LOVELAND — Funeral-home director Rick Allnutt wants to calm fears that his planned crematorium might blow toxic fumes into subdivisions along U.S. 287.
But there are two things he refuses to do.
One suggestion from Larimer County officials is too expensive.
The other too macabre.
Allnutt could install a $500,000 scrubbing system on his smokestacks that ensures mercury fumes from cremated bodies won’t seep into the environment.
“That is a cost this business will never recover,” Allnutt said.
The alternative requires Allnutt and his staff to remove tooth fillings from the mouths of bodies before they are sent to the business’ ovens.
“Basically, we’d have to disfigure someone, and I won’t do that to someone’s mom,” said Allnutt, whose family has been in the mortuary business for more than a century.
Other man-made items — such as pacemakers and artificial joints — are routinely removed by staff members before cremation. But Allnutt said he and his employees lack the expertise to take out fillings.
“We’d have to break that person’s teeth, and I would have no idea what I’m doing,” he said.
However, if he refuses to extract fillings or add expensive filters to his smokestacks, Larimer County won’t allow Allnutt to consolidate his crematorium operations at Resthaven Memorial Gardens, just north of Loveland.
Allnutt, it turns out, is paying the price for the growing popularity of cremations and the amount of potentially dangerous mercury that is spewed out in the process.
“No doubt power plants and cement manufacturers are probably the largest contributors to mercury in the environment,” said Doug Ryan, environmental health planner for the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment. “But for the first time, mercury released during cremations is on the radar screen for a lot of people.”
Amalgam dental fillings, which are a mercury alloy, are vaporized and released through the crematorium’s smokestack during cremations.
In high enough concentrations, Ryan said, mercury emissions can seep into water, the air we breathe and humans and animals — causing long- and short-term health problems.
Mercury migrating from the air into bodies of water already has prompted Larimer County to issue fish-consumption advisories for three area lakes: Horsetooth, Boyd and Carter.
Ryan and other health officials concede, however, that they are not sure exactly how much of a mercury risk crematoriums pose.
“This sort of thing has been below our normal thinking for quite a while, until just a couple of years ago,” said Mark McMillan, manager of the mercury program at the Colorado Department of Health and Environment.
That was when health officials began studying other, seemingly minor sources of mercury, such as dentists’ offices.
“And at first glance, cremations wouldn’t seem to amount to a lot of mercury,” McMillan said. “But when you multiply the thousands of cremations around the country . . . there is a potential for that number to get large.”
Allnutt estimates that he performs about 450 cremations a year at his two cremation machines on Riverside Avenue in Fort Collins. That area is industrial, and the cremation operation there meets all state and local air-quality standards, officials said.
But when Allnutt proposed moving the cremation operations to Resthaven, where the surroundings are zoned for agriculture, he had to meet a new set of county environmental rules, Ryan said.
A study last year showed that with minor modifications, the Resthaven crematorium could meet air-quality standards.
Still, there are worries that too much mercury from Allnutt’s operation could be dangerous to nearby homes and schools.
“It’s a case where lower is better,” Ryan said.
In November, the Larimer County Planning Commission agreed, voting unanimously against recommending Allnutt’s request to move his crematorium. Neighbors of Resthaven say they will again oppose Allnutt on Feb. 11 when he goes before the Larimer County commissioners.
“It’s not like we are enemies,” said Dennis Lynch, who lives in Bruns Estates near Resthaven. “I like Mr. Allnutt. But I don’t want to breathe his poison.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
