Colorado's Nuclear History: A GRATE Story and Learning Experience. Our "Poisoned Nest" per Dr Kristen Iversen and Others

I was born in Denver at the height of the 'cold war', to parents who had moved in the mid '50s to an area southwest of town in the Rocky Mountains, later made 'infamous' by a Comedy Central show called "South Park". Co-creator Trey Parker is ten years my junior. I think that Trey got an extra dose of something I'm deficient in perhaps: and perhaps I've gotten another does of something others don't have. I've come to realize as an adult that I just pick out 'patterns' more than most people. My father had been a 'cold war'/nuclear era military officer, on active duty in places like New Mexico and Englad, and in the reserves in Denver. He didn't talk about what he did at the time, around me at least, but it had to do with figuring and planning related to evacuating the Denver area, he revealed later. 

From way back, I was 'noticing' that there were a lot of illnesses in the people from our community, and their offspring once they were older and 'grown and gone' in some cases. Nothing seemed to me to be anything like came out in famous cases like "Love Canal" or Erin Brachovich's movie about an area in California which was from one particular chemical that lead to cancer. We had a mix. We weren't in the 'downwind' direction, typically, of RF, so I'm not putting RF high on the list of contributors that 'loaded' the people's bodies down and took them from the natural wellness state to 'illness', there are many contributors to this, it is important to remember. I suggest people look for our topic on "Load Theory" written by invited expert Marc Spurlock, MD. 

And, while I have studied a little extra in recent years on the subject of 'epigenetics' because a lot was coming out in the magazines I still keep my eyes out for at the store, Time and National Geographic, I don't have any particular ability with genetics information. But I do appreciate those who do and what an emerging, important aspect for health care it is.  

But I never heard anything about the area I am from being studied, or study results being released/published, even when doing some Internet searching after that became a tool I knew how to use. I moved on after high school to Colorado State University and worked in science and research there as well as health education in the student affairs division, and took classes in health promotion and drug/alcohol awareness in addition to the coursework required for my bachelor's of science in occupational therapy.  Due to multiple learning disabilities that went undiagnosed and treated until middle age, I graduated at age 36, proudly due to the extra struggles involved, and started a new career in allopathic medicine in 1996.

In 2004 I moved to the western 'slope' of Colorado and struck up a conversation at a concert with a woman who worked for a research center in Grand Junction that studies environmental illness. It turns out that this was a hub for not only uranium production, but the Department of Energy built a large 'compound' here, which continues to have about 150 employees and contract employees. Being friendly with the woman next to me at the concert, I mentioned where I was from, my health issues, and my suspicion that something was 'up' in the area I was from.

"That's a well-known area for problems" was the response. Well, THAT's interesting, why do YOU know that but WE don't? (I thought to myself). I realized that people in the area I'd moved to seemed to have a lot of illness also, and not any one thing, just 'everything'. I've heard others say that products are sometimes test marketed here because statistically, it's a desirable mix of people statistically to sample from. "Very average" you might say, for United States testing. One of the major employers in the area, or funders to various contractors, is the Department of Energy, or DOE. I've provided an interesting video and overview about the experimental, underground nuclear blast in 1969 40 miles to the east, towards Denver, to test effectiveness of nuclear blasts for 'fracking' (essentially). 

The conversation with the environmental health researcher in Grand Junction was in 2005, the same year I started providing occupational therapy services within a physical therapy clinic within a large, allopathic medical building that had just been built; it was under construction and nearby the facility that 'drew me' to move to the area. In 2007 my first patient of the year was a woman with fibromyglia, who learned of me not from her MD, who was also my MD and knew what I worked and did for a living, but from her massage therapist located next door to the MD. I connected her to a PT in our group that helped her a great deal, as well as the pain management specialist psychologist.

He was so thrilled with how we were acting in a collaborative way for patient benefit that he suggested we create an education group. We met every week for an hour to lay out ideas of how we could go about having a group for patients and providers to learn together about how to more successfully treat chronic illness that has chronic pain as one of the symptoms. Our first meeting was the first day of summer.

By the end of the year we had an active group of consumers/patients and had invited a palate of providers to come and speak to us. But they weren't coming to learn from the other providers; they were interested, but it meant loosing two hours of patient care time. That is when I started thinking about having a website for such education to the providers and consumers. 

