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About 5,000 acres of a former Army chemical weapons plant are clean enough to be removed from the federal Superfund cleanup list, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday.
The move paves the way for the Army to transfer the land to ownership of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has managed the Rocky Mountain Arsenal site as a wildlife refuge under an agreement with the Army since 1992.
"This is a major step, as this will be the first of the arsenal property transferred to the U.S. Department of Interior," said Laura Williams, EPA team leader for the arsenal project. "This makes the refuge official."
The acreage wraps around the 17,000-acre arsenal's boundaries and was formerly used as a buffer between the plant and the community.
The northern edge of the southern buffer includes some of the homestead-era woodlands and reservoir shorelines that are home to eagles, waterfowl and one of the densest concentrations of trophy mule deer anywhere in North America.The cleanup is proceeding from the lightly contaminated perimeter toward the arsenal's interior, which once was dubbed the most toxic square mile in the country.
Thousands of acres of contaminated soil have been removed and placed in a new low-level waste landfill, and the areas replanted with native prairie grasses.
The EPA said other parts of the arsenal already are clean enough to remove from the Superfund National Priority List but that officials elected not to make this land available for transfer yet.
Two complexes with more than 400 buildings were built at the arsenal, where military munitions and domestic chemicals were produced from the 1940s to the 1980s.
The mission then shifted to weapons destruction and cleanup.
Both the North and South plant complexes have been razed, but crews must remove polluted soil and replace it with clean material.
Other major cleanup projects include remediation of the infamous Basin F, a liquid-waste lagoon that once was a toxic deathtrap to waterfowl; construction of a new hazardous waste landfill for Basin F waste; and searching through a series of old munitions dumps and trenches on the east side of the tract that potentially contain unexploded shells or other old ordnance.
"That work is a little more complicated," Williams said.
The $2.2 billion project is the Army's biggest environmental cleanup and is scheduled to continue through 2011.
The Army and petrochemical giant Shell, whose operations contributed to the problem, will always retain possession of the landfill and responsibility for future cleanups.
Last year, the EPA deleted 900 acres along Quebec Street on the arsenal's western border from the Superfund National Priority List.
That land will be sold to Commerce City, and the proceeds will be used to fund refuge activities.