Colorado arsenal cleanup turns 15,000 acres into wildlife refuge
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado has been transformed from a former chemical weapons manufacturing site into a 15,000-acre wildlife refuge. The site, once heavily contaminated, now supports hundreds of species after a long-term environmental cleanup effort.
Why it matters
It serves as a successful case study in environmental remediation and the restoration of industrial sites for ecological conservation.
Just 10 miles northeast of Denver, Colorado, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is now a vast urban wildlife sanctuary where bison graze, bald eagles fly over lakes and black-footed ferrets live in the grasslands. Covering about 15,000 acres, the refuge is home to more than 330 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish.But the landscape once had a very different purpose. According to University of Colorado, Denver, in 1942, during World War II, the US Army selected about 17,000 acres of farmland in Commerce City for the production of chemical weapons and rocket fuel. From the 1950s through the 1980s, facilities at the Arsenal were also leased to Shell for pesticide production.Decades of chemical manufacturing left the land and groundwater heavily contaminated.
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