The setting was a sun-washed Saturday under a brilliant blue sky with shimmering snow-capped peaks in the distance and gleaming light-rail trains gliding along in the backdrop.
On this glorious morning, children ran across the new grass that replaced a forbidding concrete mountain with “Danger: No Trespassing” signs at 1805 S. Bannock St. Politicians delivered unctuous speeches, neighbors cheered and hugged one another, and everybody from a beleaguered Environmental Protection Agency spokesman to a rabble-rousing minister proclaimed pride and respect and boundless mutual affection.
Then they all sat down to break bread together at a neighborhood church.
It was surreal.
Looking back over the 17-year history of the Shattuck Superfund saga, all this peace and harmony seemed bizarre.
It was as bewildering as the “For Sale” sign on the land that once was deemed so radioactive, so polluted that it was declared off-limits to human habitation for 200 years – or maybe it was 2,000.
Now the nearly six acres at West Colorado Avenue and Bannock are cleaner than your average California spinach patch, and the neighbors no longer have to worry about what’s blowing in the kitchen window on a summer breeze.
It’s a testament to defiance, not peace. It’s an example of what can be accomplished when seething public outrage is mobilized against unbridled corporate greed and bureaucratic indifference.
Call it Exhibit A in the case against being polite.
At one point long about 1996, “the antagonism was at such a pitch, some of our neighborhood meetings were really pretty embarrassing,” said Jack Unruh.
Unruh and the rest of the Overland Park residents had good reason to be angry.
They had been jerked around by the EPA, which at first had denied the existence of a Superfund site in the area, then promised to clean it up and then bowed to pressure from the brokerage house that owned the site. The EPA decided to allow the radium, uranium, thorium and heavy metals to remain there entombed in concrete – because it was cheaper.
The residents had been ignored by the state, which acquiesced to the plan to leave the toxic waste just 4 feet above groundwater, just shouting distance from the South Platte River.
The Shattuck neighbors struggled to get the city to help save what Unruh called “a little gob of spit of property” in a working-class neighborhood 4 miles from downtown Denver.
After they spent years poring over documents and assembling data about the contamination that was spreading in the air and leaching into the water, and after they finally got the city, the state and their federal representatives to listen to them, the Overland Park neighbors demanded action.
When they convinced the EPA to reverse its decision in 1999 and order that the waste be removed, it was major.
Federal agencies almost never back down. They don’t have to. They know that most of the time, citizens will give up in the face of relentless stonewalling.
“Ours was a slow-rolling thunder,” said Unruh. “This is one thing we won’t have to explain to our grandchildren.”
But Unruh warned of other things he fears they will have to explain.
“The Superfund that helped clean up this site is now a mini-fund” since Congress has given polluting industries a free pass, he said. “The EPA libraries we used to find out about what was buried at Shattuck are closing, and we see more bad ecological news in the media every day.
“We can’t go back to business as usual,” he said. “It was business as usual that screwed up this site in the first place.”
Sure, the lovefest at 1805 S. Bannock St. last weekend was swell. The celebration was years in the making and well-deserved. The good guys won.
Here’s to the good guys.
The party’s over now, though, and Unruh’s right, it’s time to get angry again.
Because if you’re not angry, it’s only because you haven’t been paying attention.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@ denverpost.com.
