The project will close the off-ramp Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. until Sept. 20. The ramp will be open Saturdays and Sundays, according to the news release.

To access Colfax Avenue during the closures, drivers can continue west on I-70 and exit to Tower Road, the release said.

The ramp is closing so crews can perform direct work in the I-70 median to build the project’s diverging diamond interchange, which will have advanced signaling systems and better lighting for drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists, according to the release.

Construction on the new interchange began last year and is expected to continue until late 2025.

The I-70 Picadilly Interchange Project is funded by the city, the Aerotropolis Regional Transportation Authority and a $25 million federal grant from the Federal Highway Administration, according to the city’s website.

The closure from exit 361 to exit 371 was instated by the Colorado Department of Transportation around 3:40 p.m. due to a crash.

It had reopened as of 5 p.m.

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This new U.S. Customs and Border Protection system compares a traveler’s photo to images already kept by the government, including passport and visa photos. The Transportation Security Administration agents at airport security checkpoints already use facial recognition technology when screening all travelers.

DIA officials announced in a news release this week that the facial scanning process takes about 3 seconds. They cast this as faster, better for the flow of travelers at the airport, and more accurate than relying on airport gate agents to conduct checks.

Anybody wanting to opt out can do so by advising gate agents, who then would manually scan that traveler’s passport, according to John McGinley, DIA’s aviation program manager.

DIA is the latest airport to implement facial recognition technology to support CBP, part of the Department of Homeland Security, in fulfilling a congressional order to implement better passenger screening on departing international flights. Other airports with the systems include those in Baltimore, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City.

Travelers insert their driver’s license into a slot or place their passport photo against a screen. Then agents instruct them to look into a camera screen, which captures their image and compares it to their ID. Private companies and federal agencies increasingly rely on similar technology that gathers biometric information such as facial, eye and fingerprint images.

Civil liberties and privacy advocates, including members of Congress, have raised concerns about how the data is collected, who has access to it, and what happens if computer storage systems are hacked.

CBP officials are committed to privacy obligations, DIA officials said in a news release this week. The agency has limited the amount of personal information it collects in the scanning process and photos of U.S. citizens are to be deleted within 12 hours.

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For 25 years, 10 city and county governments near the former nuclear weapons manufacturing site northwest of Denver have monitored for contaminants and other hazards through their participation in the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council. But now the council, which has met regularly to discuss conditions on the troubled property-turned-wildlife refuge is disbanding.

Broomfield pulled out earlier this week, joining Golden, Superior, Thornton, Northglenn and Boulder County in abandoning the council — a sufficient number of member defections to trigger the organization’s demise. The body will hold a final meeting this fall, clear the books and dissolve by early next year.

Deven Shaff, a Broomfield city councilman who has sat on the stewardship council for the past five years and serves as its vice chair, said its death doesn’t mean concerns about Rocky Flats will go away.

“You have an end to the stewardship council, but there is a story ahead for Rocky Flats,” Shaff said. “There’s a sense that there’s a new chapter for Rocky Flats.”

That new chapter could begin as soon as next week, when construction is set to start on two regional trail access points at the edge of Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge. Looming over the project is a potential ruling from a federal judge that could halt plans to build the planned underpass and bridge, which will bring the Rocky Mountain Greenway trail onto the refuge.

The stewardship council’s demise and the continuing controversy are the latest developments in the long and tortured history of Rocky Flats.

The weapons manufacturing facility opened in 1952 and made plutonium triggers — or fission cores — for the nation’s nuclear arsenal throughout the Cold War. On a windswept piece of Jefferson County prairie between Arvada and Superior, the ugly result of all that industrial activity was the creation of tons of hazardous chemicals and barrels of noxious waste, some of which leaked or burned over the years.

Rocky Flats, which employed about 40,000 workers over its nearly 40-year active phase, was closed down after the FBI raided the plant in 1989. It sent 70 armed agents in a convoy of vehicles to the U.S. Department of Energy property to ferret out suspected environmental crimes.

“No way” everything was cleaned

Despite a 10-year, $7 billion cleanup that ended in 2005, many remain leery of what Jon Lipsky, one of the lead FBI agents during that raid — and an outspoken critic of Rocky Flats for years — calls an “unlicensed nuclear dump.”

“There’s all sorts of infrastructure that exists underground, and nobody knows what’s there,” Lipsky told The Denver Post. “There’s no way the Department of Energy cleaned everything.”

The Rocky Flats Stewardship Council is compromised because the Department of Energy funds it and “runs interference” for it, Lipsky said. That’s a sentiment shared by the Boulder-based Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. Chris Allred, who works on nuclear issues for the center, said there needs to be an organization that can look out for public health “without being subject to regulatory capture by the DOE.”

