2000-10-21 - 16:17 MDT

October 21, 2000

Today/Yesterday

In the paper today it tells about a contractor finding a container of Sarin nerve gas while cleaning up an old area at Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Not surprising in the least, to me any how, the carelessness of government contractors and weapons manufacturers had us between the rock and a hard place for it seemed like centuries. East of what used to be called Derby, Colorado -- The Rocky Mountain Arsenal was built taking in a vast area of one time farmland, some time in the early 40's or late 30's.

Along about the time our country was building up for the inevitable oncoming war. We moved to East Denver in 1937 when a military air field (Lowry Air Force Base) began to be built on the site of the old Phipps sanatarium and Buckley Field was in process of being built. And you know, I do think that we were still shipping scrap metal to Japan even then. At that time the Holocaust was pretty well under wraps too, at least here amongst us Gentiles.

Derby then, was sparsely settled, mostly by poor people like us. Production, later of a binary version continued into the late eighties. Along with that, out there Shell Oil was building insecticides for a long time, polluting at a great rate also.

The big poison gas bombs and big containers of stuff were shipped to Tooele Army Depot near or in Dugway Proving Grounds, in the Great Salt Lake Desert and to some atoll in the Western Pacific for disposal.

On the west, almost to the foothills, north of Arvada (another suburb of Denver) Rocky Flats facility built triggers for atomic bombs -- and who knows what else. The superfund work goes on out there, recovering and disposing of plutonium and other hazardous materials. One could look back from the highway between Golden and Boulder and see the very easy descent into the very heart of Denver. An heh - heh - heh "Incident," out there would have let the consequential poisons roll downhill into town. An explosion of any proportion out there would have depopulated the whole metro area. There still are many cases of Beryllium poisoning being dealt with, including office help who had walked through the plant frquently. The thing that captures my Nanny is that beryllium was known to be poisonous long before Rocky Flats was thought of, but was apparently ignored by management.

I don't think it is just the Denver area being involved - - Hanford Washington is in a maggot gagging site too in the present day. With a little research other sites can be named. Back in World War one days there were facilities here in Denver which used radium for various purposes. One of which was to make the hands and dials of watches luminous for military use. There were quite a number of women who suffered from that, they had pointed the brushes with their lips so as to make the fine lines necessary on the watch dials. That problem was taken care of with the, new "Super Johnny Come Lately." funds. Another thing here in Denver is the Shattuck Chemical site, within a few blocks where I was raised. I would have to do research on that one, needless to say the debris left from that was so dangerous that super-fund procedure decided to cap the site with x amount of clay, and x amount of waterproofing and leave it lay. That doesn't work and everybody knows it, the slightest earth tremor cracks the containment and leak it will. It does beat kids scuffing in the dirt back and forth over the empty area, but not by much. Any how, now they are going to dig the whole schmear up and ship it off to somewhere ?, to get it out of Dodge.

Considering the disposal of trash in general, I think we are about to smother under the mountains of landfill, if we don't die of the contamination being spread around in our living spaces. Shipping it out to sea is not a solution either, it just makes a pitiful situation worse. Disposal by rocket ship to Mars ? Who can afford that ? Now days our trash receptacle here fills almost with one meal's trash, cans, cardboard, yadda, yadda. My God, containers within containers, enclosed in plastic and carried home in plastic bags. Most of the damn stuff is not bio-degradeable (sp ?) even close stacked newsprint has been uncovered in a landfill and found to be in as good condition as it was when thrown out tens of years ago. The rat population is growing greatly as the landfills proliferate and the danger of Plague carried by them grows greater. And this is not a crying of "Wolf." Prairie dogs out here have been found late this season to be carrying Bubonic Plague. It could happen.

Someone e-mailed me this morning and I replied before I read the Newspaper -- I think the only thing I was wrong on was my thinking that the waste from the Arsenal was being shipped to WIPP in New Mexico.

I hate thinking about this type of thing, because it makes me feel that we never learn and are forced to deal with problems by seniority, Today/ Yesterday.

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