Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate 70 Superfund Site

Site summary

Several sources of pollution impact the Globeville, Elyria-Swansea communities, one of which is historic smelting in the area. Although the smelters shut down many years ago, we are still working to clean up the pollution they left behind in the soil. Parts of the neighborhood have been designated as the Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate-70 Superfund Site, which allows the Environmental Protection Agency to identify responsible parties, collect money, and clean up the contamination the smaelters left behind.

The 4.5-square-mile area is in the north-central section of the city and county of Denver, Colorado. Historically, the area was a major smelting center in the western United States.

Beginning as early as the 1870s, two smelting plants – Omaha & Grant and Argo – operated at the site. They refined gold, silver, copper, lead and zinc until the early 1900s, when operations ceased. Operations deposited heavy metals in area soils and contaminated groundwater at the smelter locations. 

After the EPA discovered contamination, they listed the site on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List in July 1999. To manage site investigations and cleanup, EPA divided the site into three operable units (OUs): 

• Operable Unit One (OU1) is residential soils.
• Operable Unit Two (OU2) is the former Omaha & Grant smelter site.
• Operable Unit Three (OU3) is the former Argo Smelter site.

Operable Unit One (OU1) included all or part of five neighborhoods – Cole, Clayton, Elyria-Swansea, southwest Globeville and Curtis Park. It included residential yards in the site area where levels of lead and/or arsenic in soil presented an unacceptable risk to human health. There were about 4,500 residential properties in the unit, most of which were single-family homes.

EPA sampled 99 percent of residential properties in Operable Unit One and removed contaminated soil from about 800 of those that needed it. They removed contaminated soil to a depth of 12 inches and replaced it with clean soil. EPA and the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment deleted Operable Unit One from the National Priorities List in September 2019.

Current activities

The Superfund program is focused on the highly industrialized area known as Operable Unit 2. This area includes part of the National Western Stock Show and the Denver Coliseum. There are no residences in this area.

 Vasquez Boulevard Community Advisory Group

A Community Advisory Group (CAG) can assist the community in understanding the multi-phase Superfund process, what contaminants are addressed, and the timeline for cleanup. The cleanup process is technical and can take a long time, so the Community Advisory Group meetings are a great way for the community to learn more and stay up to date about what is happening. These meetings provide space for you to voice your concerns about the cleanup and engage with agency representatives from the CDPHE and the EPA. 

Upcoming CAG meeting (To be arranged)

Helpful resources

• Gardening safely in the Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate 70 area April 2020 En inglés y español.
• Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate 70 vicinity map.
• EPA Vasquez Boulevard/Interstate 70 site information.