The peace and justice center is not convinced that the 6,500-acre site, which opened as a national wildlife refuge six years ago, is safe for human recreation. It’s one of several environmental groups that sued the federal government in January in an effort to stop the trail connections from being built on Colorado 128 and Indiana Street.

About 1,300 acres in the middle of the refuge remains a Superfund site, off-limits to the public, where the plutonium triggers were manufactured inside what amounted to a small standalone city.

“Rocky Flats is not stable in the environment,” Allred said. “This will only be made worse if construction projects are allowed to continue spreading contaminated dust.”

Dave Abelson, the longtime executive director of the Rocky Flats Stewardship Council, flatly rejects the claim that he is bought and sold by federal interests, saying his accusers “have not shown a single example of where the funding source affected the actions or comments of the board or of the contract staff.”

“Not a single instance,” he said.

Abelson agrees that it’s time for the organization to sunset — not because it’s untrustworthy, he says, but because the science says so.

Water samples from the site have been relatively stable and within a safe range for years, while hundreds of soil samples — with the exception of one that generated headlines five years ago for its elevated plutonium reading — have also been deemed safe.

“Do you need the same type of intense focus that the governments have put on this?” Abelson said. “The answer appears to be no. You don’t need the same level of focus because it’s a stable site and has been for many years.”

Concern about lack of collaboration

The stewardship council grew out of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, which was launched in 1999. The council, created in 2006, was a more formal version of its predecessor and was created under a mandate in federal law to provide local communities a voice in the management and monitoring of contaminated sites nationwide.

The council has proven vital in looking for and identifying post-cleanup problems at Rocky Flats, Abelson said.

One year, city and county officials on the council challenged a plan by DOE officials to breach ponds on the site. They also expressed concern with the condition of Rocky Flats’ notorious landfills.

“The governments were alarmed when it became clear that portions of the original landfill that lie above Woman Creek were not stable,” Abelson said. “DOE eventually remedied the problem.”

In more recent years, things have been quieter, said Thornton Mayor Jan Kulmann, who chairs the stewardship council. She’s served on the body for a decade.

Thornton’s main concern is water quality, she said, with Standley Lake — just east of Rocky Flats — serving as a major source of drinking water for the city of 145,000.

“The data that we’ve been receiving from DOE … have not changed in 10 years,” Kulmann said. “We’re cautiously optimistic that it has reached a more stable condition.”

Broomfield’s concerns are different than Thornton’s, given its closer proximity to the refuge.

The city and county has been aggressive in separating itself from all things Rocky Flats in recent years. It started in February 2020, when the city’s elected leaders unanimously voted to pull out of the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority following the discovery in 2019 of an elevated reading of plutonium along Indiana Street and in the path of the proposed highway.

Not long after that decision, Broomfield withdrew from the Rocky Mountain Greenway project, resulting in the trail being rerouted through Westminster. But Broomfield Councilwoman Heidi Henkel isn’t so sure the city should have withdrawn from the stewardship council without having an “exit plan.”

“The only way to make government accountable is (that) you make everything public,” said Henkel, who served on the stewardship council for two years. “It’s disappointing to me that with a Superfund site there, we’ve decided to stop this group without any commitment to further the public discussion.”

While the Department of Energy will send quarterly water quality reports to the cities and counties that made up the stewardship council’s membership, Henkel worries about the lack of collaboration and shared knowledge that comes from everyone sitting down at a table together.

50,000 visitors to Rocky Flats

Seth Kirshenberg, executive director of Energy Communities Alliance, said the cities and counties around Rocky Flats are in a unique position because their advocacy organization — the stewardship council — is one of the first in the country to disband.

His Washington, D.C.-based group works with communities that are located near former nuclear weapons plants and nuclear energy facilities.

“Remedies fail and you have to keep on top of these issues,” Kirshenberg said. “The remedies need to be protective of human health and the environment. Hopefully, all we see is the use of the site — but if something happens in the future, they may have to put it back together.”

A Department of Energy spokesman told The Post that the agency would continue doing what it has been doing while the stewardship council has been active.

“The cleanup of the Rocky Flats site has proven to be protective of human health and the environment for nearly 20 years,” spokesman Jeremy Paul Ortiz wrote in a statement. “As we move into the third decade since cleanup, DOE will continue reporting on-site monitoring and maintenance activities and post this material on our public website.”

The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge saw 50,000 visitors in the most recent fiscal year, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

One of those visitors is Jeanette Hillery, a member of the League of Women Voters of Boulder County. She’s also been a member of the stewardship council since its inception 18 years ago.

