Environment: Hot Town

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Except on the coldest days of the Colorado winter, the doors of the Pomona Elementary School annex, on the outskirts of Grand Junction, are opened during recess. The reason is that the building is radioactive. Unless the rooms are aired, radioactive gases and particles seeping through the floors cause the radiation in the school rooms to rise dangerously above safe levels. In fact, during the summer months when the school is closed up, radiation rises to a level 18 times higher than the guideline established by the U.S. Surgeon General.

Pomona Elementary's problem is shared in less acute form by buildings in at least a dozen other Colorado communities and by Grand Junction itself, an important uranium-producing town until the ore petered out in the mid-1960s. The villain is uranium "tailings" —the gray, sandy debris that piled up in small mountains beside the mills as refuse from the mining operations. The tailings were known to contain some residual radiation, but below levels the AEC then considered to be a health or safety hazard. As the town boomed along with its uranium mines, Grand Junction contractors seized on the tailings as a convenient and cheap source of landfill and concrete mix. Over the years, thousands of tons of tailings went into the construction of schools, homes, commercial buildings, sidewalks, an airfield and a shopping mall.

Cleft Palates. By 1961, says the AEC, "form letters" were mailed to health officials warning that while the agency did not have regulatory jurisdiction over the tailings, their radium content could be hazardous; health officials, however, claim they never received the letters. In 1966 the Colorado state health department attached test film badges to several buildings in downtown Grand Junction; the badges promptly turned black from radioactivity. This led the state to pass legislation requiring contractors to get permits before using tailings in any project.

In 1970 a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Dr. Robert Ross, noticed an increase in the number of cleft palates and other birth defects in the area, and communicated his concern to Dr. C. Henry Kempe, chairman of the pediatrics department at the University of Colorado's Medical Center. Their joint studies, reported last October, indicated that the incidence of cleft lip and palate was almost twice as high in the Grand Junction area as for the rest of Colorado, the birth rate significantly lower, the death rate from congenital anomalies 50% higher.

But the town was slow to take alarm. Paul Hathaway, regional editor of Grand Junction's Daily Sentinel, explains: "Uranium turned this from a sleepy little cow town to a booming city. They accept it as part of their existence. That's why you don't see a lot of immediate concern about the tailings." As Frank Folk, who is principal of a local school, puts it: "I'd just as soon be here in the clear air with the tailings as in some of those cities with their smog."