WESTMINSTER —After seeing two dogs battle cancer she believes was caused by playing in a dog park next to the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, Denver resident Alesya Casse has started a campaign to educate dog owners about the area’s history.
“Dog owners are so passionate about the dog park, but may not realize how close it is to a former nuclear weapons factory with a history of severe environmental contamination,” said the 35-year-old corporate paralegal. “I don’t want to try to close the park, but just educate people.”
The Street is part of the 15,000-acre Colorado Hills Open Space, which is due east across Indiana Street from the former nuclear weapons plant. The plant operated from 1952 to 1992. Since 2007, it has been a national wildlife refuge.
Plutonium levels in the area of the dog park have been measured from three to 40 times the level of normal background radiation found along the Front Range. But officials from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and a host of other federal, state and local organizations say the levels are magnitudes smaller than anything that could have a discernible impact on human health.
Casse said she was spurred to act after seeing a friend’s dog develop bone cancer in his leg at the age of 4 after playing in the dog park almost every day. Around the same time, another friend’s young dog survived two bouts of cancer.
“The realization that this probably came from spending so much time in the dog park didn’t come right away,” she said, “but it was staring us right in the face.”
She has held workshops and spends a few afternoons every week handing out fliers at the park.
A 2011 test of plutonium levels commissioned by the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center showed levels of plutonium isotopes ranging from 0.019 picocuries per gram of soil to 1.579 picocuries, the same level of contamination measured 40 years ago during the heyday of production.
Carl Spreng, an environmental protection specialist and Rocky Flats project manager for the state health department, said that even at 10 picocuries per gram, a refuge worker with no protective gear could spend 18 years working eight hours a day on the site and would have a one in a million chance of developing cancer that would not have occurred otherwise.
“Everyone knows someone across the street or has a family member who got cancer, and the natural tendency is to find someone or something blame,” Spreng said. “There have been millions of analyses of radionuclides, and the risk assessments show that the levels both on and off site are protective of human health and environment, and that’s the bottom line for us.”
LeRoy Moore, a nuclear watchdog with Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, contends the site still poses a risk. He said an ongoing concern is burrowing animals that can bring plutonium-contaminated soil to the surface.
“There have been numerous studies, including one recently done by Columbia University, that have shown one particle of plutonium can create cancer in a mammal,” Moore said.
Bill Johnson, a retired veterinarian who owned three animal hospitals in Colorado and California — including one in Arvada downwind from Rocky Flats — said he’s not surprised to hear that dogs who played in the park have cancer.
“My biggest concern when I came back to Arvada to practice was seeing all these dogs with cancer,” Johnson said, noting two of his dogs got cancer after living in the area. “I saw more in one week than I would in a few months in California.”
Austin Briggs: 303-954-1729, abriggs@denverpost.com