At the start of 2008, I gave notice that I'd be not available after the end of February providing the OT services in the allopathic medical building. I tried very hard to hand that off to other qualified OTs or PTs in the area, but we were doing 32 hours a week that was basically 7 am to 6 pm, which doesn't work for people with children to work. It took up extra space to have a room dedicated to hand therapy, so that just had to 'die on the vine' and be chalked up to a great experience that I had in building something up and making it flourish. I was approaching 50 and felt like the next step for me professionally was to round out my health experience that so far was based in allopathic, insurance-based medicine.

So I headed out to create Lumigrate within a new clinic that was opening for 'outside th box' providers collaborating with functional and integrative medicine. (Integrate means to bring together and meld, and is half of the inspiration for the word Lumigrate. The other is related to our slogan about lighting the path to health and well-being.)  Plans are one thing, what ultimately unfolds in reality another sometimes, and ultimately Lumigrate captured in video a time capsule of one year that held much promise and I again chalked  up to experience that was worth it all, but the clinic team was completely diverged and in different, separate offices within one or two years.

The provider that was there the longest, and throughout my time there, was the naturopathic doctor who specialized in 'environmental medicine'. I got such an appreciation for not only his type of medicine but for the people who came to be seen as patients. I had a similar variety of patients in my previous clinic as we took Medicaid, Medicare, and all the usual insurances plus those without insurance if they were wanting to pay cash. He was seeing a real 'cross section' from the area, and was the only provider of his type in the area, and I mention all this so that if you're reading and wondering about health effects that could be from environmental causes, you might seek out a qualified naturopath.

Please do realize that the changes in the various certification programs in the United States was slow to regulate in some cases, and there are basically 'two types of naturopathic doctor programs'. One is similar to going to medical or osteopathy school, with intensive in-person classwork and clinical experience before completion. The newfangled kind of N.D. degrees are designed to give some clinical and in person experience but has a lot of learning done independently, remotely from where the program leaders are.

But these providers can be wonderful resources, and I personally wish that the people around Rocky Flats learn of naturopaths and other providers who might help them offset what can be addressed through what some call 'alternative' or 'complementary' provider. It's a more natural and 'traditional' form of medicine that I think has real value. I speak from personal experience, as well as what I learned as a professional steeping for the year or so within an integrative clinic. I have clearly continued to steep in this, though through more 'national' and 'international' contacts, since Lumigrate launched in March of 2009. 

People everywhere have such increased burdens upon their body, mind, spirit systems, I hope they find these more natural forms of medicine. I have provided many examples on Lumigrate as examples for our YOUsers to learn about, and information on how to basically 'bird dog' them/find them in your own communities. Since many people might not have providers in their immediate communities, I have worked to find providers who will work advising people completely without face-to-face contact or minimally. Sometimes people living in a large area with all the provider types around them are unable to get to those providers due to limitations in their functional abilities. These providers often can be utilized by advocates or 'extensions' of the patient. Sometimes it is a person in the surrounding system who cares about the unwell person who might have the ability to reach out and start pulling on the rope, so to speak, then handing it over or sharing it with that person. 

You'll hear Kristen recalling the lovely memories she has of where she grew up; it sounds so similar to mine in many ways and was about the same timeframe. Horses, dogs, cats, rodents as pets -- in my case I wanted to grow food from a very young age and gardening was a major part of my time -- digging in the dirt. Kristen goes on to describe some of the illnesses that occurred in those living around Rocky Flats, and calls them the 'heros' in her book. What respect is shown for those who have illness. Often, we think of the big stories we hear of and lift those up to our pedestals, but ultimately isn't everyone who has gotten an illness inadvertently from the burdens pulling them from wellness a hero? I think so, particuarly as a person who has really never been 'well', and overall having worked to learn and address what I could. Millions share this experience in America; billions share it in the world. 

