Junction Daily Blog: Western Colorado Talk and Opinion

Black Sunday's Aftermath

April 29, 2007

OK, it's too hot to work outside now (I'm a wuss). So I'll write something.

As I browsed through the Black Sunday commemorative in this morning's Sentinel, one of the sidebars caught my attention and got me thinking. That's always dangerous. In that article, Bob Reece of First American Title said that it was psychology that eventually got us out of the Black Sunday funk. It wasn't psychology at all. It was cold, hard, cash. Government cash.

In my humble opinion, what saved this community in the years following Black Sunday was UMTRA, the Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action program.

UMTRA wasn't government welfare for an economically depressed area. Its roots went back to the early 1970s, predating the "bust" by a decade. It just happened, purely by coincidence, to hit us at the right time. I believe it singlehandedly saved the local construction industry.

Between 1951 and 1970, during the height of the Cold War, the Climax Uranium Mill along the Colorado River processed uranium that the Federal Government needed for weapons and reactor fuel. The uranium processing generated about 2.2 million tons of tailings. Some 1.9 million tons were deposited on the 114-acre mill site, which is now Los Colonias Park. The rest, about 300,000 tons, was simply given away to anyone who wanted it. The tailings were fine, sand-sized material with excellent compaction properties. With most of the uranium removed, the tailings were thought to be safe to use as a construction material: as fill, and as aggregate in concrete. Wrong. Although the uranium itself was gone, what was left behind in the tailings was the radioactive daughter products of the uranium decay chain. As the daughters continued to decay, the tailings gave off dangerous, cancer-causing radon gas. By 1965, when the practice of giving away tailings was discontinued, the material had been used in or under as many as 5000 structures in Mesa County.

It was an embarrassment. In the late 1960s, one of the TV networks did a special on Grand Junction, the city that glowed in the dark. But it was more than just an embarrassment. It was a real, honest-to-goodness health problem. Some after-the-fact computer models suggested that 589 people would have died of radiation-related causes in Grand Junction alone if the tailings had been left in place. There was one person killed in an industrial accident during cleanup of the Climax mill site. The net result of the mill-tailings cleanup, therefore, was 588 lives saved in this community alone.

As far back as 1972, probably as a result of negative publicity, the government decided to do something about the tailings it had let get away. That's when Congress authorized the Grand Junction Remedial Action Program, a small project unrelated to the UMTRA program. It was a relatively low level of effort that was designed to clean up about 600 of the most contaminated properties. And it did, in a trickle of a couple of dozen properties each year. It was clear that at that rate the job would never be done.

In 1978, Congress passed the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act (UMTRCA). It was a much more ambitious project to clean up mill sites all over the west that sold their uranium exclusively to the government, and vicinity properties contaminated with tailings produced by those mills. One of the provisions of UMTRCA was that work couldn't start in earnest until the Environmental Protection Agency developed a set of cleanup standards. There were planning and characterization activities that could go on prior to the development of the standards, but little could be done in the way of actual cleanup because no one knew what the cleanup standard was--no one could say for sure when was a property was "done."

Let's look at what was happening in parallel, in the time immediately following Black Sunday. With workers leaving Western Colorado in droves, it was very difficult to sell homes. You couldn't even give them away. Suddenly jobless, many families were simply walking away from their homes to get out from under the payments. Property foreclosures were at a record level. The last thing anyone wanted to do at that time was to build a house. After the jobs that were lost directly because of the closure of oil shale projects, the construction industry was the next casualty. The local construction industry was essentially devasted.

Completely unrelated to the Black Sunday events of 1982, after five years of work, the EPA released its cleanup standards in 1983. Work could finally start in earnest on the UMTRA program. In Grand Junction, that work included cleanup of the Climax mill site and more than 4,000 residences and other properties that were contaminated with tailings. Up-valley, closer to "ground zero" of the oil-shale bust, there was another mill site in Rifle that needed to be cleaned up. The mill-site projects were administered by the DOE UMTRA Project Office in Albuquerque; the Grand Junction Vicinity Properties Project was administered by the DOE Grand Junction Projects Office, located between Orchard Mesa and the Redlands along the Gunnison River.

The mill-site cleanup jobs were huge earth-moving projects that were conducted by large companies. They provided lots of jobs--good paying construction jobs--that kept some semblance of a construction workforce in place in the Valley.

On the other hand, most of the Vicinity Property jobs were much smaller. With the exception of a couple of dozen very complex projects (for example, the Jarvis property along the Colorado River west of Fifth Street, and the removal of more than 30,000 yards of contaminated material from under downtown sidewalks), almost any mom-and-pop operation with a bobcat, a dump truck, and a few laborers could bid on Vicinity Property work. Many of them did. For a while, it was the only work in town.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the surplus of housing and the quality of life here attracted thousands of retirees from outside the area. A couple could sell a home in California, pay off their mortgage, and pay cash for a home in Mesa County with the equity that was left. With the retirees came a robust service-based economy to take care of their needs. The bust was over. People started building again. Fortunately, there were healthy companies left in the area--companies that were kept alive in the interim by mill tailings projects--that could build those houses.

Through Fiscal Year 1994, according to a GAO report, the mill tailings projects in Grand Junction alone had infused more than $650 million in direct, outside cash into our community. Another $117 million was spent through FY-1994 in Rifle. By the end of remediation activities, more than $900 million was pumped into the Grand Junction and Rifle economies. Turn that money over four times, as many economic models do, and you get a full appreciation of how important it was at the time. Virtually all of that money came in from outside the area and was spent paying local hires who spent the money locally on food, clothing, housing, consumer goods, amenities, and taxes. That money didn't just keep mom-and-pop construction companies alive, it kept everyone else alive too.

Contrast that with the service-based economy of the late 1990s "golden years." That economy merely recycled money. UMTRA saved our bacon. Nine-hundred-million bucks isn't "psychology." It ain't hay either. Timing is everything. It all hit at the right time.

The benefits went both ways. Because the construction industry here was in a serious slump, the Federal government probably got the Grand Junction vicinity properties cleaned up for a lot less money than it would have under any other circumstances.

This little article wasn't meant to be a comprehensive history of the UMTRA program in Grand Junction. That story can't be told in this small space. Rather, it was meant to serve as a reminder about a story that's still out there waiting to be told--how UMTRA carried this community through the 1980s in the aftermath of the biggest "bust" in our history. (If you want to read a little more history, there's a pretty decent summary history in a report by the Environmental Law Institute that was written for another purpose. I used that report as a source for some of the numbers above.)

The role that UMTRA played in ending the dark days of the bust has long been overlooked. Hopefully one day, while there are still people alive here who remember it, it will be fully documented. It was a much bigger deal than people realized at the time.

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