It is up to a federal district judge in Washington, D.C., to decide what comes next in an advocacy group’s lawsuit to force an additional environmental review for a hiking trail near what used to be the Department of Energy’s Rocky Flats plant in Colorado.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly heard oral arguments last month on whether to issue a preliminary injunction in a suit brought by Physicians for Social Responsibility and other plaintiffs against the Department of Interior and the Department of Transportation. The plaintiffs seek more environmental analysis on the Gateway Trail being developed at the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge.
The latest legal briefs were filed March 22 and March 29 with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Kelly heard oral arguments March 6 on a requested preliminary injunction, which would effectively hold up construction of the Gateway Trail, expected to start between June and September, until more environmental review is done, according to online court records.
The federal defendants say the plaintiffs have little to offer other than a 2019 soil sample, taken during prep work for a toll road, which showed elevated levels of plutonium contamination. Additional soil sampling by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment in 2020 showed little health risk.
An environmental assessment of the eight-mile trail in 2020 by the Federal Highway Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found no significant impact. But Physicians for Social Responsibility maintains a more detailed environmental impact statement is needed given the trail will pass through “the most heavily plutonium contaminated portion of the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.”
Alternate routes proposed by the plaintiff groups would have avoided the “wind blown area,” according to the suit.
In October 2005, DOE and its contractor completed an accelerated $7-billion, decade-long cleanup of the Rocky Flats Plant. The nearly 4,900-acre peripheral operable unit, which excludes the 1,300-acre central operable unit, was transferred to Interior in July 2007, to be managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
DOE made thousands of plutonium pits a year at Rocky Flats, which opened in 1952 and closed in 1989 after the FBI raided the facility to investigate felony environmental crimes, to which plant operations contractor Rockwell International later pleaded guilty.
