Federal uranium waste cleanup in the 1980s missed more than 100 properties.

DURANGO» It turns out more than 100 properties in Durango were missed during a massive, multimilliondollar cleanup in the 1980s of radioactive waste that was once used for the construction of homes, buildings and roads.

Now, more than three decades later, the state of Colorado’s health department says these hot spots that slipped through the cracks need to be cleaned up.

“We’re now looking to raise the awareness of this potential issue in Durango,” said Tracie White, a remediation program manager for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “It’s been on our radar for a while, and we’ve been laying the groundwork. Now, it’s coming into place.”

Durango is no stranger to the issues left behind from the town’s legacy with uranium mining.

In the 1940s, the U.S. government built a mill on the northeast side of Smelter Mountain, now the Durango Dog Park, to reprocess uranium tailings for sale to the Manhattan Project, which produced the world’s first atomic bomb.

After extracting uranium, though, what’s left behind is a gray, sand-like waste product that can be filled with radioactive components, such as radium and radon. In Durango, this pile grew to 1.2 million cubic yards — enough to fill nearly 400 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Over the years, people freely used the uranium mill tailings in construction around town, said Duane Smith, a local historian and former Fort Lewis College professor. It was as easy as driving your truck to the waste pile and taking a load.

“People didn’t understand the real danger,” Smith said. “As Durango started to expand, the easiest thing to tap were those uranium piles.”

The uranium tailings were a cheap, easy material to work with and were used for the foundation of buildings and homes, driveways and roads, including sections of Camino del Rio. The radioactive waste was even used as a substitute for sand in gardens and sandboxes.

The practice went unchecked until the tailings became a major public health concern in the 1970s, which prompted Congress to pass the “Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act” in 1978 to tackle the 24 worst uranium sites around the country.

In the 1980s, the U.S. Department of Energy estimated 122,000 cubic yards of radioactive waste had been used in and around Durango homes, businesses, public buildings, roads and parks, and that it would take years and millions of dollars to remove it all.

Greg Hoch, the city of Durango’s longtime planning director, now retired, said federal government officials went up and down Durango streets surveying for hot spots. In the end, most of the high-risk sites were removed and cleaned up, he said.

“Generally, the program worked, and there wasn’t a lot of controversy,” Hoch said. “It was viewed as being successful.”

But properties were missed, not just evidenced by this recent announcement from the state health department. In 1997, it was discovered that even more hot spots beneath Durango homes and streets remained contaminated by tailings, a discovery that “unsettled” the city at the time, according to The Durango Herald archives.

This time around, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment is trying to spread the word that uranium mill tailings contamination potentially still exists on about 115 properties in and around Durango, but at this point, it’s still a bit of a guessing game.

The state health department said surveys in the 1980s estimated that 915 properties in Durango were believed to have the uranium waste byproduct. While most were cleaned up, there has always been an understanding that some likely escaped the effort, she said. Recently, however, CDPHE was able to home in on which properties may still pose a risk after records from the 1990s were digitized.

“Now that the records are more easily accessible and searchable, we are able to identify properties that may still have tailings remaining,” White said.

Health officials suspect properties have been passed over for a number of reasons: tailings could have been relocated, properties could have been partially but not fully cleaned or, in some cases, the homeowner at the time refused to take part in the project.

Homebuyers and sellers are not required to test for radon or uranium issues. However, if a seller is aware of an issue, he or she would legally have to share that information, said John Wells with the Wells Group.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet and U.S. Rep. Scott Tipton have drafted federal legislation that would require the DOE to give land to the state health department for use as a storage site for the tailings.

When uranium decays, it produces a radioactive gas called radon that, when inhaled, has been linked to higher rates of lung cancer. Both uranium and radon are naturally occurring and found in elevated levels in southwest Colorado.

Aside from outright removal of tailings, radon issues can also be mitigated by creating proper ventilation in a house. Each situation is different, in terms of the levels of radon and how much it would cost to deal with the problem, and all that information remains unknown in the case of Durango’s newly identified hot spots.

But unlike in the 1980s, when the federal government covered the bill, cleanup costs this time will fall to the property owners.