She said she’s struck by how the contamination horror stories of decades ago still seem to guide people’s thinking about Rocky Flats today. The site isn’t pristine, she said, but the testing and data she has seen over the last two decades indicate the risk posed by Rocky Flats’ legacy is more than manageable.

“There are a lot of people who want to go back to the 1970s and 1980s — and think that what was going on then is still going on today,” Hillery said. “The testing indicates it’s safe.”

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Passengers posted photos of crowds packed into train waiting areas on social media and reported missing their flights, though airline officials contacted by The Denver Post did not provide an estimate of how many passengers were impacted.

The malfunction happened about 2:40 p.m. when part of a single train car came into contact with the rail, sending out “sporadic sparks” and arcs of electricity, airport spokesperson Courtney Law said in a statement.

Denver Fire Department crews responded to the airport, but smoke from the electrical discharge cleared before they arrived, Law said.

All terminal trains were stopped for roughly 20 minutes and began running at a reduced capacity as technicians repaired the damaged track, Law said. Airport crews repaired the track in just over an hour, and trains resumed running at full capacity by 4:30 p.m.

The incident caused four hours of disruptions to United Airlines operations, spokesperson Russell Carlton said in an email. Those included backed-up security lines and moving around employees to help customers, he said.

Southwest Airlines did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

There were 282 flights delayed and eight canceled at DIA on Wednesday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. That’s in the same ballpark as earlier in the week, when 373 flights were delayed Monday and 196 were delayed Tuesday.

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What it lacks is adequate creek access for visitors to stop and savor its beauty or hike along its banks. The highway, U.S. 6, is off-limits to runners and cyclists because its five dark tunnels are so narrow, and pullouts are scarce — with some posing traffic dangers. Motorists get only occasional glimpses of the soaring canyon walls above because the curving highway commands their full attention.

That’s going to change over the next two years, thanks to an ambitious construction project that will dramatically improve recreational access to the canyon. Jefferson County’s Open Space division is spending $80 million to extend the Clear Creek Canyon trail three miles upstream from its current terminus at Tunnel 1, which is located two miles west of Golden. About 1.25 miles of new trail is slated to open just west of Tunnel 1 next year, with another 1.75 miles to follow in 2026. Eventually the trail will connect with Clear Creek County trails through Idaho Springs and beyond.

If $80 million seems like a lot for three miles of concrete trail, it is. But the complexity of the project, with a narrow creek and highway hemmed in by steep mountainsides, presents major engineering hurdles. In some sections, the trail is being built on elevated concrete viaducts resembling the sweeping roadway decks of Interstate 70 as it runs through Glenwood Canyon.

The project includes seven new bridges over Clear Creek, one new bridge over the highway, a new underpass beneath the highway and two new trailheads with restrooms and parking spaces for 170 cars. A park at one of the trailheads will feature a one-mile loop for hikers and creek access.

“It’s pretty wild,” project manager Scot Grossman said while providing a guided tour of the area in mid-August. “What we’re doing is a generational project.

“This has statewide and national significance,” he continued. “We’re creating safe access to the creek, as well as all the recreational amenities – rock climbing, slack-lining, tubing, rafting, fishing, gold panning. I love the idea of little kids growing up in Golden 15 years from now, they get their little bike posses together on Saturday and ride up the trail to go fishing, climbing, or to ride a lap at Centennial Cone (park) and ride back down.”

“We’re building this for 100 years”

Great Outdoors Colorado — which distributes Colorado Lottery proceeds — provided a $7-million grant for the current construction project. The Denver Regional Council of Governments chipped in another $10.25 million. GOCO previously gave the Clear Creek Canyon trail effort $10.5 million for segments that have already been completed.

But the remainder of the $80 million is coming out of the Jeffco Open Space budget, which is funded by a dedicated 0.5% sales tax that voters approved in 1972. That tax is not subject to the restraints of the TABOR amendment, approved by Colorado voters in 1992, which limits the amount of revenue governments in the state can retain and spend.

“Most of the open space programs around the Front Range have a similar sales tax,” Grossman explained. “Ours predates Tabor by 20 years or so, so there’s no sunset (provision) on it, which is really fortunate for us. Other agencies have a 10- or 15-year sunset, and they have to go back to the voters to re-up their funding.”

CDOT is also working on the project in an effort to create safer motorist access to creek attractions than has been the case in the past. “They’re the other landowner here,” Grossman said. “Their mission is to get people through the canyon safely and efficiently. Our visitors, when they stop, they pull out in every little nook and cranny. Doors open, dogs come out, strollers, bikes. It’s just not a safe environment to recreate in.”

