc.
The agreement, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Denver, also requires Denver and its partners to reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for $13.9 million of the $22 million the agency has spent overseeing the site.
The agreement “provides a sound basis for a good cooperative relationship going forward,” said Pat Shanks, an attorney for the group of defendants.
“This agreement brings to a close a contentious chapter in the history of Lowry Landfill,” said Kelly A. Johnson, an acting assistant attorney general at the Justice Department.
The plan, however, will leave much of the contamination in the ground at a site where cleanup efforts have been hampered by apparent leaks in the pollution- containment system.
“This site is like a ship that’s sprung a leak,” said Bonnie Rader, director of Citizens for Lowry Landfill Environmental Action Now. “We can’t say the ship is sinking, but we keep finding more and more leaks.”
In 2001, the EPA released a five-year review showing that contamination had been found outside the site’s containment walls on the west boundary.
The settlement requires a water- treatment plant at the toe of the landfill to capture and treat the contaminated groundwater seeping off the site.
The wastewater will be released to Aurora’s sewer system.
The original cleanup plan called for contractors to dig up and truck away contamination from an area called the “former tire pile.”
That approach was abandoned in 1999 after high concentrations of vapors at an excavation area forced workers to evacuate the site.
Now, plans call for pumping wells to draw off only 20 percent of the estimated 131,000 gallons of liquids before the area is capped.
The six companies are responsible for contributing nearly 94 million gallons of industrial waste to the site, about 68 percent of the total volume of industrial waste found there.
Staff writer Theo Stein can be reached at 303-820-1657 or tstein@denverpost.com.