Kristen relates in the resources I set up, below, about being flooded by emails in the first week after the book release (and resultant local press/media which was mainstream as well as independent/alternative/online), with people who lived or still live in the area sending in more stories, similar to those she knew of and had included in the book. Here is the link to YouTube and the book's publisher's official trailer about the book, which has a nice interview and highlight photos and graphics (such as maps). www.youtube.com/watch . As people were made aware of her and the Rocky Flats issue in her case, I hope that people everywhere start seeing how their exposures are also significant, possibly, and start looking at their health issues as possible 'environmental illness', and address it in a way to contribute to being more in the direction again of "wellness". It's the state beings are designed to strive for.  

Rocky Flats (RF) is an incredibly emotional issue, as you'll see Kristen Iversen say (a PhD) in what I set up for learning / reading / viewing here. The link above specifies that it was 10 years of research, but she said elsewhere that it took her a long time to write the book to "get her whole heart and mind around the story" and then do the research. This resonated for me. Deeply. 

The book (and these videos) cover the history of RF, the history of her family and the people she knew, and the history of the cold war overall and how that was happening in 'our own back yard', without really realizing at the time, what a big deal Rocky Flats was. She only realized after she'd globe-trotted to Europe to write and find interesting stories, returning at the time The Wall came down in Europe, that she realized how much our 'back yard' had to do with the cold war era. 

I wonder what I, today, am not considering in my old back yard, or my current one. I encourage each person to consider pulling over for a while and taking a look at where YOU spent your formative years and since, up to the present. These are things which dovetail and support what our "Load Theory" topic by Dr Spurlock, which I referenced above, provided.

I recall the earthquakes we had in the 1960s that were attributed to Rocky Flats pumping fluids into the ground and setting off faults that were in the area. It was around the time that my father's 20 years in the Army/US Air Force were wrapping up. In the Reserves he was working on the team that addressed how to have Denver area evacuate if there were a nuclear event of some sort. Prior to that he was in the program related to the atomic bombs that became a big deal at and after the end of World War II. I didn't know all that when I was little though, that came out later when I was old enough or things like security clearances and classifications were lowered or dropped.

I remember that he said we didn't have anything to worry about related to all that. And he unplugged the televsion in the mid '60s, yet continued with the subscription to The Denver Post, Time Magazine, and National Geographic. I went to public school. And I had environmental illness symptoms since 'day one' perhaps. This, nobody 'labeled' as such until I got into working on figuring out my baffling symptoms and why they occurred, in order to reverse the chronic illness I've had as part of my adult time, more or less, in order to have less. Ideal would be none, but 'functioning acceptably' as a person my age, I'm satisfied with. I have learned a great deal along the way from these circumstances in my life, and additionally from going to a Colorado, public university offering a mainstream, allopathic medical degree program in occupational therapy. I graduated in 1996.   

I wanted to create a topic about the unique history we have in Colorado to share, inspired by Dr Kristen Iversen and the book she published in recent years titled Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats. 

Report Card is reviewed: 

 

F - Fire Safety

F - Waste Disposal

D - Criticality (reason for D:

F - Inventory Control

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myXswNUQgLs

0800036 - Project Rulison - 1969 - 7:28 - Color - Project RULISON was a gas stimulation Plowshare Program nuclear test. Plowshare was a program that promoted using the energy produced from nuclear explosions for peaceful uses and applications.

 

The 40-kiloton RULISON test was detonated 6 miles west of Grand Valley, Colorado, on September 10, 1969. Its purpose was to release natural gas reserves locked tightly in the sandstone and shale Mesa Verde formation. The estimated cost for the RULISON project was 6.5 million dollars, funded primarily by the Austral Oil Company of Houston, Texas.

The video shows the explosion, underground rock fracturing, gas release, and underground well operations in schematic animation. Footage of the site, including the actual nuclear explosive package, is shown before the test explosion, but not during or after the test.

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I've actually gotten to know people who work for DOE or their contractors and were involved in the cleanup or monitoring of this site, and of other former nuclear "test" sites. Sometimes the explosions were part of our country's plans to show our technologies to others in the world in order to flex our muscles. I think it is of value to share some of these key historical issues and encourage people to remember our history, study it you've not or have forgotten, and then look at today's issues with that in mind. History was something I wasn't so inclined to study as a young person, but I remember my mother telling me what an advantage it is to know when it comes to current issues and solving them. I have to say now, being the age she was at that time, I agree, and hope this has been of value to readers. ~ Mardy