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Who Are the Citizens of  CCAT?

CCAT is a local, grass roots organization that formed after the Cotter Corporation’s uranium mill announced plans to import radioactive/toxic waste. We are a diverse volunteer group of educators, business professionals, health care workers, business owners, county and state employees, retirees, homemakers, students and others. We love our region and want to preserve its rare assets: Nature’s Beauty, Clean Air, and Fresh Mountain Water.

Our goal is to educate ourselves on industrial operations that threaten these assets, our health, economy, or tourism. We will continue to pass this information along via the media, special meetings, newsletters, our website, and local events.

Current laws provide public involvement in decision-making, and CCAT has addressed our County Commission, City Councils, and attended public meetings. We testified at legislative hearings resulting in the passage of House Bill 1408. Though not perfect, it gave more rights to our community threatened with becoming a radioactive dump. We will continue to work with local, state, and federal officials on these issues. Please join us and do your part to preserve our environment.  Please attend public meetings, when announced.  

DEAR READER

You and I are neighbors. We call Cañon City home because it is a wonderful, quiet, small and beautiful part of Colorado. There is a wealth here that far exceeds money – there is community. I grew up here, went away to college and came back to raise my family exactly because of the small town atmosphere. I live here because of the community.

Some of you may know me as "Gingerbread Red" because of my red hair (which only gets a little help these days) and my 18 years of seasonal Gingerbread construction. Or, you may have seen me at the Open Pantry division of the Fremont County Fair, where I have been superintendent for almost (good grief is it really) 25 years.

My love for Fremont County has stood the test of time. I am neither an activist nor a wild-eyed rebel. I do find myself in the position of knowing that our community is threatened. I cannot pretend not to know or allow the community’s future to be jeopardized by bad or uninformed decisions. My father taught me that your community is what you make it, "Don’t turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to its needs," he said.

You and I are also neighbors to the Cotter Uranium Mill, which is owned by General Atomics. I have friends and acquaintances that work at Cotter. My father worked there. Cotter has not been a good neighbor. Cotter is responsible for the Lincoln Park Superfund site. Cotter allowed contamination to seep through the ground and foul its neighbor’s wells.

The dangers that are part of their kind of business were not respected. Employees were put at risk and suffered the consequences of their exposure. My father died a little over a year ago at age 71, a good 30 years younger than his mother was at her death. His workers compensation case proved that his lymphoma cancer was due to an accumulation of 700 times normal uranium in his system directly attributed to exposure at Cotter.

The bar has been lowered if we think that shortening people’s lives is normal, or if radioactive wells are normal, or if mocking Colorado’s laws as a "bump in the road" is normal.

We are all part of the Fremont County community. It will take us all to raise the bar back up where it belongs. Grab on and start lifting this is a big chore and this community is worth it!

Jeri L. Fry, CCAT Co-Chair

Fremont County Doesn't Need Radioactive Waste

Citizens in Fremont County are dismayed at the proposed shipment of 470,000 tons of toxic and radioactive waste from Maywood, New Jersey to the Cotter Uranium Mill in Cañon City, Colorado. This became public knowledge on February 26, 2002, which certainly does not qualify as good public notice when it appeared in the newspaper of a town over 40 miles away.

Colorado Citizens Against ToxicWaste (CCAT) formed immediately upon news of Cotter’s plans. We are the people who live in Fremont County. We are not routinely activists. As an organized collective, we did not exist prior to March 7, 2002. CCAT represents the community that was not consulted or involved in Cotter's plan to become a long-term storage site and processing center for someone else’s Superfund radioactive and chemical waste. We number over 4,000 at last count and are growing as residents become aware of the issue. And we are outraged!

Cotter is the only remaining operating conventional uranium mill in the country. But, it was never intended to become a long-term storage facility for toxic and radioactive material beyond what it generates itself in milling ore. Cotter is located 1/4 mile from our city limits, and 2.5 miles from the center of town. After becoming a Superfund site itself, while the mill was dormant for almost 15 years, a new residential area with hundreds of homes was developed a stone's throw to the west. The local golf course shares the mill’s northern boundary, and hundreds of Lincoln Park homes and businesses lie below the facility to the north and east. The Wet Mountains are due south of the mill’s compound. The Arkansas River and thousands of Fremont County residents are down-hill, down-wind, and down-stream of the dusty, barren facility with 144 acres of toxic radioactive lakes called tailings ponds. The Maywood waste will be stored along the edge of the ponds, and the waste that is processed from Li Tungsten, Sequoyah, and elsewhere, will empty into the toxic soup of these lakes.

With this in mind, the following Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulations seem to have been ignored in choosing a site for Maywood and other radioactive waste. NRC regulations criteria relating to the operation of uranium mills and the disposition of tailings or wastes, and choosing a site, state:

"The general goal or broad objective in siting and design decisions is permanent isolation of tailings and associated contaminants by minimizing disturbance and dispersion by natural forces...The following site features which will contribute to such a goal or objective must be considered in selecting among alternative tailings disposal sites or judging the adequacy of existing tailings sites: Remoteness from populated areas..." (NRC,10 CFR 40: Appendix A, I. Technical Criteria).

If Cotter and their parent company General Atomics is allowed to go forward with the plan to become a radioactive toxic waste recycler and dumpsite for the nation, we fear they'll not be around to clean up the mess in the future. As of April 22, 2002, Cotter had not provided the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment with an adequate financial assurance warranty that would guarantee money for clean-up when they close and decommission. On the one hand Cotter/General Atomics testified at the Colorado Senate and House committee hearings that waste disposal was only a side business, and on the other hand they have said in local news articles that they will go out of business if they can't become a disposal/processor site for radioactive waste.

Good business decisions are based on accurate information and common sense, not just dollar signs. Our community's environment, future economy, local property values, tourism, and public health and safety are worth more than a few dollars gained by this enterprise, that will be (according to Cotter's own projections) buried and gone in about 20 years. Go to our address page and write to our government officials, demanding that they stop Fremont County and Canon City from becoming a national radioactive toxic waste dumpsite.

Colorado Citizens Against ToxicWaste
PO Box 964
Canon City, CO 81215-0964
(719) 275-3432   or (719) 275-4010

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