Workers planned to break ground Sept. 9 on parts of the planned Rocky Mountain Greenway, a hiking trail near a former plutonium-pit factory, a group trying to stop the trail said in court papers.
Planned activity for next week includes beginning construction on abutments for pedestrian bridges and a pedestrian underpass, according to a notice filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by Physicians for Social Responsibility.
The group in January sued the Department of Transportation to stop construction of the greenway, where once stood an industrial-scale factory that powered the U.S. nuclear-weapons buildup of the Cold War by annually churning out about a thousand of primary-stage cores over nearly 40 years.
Physicians for Social Responsibility said it got the planned construction start date in an email from the Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration. The email was attached to Thursday’s court filing.
The group has said the trail planned by the Department of Transportation (DOT) passes through areas heavily contaminated by plutonium from Cold War pit production. The plaintiffs want the department to do another environmental review of the planned trail site. DOT published one in 2020 that found little risk to trail users of radioactive contamination.
Rocky Flats opened in 1952 and shut down in 1989 after the FBI raided the premises and found evidence of environmental crimes to which plant operator Rockwell International later pleaded guilty.