In 1871 a narrow-gauge railway began service in the canyon from Golden to the mining towns of Clear Creek County. The current construction project takes advantage of some of its grades. Prior to the construction of Interstate 70 in the 1960s and ’70s, Clear Creek Canyon was the primary route to the mountains for Denver motorists. .

Now, Jeffco’s Clear Creek Canyon Park is in the process of stretching up the canyon along the creek from Golden to Clear Creek County. The first segment opened in 2021 with the debut of the $19-million Gateway trailhead just west of the intersection of U.S. 6, Colorado 93 and Colorado 58. From there, the existing trail extends 1.75 miles to Tunnel 1.

The Clear Creek Canyon trail will be the middle segment of the greater Peaks to Plains trail, which eventually will extend 65 miles from the foot of Loveland Pass through Georgetown, Idaho Springs and Clear Creek Canyon to the confluence of Clear Creek with the South Platte River in Adams County. It is already complete from the Clear Creek Gateway trailhead to the Platte, near 74th Avenue and York Street, via Golden, Wheat Ridge and Denver.

“We’re building this for 100 years,” Grossman said. “We really want to make sure this is here for three or four generations. That takes time. The geologic, ecologic and hydrologic challenges are immense. We have world-class whitewater here that gets really high in the spring. And, you can see the geologic constraints. We’re in a deep canyon with rock everywhere.”

A floating trail, like a mini-Glenwood Canyon

Construction manager Jeff Hoge, a cyclist, already is looking forward to exchanging his hard hat for a cycling helmet.

“I can’t wait for this,” Hoge said. “I’m a cyclist, I grew up here, and I’ve never been able to ride a bike legally on U.S. 6. That’s exciting. As far as the construction part of it, this is a dream job for a construction manager.”

The three-mile section now being built will climb 300 feet from Tunnel 1 to Huntsman Gulch. All of it will be wheelchair accessible and comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, which means maximum grades of 5%. The walls of the canyon soar 1,000 feet over the creek, which often is very narrow, which is why construction engineers opted for building a viaduct through those sections. It also has less impact on creekside vegetation, they say.

“This is a heavy civil construction project, but we really pride ourselves on having a really light touch, a really surgical approach, because at the end of the day we are an open-space organization,” Grossman said. “We’re a balance of recreation and conservation.

“That viaduct, I think, perfectly sums up ‘heavy civil’ with a light touch. That is a difficult thing to engineer and build, but the impact on the land is way smaller and lighter than cutting out (a streamside slope) and filling back in,” he added.

To create the viaduct supports, workers drill 30 to 40 feet through surface rock and soil until they reach bedrock. Then they drill another 12 feet into bedrock to anchor concrete columns that will support the deck on which more concrete will be poured for the trail.

“This is our new tool, a ‘floating trail,’ a mini-Glenwood Canyon — same design principles,” Grossman said. “We’re basically building a 10-foot-wide road. It’s like what CDOT is doing on Floyd Hill right now — same concept, just smaller.”

The first new trailhead, about a mile upstream from Tunnel 1, will include a roadside parking lot that can accommodate 40 cars, along with a bridge over Clear Creek to the trail.The second new trailhead, at Huntsman Gulch, will offer a place to park, linger and explore which Grossman calls “a park within a park.” The parking lot will be built to handle 70 cars, and there will be a bridge across the highway to the trail. Another bridge will take visitors over the creek to a secondary trail accessing a shady one-mile hiking loop with a natural surface.

When the Huntsman segment is complete in 2026, it will leave a six-mile gap between Huntsman and a segment of the project upstream that opened in 2017, providing access to Jeffco’s Centennial Cone Park near the Clear Creek County line. Grossman said filling that gap, which would complete Jeffco’s part in the Peaks to Plains trail, could take another seven to 10 years depending on funding.

“This is a really big project,” Grossman said. “There’s a lot of money invested from taxpayers of all kinds — federal, state, local, people who play the lottery.

“I start every presentation I give with how privileged I am to do this, to have the responsibility – which is weighty – to do stuff like this for generations to come,” he added. “I’m just a nameless face three generations from now, but this is a legacy for all of us.”

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The breakdown started at 2:42 p.m., airport officials announced in a post on the social media site X. Travelers posted photos showing the disruptions with people waiting for the trains and frowning downward at their smartphones.

At 4 p.m., trains resumed operations at a limited capacity and became fully operational at about 4:30 p.m., airport officials said.

