When Colorado’s congressional delegation works together, things get done, especially for southern Colorado. Now the next collaborative project for our senators and congresspeople is pushing the Army to quickly clean up decades of pollution and dangerous munitions at the Pueblo Chemical Depot.
Space Command will be headquartered in Colorado Springs after our Senators especially congressmen Jason Crow and Doug Lamborn put their foot down and refused to accept a scandalously executed basing location process that for a time threatened to take Space Command from the Centennial state. Now Crow and Lamborn are working together to create a Space Force National Guard.
Representatives Ken Buck and Joe Neguse led the delegation’s push for the U.S. Senate to finally recognize Camp Amache as a federal historic site that will be managed by the National Parks Service.
Senator Michael Bennet fought alongside Democrats and Republicans from Colorado for years for the Arkansas Valley Conduit to bring clean drinking water to thousands of Coloradans in the southeastern plains who had been promised the project for decades. Bennet and John Hickenlooper secured $60 million in Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Act to finally make the dream a reality.
Working diligently behind the scenes of this progress is Rep. Diane DeGette, the senior member of our delegation and the coordinator of a regular Colorado delegation meeting to plan just such coordinated efforts. We’ve been told by several people familiar with the meetings that Congresswoman Lauren Boebert, whose district includes southeastern Colorado and Pueblo, is the only person not to attend the bipartisan Colorado delegation meetings.
But the next frontier for the other more productive members of Congress is pushing the U.S. Army to complete the cleanup of the Pueblo Chemical Depot. The old weapons facility which until recently housed thousands of tons of chemical weapons and munitions needs an estimated $600 million investment from the Army to clean up a legacy of contamination.
The restoration of the land to industrial standards is critical for the area’s economy.
Thousands of acres of prime Pueblo real estate are tied up by a combination of toxic chemicals leached into the ground by industrial spills and unexploded ordinances that were once ignited by a lightning strike.
The Army has reduced the groundwater contamination at the facility but TNT and TCE concentrations still exceed the EPA’s standards for drinking water. So far, according to CDPHE none of the contaminants have spread beyond the site, and the Army is actively treating groundwater and returning it to the ground cleaner.
Still, local residents south of the depot in Avondale reported to The Denver Post’s Bruce Finley that they don’t drink the well water out of fear of contamination. The area faces the same problem with unsafe drinking water as much of the area. The main trunk of the Arkansas Valley goes straight through Avondale illustrating the importance of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act finally funding projects like these that have languished for years.
Cleaning up the Depot is critical not only to the environment but to the economic vitality of the region.
Russell DeSalvo, executive director of Depot’s state-created economic development group, PuebloPlex, has been working to make use of nearly 1,000 storage structures at the site and some of the useable land, including subleases for the space, aviation, and train industries that could bring needed jobs to the area.
But an estimated 7,000 acres cannot be used because of buried munitions.
“It is unsellable if it is not cleaned up. It becomes a burden for the community and for the Army and for the state to monitor this contamination in perpetuity if it is not handled appropriately,” DeSalvo told The Post. “People could be killed if they find a piece of unexploded ordnance that may be live.”
The Depot was once a hub for jobs building chemical weapons and explosives. Then it became a hub for the slow decommission of those same weapons that had been stored. Now that the cleanup is complete, the land must be put to use for the community. A third-life of activity, and not relegated to the same fates as other military waste sites that were remediated only to the level needed to become wildlife refuges portions of which are closed to pedestrian traffic due to fear of ongoing pollution just below the surface could be disturbed accidentally.
Pueblo doesn’t need a wildlife habitat.
Our Congressional delegation should work with laser focus to ensure the Depot is quickly cleaned up to the standards for industrial use. The more quickly the Army funds and prioritizes the project the better for the community.
Sign up for Sound Off to get a weekly roundup of our columns, editorials and more.
To send a letter to the editor about this article, submit online or check out our guidelines for how to submit by email or mail.
