Overland neighborhood leaders and public officials gathered Saturday to celebrate the final cleanup of the Shattuck Superfund site on South Bannock Street.
U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette and Richard Poole, a representative of U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard’s office, joined residents at the nearly 6-acre site in south Denver that used to contain low-level radioactive waste.
There was a time when the site was so feared that Tom Anthony had to use his daughter, Margot, to drive the point home to political leaders.
She asked during one of Allard’s town-hall meetings whether Allard, or anyone for that matter, would want to live next to a low-level radioactive waste site.
“Nobody could answer that one,” Anthony recalled Saturday, adding that from then on the Republican lawmaker was on the neighborhood’s side.
That was in 1998. Now Anthony’s daughter is 18. On Saturday, Anthony grinned as he watched his two younger children – 4-year-old Colter, dressed in football gear, and 2-year-old Arnan – tumble on the green grass at the site.
“This is what we have been waiting for: 5.9 acres of nothing – nothing bad, nothing but good,” said Jack Unruh, another resident involved in the fight.
It wasn’t always good. In 1992, residents learned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency planned to seal waste at the site with a 14-foot cement cap.
The waste was the legacy of the Shattuck Chemical Co., whose plant salvaged uranium from defective fuel rods rejected by nuclear reactors.
David Vargas, 47, another resident, remembered when his children came home to ask him why a security guard had been posted on the street where they biked.
He recalled his children joining forces with other children for one rally. They all gathered up trash for makeshift drums they pounded to make their presence known.
The EPA agreed in 1999 to embark on a $50 million cleanup of the site, removing 250,000 tons of material and shipping it to a Utah dump.
“Thank God, they moved all that stuff out of here,” Vargas said Saturday.
Deb Sanchez, another instrumental resident, lost a husband to a heart attack during the struggle. She is a minister after studying at Denver’s Iliff School of Theology.
Now fighting ovarian cancer, she said that it was only when she and the others living in the neighborhood stressed their similarities with other public officials that they began to make progress.
“In this place, at least, we have beaten our swords into plowshares,” she said, her voice tremulous with emotion, in reference to Isaiah 2:4.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-954-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
