Slipcovering a Superfund site. (Rocky Mountain Arsenal is toxic waste cleanup site and wildlife refuge)(includes related article)

Denver's Rocky Mountain Arsenal is - surprise! - a toxic waste dump and a wildlife refuge.

In the main lobby of Denver's City and County Building, an attractive map of the area's new airport displays distances to local attractions - buffalo Bill's grave, Lookout Mountain, a famous brewery. Conspicuously missing from these roadside attractions is the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, surely one of Denver's most unusual tourist attractions. The arsenal is both a Superfund cleanup site (one of the most contaminated in the United States) and a recently named provisional wildlife refuge - combining millions of gallons of toxic waste, bald eagles, and more.

At the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, an optimistic cohort - the U.S. Army, Shell Oil, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), local politicians, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service - are planning to turn the area into a wildlife refuge. (In the words of Colorado Cong. Patricia Schroeder, a "local Serengeti.") But their plans for the refuge seem to ignore the arsenal's special reality: It is home to what was once called the most toxic square mile in North America. The cleanup will cost an estimated $2 billion, and the army admits the process might take until the year 2020, "or longer, we just don't know." Meanwhile the arsenal, which has developed an aggressive education program, ushered some 24,000 schoolchildren through on wildlife tours last year.

The Rocky Mountain Arsenal, hurriedly built to meet U.S. weapons needs during World War II, began operating as a chemical weapons manufacturing plant in the high plains just eight miles northeast of Denver in 1942. Today, no weapons are produced or stored there, and only a handful of buildings are used by arsenal personnel. The contaminated buildings that remain are earmarked for decontamination and ultimately for destruction.

At one point in its 50-year history, the army facility employed thousands of workers; it manufactured such chemical weapons as mustard gas, lewisite, and chlorine gas. The arsenal also produced napalm during World War II. Officials say that by war's end, the arsenal had also produced more than 100,000 tons of incendiary munitions. And in the mid-1950s, during the early days of the Cold War, the arsenal was the primary production site for GB nerve agent, "a weapon as deadly as the atomic bomb and as frightening," according to a Denver Post article of the period.

Following the war, private industry manufactured herbicides and pesticides at the arsenal. Julius Hyman and Co., which produced pesticides at the arsenal, was acquired by Shell Chemical Co., a division of Shell Oil, in 1952. Shell …