The Rocky Mountain News had a good article today on how nature is reclaiming the now closed Rocky Flats site. Quoting the article:
People have become rarities at the now-defunct atom bomb plant, vastly outnumbered by coyotes, deer and owls.
Rocky Flats was once a sprawling complex where workers produced 70,000 nuclear weapons. In the past 10 years, thousands of workers dismantled it building by building and hauled off thousands of truckloads of radioactive waste.
Demolition workers packed up and left in October, leaving the 6,000 acres of foothills prairie to the occasional environmental regulator or researcher checking on the cleanup.
Heavily armed guards protecting deadly plutonium have been replaced by a 4-foot- tall wire fence that might stop a cow, but little else.
Rocky Flats is home to 108 species of songbirds, 23 species of raptors (birds of prey), 2 species of upland game birds, 49 species of waterfowl, 38 species of mammals, 14 species of reptiles and amphibians, and 11 species of fish. The buffer zone was largely untouched during the years of weapons production and will be the first area opened to visitors when the Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge opens sometime next year.
Read the rest of article on the Rocky Mountain News.