The unspecified mechanical problem “damaged a piece of the track,” DIA officials said in an email. “Technicians fixed the damaged piece in a little more than an hour. Trains were able to run during this time, but at limited capacity, which caused crowding at security checkpoints and on train platforms.”

The federal Transportation Security Administration added staffers at checkpoints to speed the flow of travelers. Airport officials said the bridge security checkpoint would stay open until 6:30 pm.

Airport officials said they did not know of any flights that were delayed because of the train breakdown.

For Sydney Balsamo and her two friends from Denver who were headed out for the Labor Day weekend, the delays hit first in a security line, lasting more than an hour, Balsamo said. Then they entered a packed train waiting area trying to reach Concourse C for their Southwest Airlines flight to Chicago, she said. They missed it, and then missed another hastily re-booked flight.

“We have now missed two flights,” Balsamo said around 4:40 p.m.

“But we are booked on a third. This has definitely changed our travel plans. We took off work. And now we are just going to sit in the airport for another five hours,” she said.

“The communication was really poor. We were informed trains were down. Then we heard from a couple of security agents they were going to be holding flights. Then we got notified by Southwest that our flight had departed.”

Trains were operating every 15 minutes instead of the usual 2 minutes, she said.

DIA’s south and west security checkpoint operations continued through the train disruption.

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The new flights will carry travelers to Mexico, France and Iceland.

They build on the launch earlier this year of a 13-hour nonstop flight from Denver to Istanbul, Turkey. DIA officials have prioritized the expansion of international flights and they’re exploring more routes, including one linking Denver with Ethiopia, increased flights to Japan, and a nonstop flight to Amsterdam.

International air travel increased by 17.2% during the first half of 2024 compared with 2023, a factor in the overall increase from 77 million passengers in 2023 to a projected 82 million, DIA chief executive Phil Washington told city council members this month. A monthly record 7.6 million passengers boarded planes at DIA in June. “We think we might break the June record around the Labor Day time frame,” Washington said.

DIA officials have been planning on 100 million passengers a year as soon as 2027. The airport was built to accommodate 50 million. Current construction includes the installation of an expanded, 17-lane security checkpoint.

Starting this winter, DIA  will offer 14% more flights to European destinations.

Here’s the expanded service travelers will see, according to information provided by DIA communications manager Michael Konopasek:

— Air France nonstop flights to Paris. The summer seasonal service will expand to year-round service with flights three days a week between November and March

— Icelandair nonstop flights to Reykjavik. Icelandair Air will run flights on four days a week from January through mid-February, then ramp up to five days a week through the end of winter, increasing to as many as 11 flights a week during peak summer months. In recent years, Icelandair didn’t run flights between early January and late March.

— Aeromexico will add a flight to Monterrey, Mexico starting on Dec. 21 (one day a week on Saturdays through mid-April). This adds to the Viva Aerobus nonstop service between Denver and Monterrey.

“It’s a big deal,” Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce president J.J. Ament said. The new flights “show that we continue to emerge as a place where you can do business around the world, taking advantage of Colorado’s highly-trained workforce and deploying it globally,” Ament said.

“The airlines wouldn’t be doing this if the routes were not performing economically. And it is a testament to the vision our airport officials have for the future.”

DIA is the third busiest airport in the United States and the sixth-busiest in the world, with passenger numbers increasing from 69 million in 2019, according to the latest data from the Airports Council International.

DIA expects a record 444,500 passengers to pass through airport checkpoints between Thursday (Aug. 29) and Tuesday (Sept. 3), with the heaviest traffic on Friday and Monday.

The forecast represents a 5.1% increase over the Labor Day period in 2023.

Airport officials this week advised travelers to expect longer security wait times and relatively full parking. They recommended that travelers arrive at the airport at least two hours before their flights.

To try to speed up airport flows, DIA has set up a security line reservation system operating between 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. that allows travelers to make free reservations up to 14 days before their flights — reservations with 15-minute windows that allow them to skip the security screening line. These are available only for the West security checkpoint, which operates from 4 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

“It gives peace of mind to travelers,” airport spokesman Michael Konopasek said.

DIA officials plan to post updated information on parking availability, security line wait times, and different security checkpoints.

Nationally, the Transportation Security Administration is preparing to screen more than 17 million people between Aug. 29 and Sept. 4. Federal agency officials report record summer travel, up by 8.5% overall from last year’s levels.

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The average delay time for arriving flights is approximately one hour, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. The airport is on a traffic management program because of thunderstorms.

There were 712 delayed flights and 21 cancellations at DIA as of 7:00 p.m., according to FlightAware. United Airlines reported the most delays at 231, followed by Southwest Airlines with 220.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

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