Industrialized Cyclist Notepad

That’s right, 2003.

Toward the end of Kristen Iversen’s remarkable book, Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, she provides a detailed account of a severe plutonium fire that happened in Building 371 at Rocky Flats in May 2003 in which Rocky Flats firefighters put their lives at risk in order to protect innocent people both on and off the site. By the time of this fire, I had for a decade been attending Rocky Flats-oriented meetings at the rate of two or three per month as a member of a number of advisory and oversight bodies focused on trying to get a responsible cleanup at  Rocky Flats. When the fire happened, those of us engaged closely in Rocky Flats matters were awaiting publication of the final legally-binding Rocky Flats Cleanup Agreement by the Department of Energy and the cleanup regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. Despite all this close attention to what was happening at Rocky Flats, I and others around me never heard that there was another serious plutonium fire at Rocky Flats in May 2003. No one from the federal and state agencies responsible for day-to-day activities at Rocky Flats, no one from Kaiser-Hill, the cleanup contractor, no one informed us of this fire.

It might as well have been 1957 when a plutonium fire at Rocky Flats resulted in the largest single release of highly toxic plutonium to the offsite environment and the public heard not a peep. Forty-six years later, not a peep.

via Rocky Flats « LeRoyMoore's Blog.