Army denies Piñon Canyon contaminated

Fort Carson officials have to be wondering this week if their much-resisted effort to expand the Piñon Canyon Maneuver Site is worth it.

Having barely finished containing a wildfire that burned nearly 50,000 acres of the training site northeast of Trinidad, Army officials were confronted Wednesday with allegations from state Rep. Wes McKinley, D-Walsh, that he has soil samples showing unusually high concentrations of uranium at four sites on the 238,000-acre site.

"I certainly don't think Congress should be thinking about expanding Piñon Canyon until we get answers to the questions about where the uranium came from and whether that land needs to be cleaned up," McKinley said Thursday.

McKinley, who first came into statewide prominence as foreman of the federal grand jury that investigated problems at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant, said he has heard rumors over the years about toxic materials being dumped at Piñon Canyon. He said he collected his samples during a tour with Army officials in May 2007.

"You don't want young soldiers training out there if the ground is contaminated with uranium," he said, noting that the soil samples he had tested showed uranium concentrations ranging from 20 parts per million to 60 ppm. McKinley said the radioactive heavy metal naturally occurs in Colorado soil at about 5 ppm. McKinley's allegations have caught Fort Carson officials flat-footed. Tom Warren, the deputy garrison commander in charge of the Piñon Canyon expansion, told reporters Thursday he was unaware of any uranium content in the soil at the training area and pointedly denied any suggestion the Army has used "depleted" uranium ammunition in live-fire training there or allowed any materials to be dumped there. Warren acknowledged, however, that Army officials may have to test the soils at the training area to address McKinley's claim of contamination.

Officials at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment said that McKinley's samples did not indicate a dangerous level of uranium on the ground. They said natural outcroppings of uranium and uranium dust can have much higher concentrations than McKinley's samples.

"Uranium ore has a concentration of about 50,000 parts per million, so soil contamination of about 60 parts per million is not really a health concern when it comes to exposure," said Steve Tarlton, who heads the radiation management unit of the health department. "The only real health risk at that level would be if people were inhaling it over a period of time."

State officials said they did not have the authority to investigate contamination at Piñon Canyon and that it would be up to the Defense Department or the federal Environmental Protection Agency to do so.

McKinley said he gathered the samples a year ago but did not inform Fort Carson officials of the results until the press conference this week. Efforts to get the state health department or the EPA interested in investigating also failed, he said.

"I believe the state has ( joint) jurisdiction over Piñon Canyon and I think we need to get answers as to what's out there," he said.

A coalition of ranchers around Piñon Canyon has been fighting the Army's expansion plans for several years now, but McKinley's allegations took them by surprise as well.

"I know there is uranium out there in the ground because my uncles used to take Geiger counters out there back in the 1950s when the uranium boom was on," said Las Animas County Commissioner Gary Hill, whose family lost land to the Army when Piñon Canyon was created. "But I never heard there was any contamination problem. The Army would have to be crazy to let that happen."

The contaminated soil issue has cropped up just as the Army is preparing to send a report to Congress outlining all its reasons for wanting to add another 414,000 acres to Piñon Canyon.

Earlier in the week, Rep. John Salazar, D-Colo., an opponent of the expansion, succeeded in getting the 2009 military construction bill to include language blocking the Army from spending any money on the project for another year.