City Park Ferril Lake, Denver, Colorado

(Reprinted entirely from Press Release of 9/12/07 from Adrienne Anderson)

Or is it a government/corporate cover-up?

In the absence of a credible investigation by city, state and federal officials, some with overt conflicts of interest over the matter, the Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center, a membership-based non-profit organization with members throughout the Denver/Boulder metropolitan region and beyond, is investigating, and our preliminary findings cause major concerns, not only about the dead ducks and other wildlife, but about whether our tax-payer funded agencies are doing their jobs and conducting a proper investigation to abate the ongoing tragedy and wildlife emergency in Denver.

And a cover-up? YES, as evidence obtained in an RMPJC investigation and a years-long prior investigation by former University of Colorado at Boulder Environmental Studies instructor and whistleblower, Adrienne Anderson have unraveled through voluminous documents reviewed and obtained from official agency files.

In case you missed it, you can listen to the KGNU's Morning Magazine for September 10, 2007 for the report by international journalist Claudia Cragg, reporting about the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center's News Conference at Denver's City Park concerning the continuing crisis of duck deaths in Denver. The report aired is about 10 minutes into the half hour news program.

For the full statements made at the news conference by Adrienne Anderson and LeRoy Moore, Ph.D. of RMPJC, along with Joan Jacobsen, a member and former Co-Chair of the Citizen Advisory Board of the Lockheed Martin/US Air Force Restoration Advisory Board, which oversees the clean-up of the Superfund site cleanup at the Lockheed Martin complex soutwest of Denver (speaking individually) and Ron Forthofer, Ph.D., a retired scientist from the University of Texas School of Public Health, see the RMPJC website on the dead ducks issue.

Cragg's report and RMPJC's preliminary investigation, to date, have documented the failure of agency officials to properly address the wildlife emergency, given what RMPJC and other believe to be the most likely, though hidden source of the problem: the exposure of ducks and other wildlife to sewage water effluent containing toxic and radioactive wastes flushed to Denver's sewage treatment plant, and being re-routed to City Park lakes and other selected public areas in a controversial scheme unprecedented anywhere in the United States.

For further background on the controversial policy of redistributing Superfund-site laced sewage effluent water around to public water ways with only partial treatment, and what RMPJC believes to be the primary cause of the duck death crisis in Denver, read "Dirty Secrets," a three part series written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Eileen Welsome, and a previous column by Adrienne Anderson, "Ducking the Issue" published in the Colorado Daily.

For still further background on the issue, please watch and listen to the Amy Goodman's "Democracy Now!" program "Recycling Plutonium: How the EPA is Dispersing Toxic and Radioactive Waste From the Lowry Landfill to the Sewage System and Onto Colorado Farmlands and Public Parks" aired and broadcast nationally on May 4th, 2004. (Note, Amy Goodman is coming to speak in Denver this Saturday at the Central Presbyterian Church at 7:30 pm). As also reported by Project Censored in 2000, who named this one of the Top Ten most underrported stories in the entire U.S. for the year 2000, this may also help to explain why the Dean Singleton-owned Denver Post and Scripps-owned Rocky Mountain News (and affiliated media, now also owned or affiliated with the 2006 merged media corporation Prairie Mountain Publishing Company that controls virtually all major print media along the front range) have refused to report about this, and failing to disclose in recent years their own secret role in secret deals - with scores of other polluters in this region - to flush their own toxic printing inks and solvents once dumped for years at the Denver-owned, Waste Management, Inc.-operated Lowry Landfill back into the public domain, in solution with wastes from Rocky Flats, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, Coors, Shattuck, Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) and nearly 200 other polluters, now being dispersed with only partial treatment by Denver Water to fill City Park lakes and routed to other parks and public areas.

The Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center has asked Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper for a response to our concerns, and has notified all Denver City Councilpersons (with no response, to date) now with our calls for the reversal of the controversial, nationally precedent-setting policy allowing toxic and radioactive Superfund site wastes mixed with sewage effluent water, with partial treatment, to be used for our public park lakes and other uses as "recycled water," given the predicted consequences which RMPJC strongly believes - based on our research - to be causing adverse effects and deaths in wildlife, ranging from mutated fish found downstream below Metro Wastewater, hundreds of dead ducks dying in and around Metro Wastewater's sewage treatment ponds in the winter of 2007 and the current crisis, still continuing, of large numbers of ducks succumbing and drowning in City Park lakes, in the heart of Denver, and near the city's zoo.

For further information about this issue, keep in touch with us at RMPJC. We need your support to get to the bottom of this issue, conducting an independent investigation for protective action, wildlife protection and public health.

For further information, contact: Adrienne Anderson, Coordinator The Nuclear Nexus: Working to End Local Hazards and the Global Threat Rocky Mountain Peace & Justice Center (303)444-6981 (message) Web: http://www.rmpjc.org/ E-mail: aa_rmpjc@earthlink.net