Colorado Gov. Jared Polis verbally declared a disaster emergency for the Elk fire burning southeast of Meeker in Rio Blanco County, according to a news release from his office.

The lightning-sparked wildfire started just after noon Saturday and had spread to roughly 600 acres by 2 p.m. Sunday, according to the Rio Blanco County Sheriff’s Office.

Sheriff’s officials said the fire, which is burning on a mix of private, Bureau of Land Management and state-owned land, prompted evacuations on both sides of County Road 8 between mile markers 11 and 16.

“Fire crews, along with air and ground support, are actively engaged in suppression efforts,” sheriff’s officials stated in a Sunday afternoon update. “Smoke is visible due to the hot and dry conditions contributing to active fire behavior.”

No structures are currently threatened, but residents and travelers are asked to avoid the area, officials said.

The governor’s disaster declaration allows state officials to direct more resources to fighting the wildfire.

“Fire conditions in northwest Colorado are at near record levels, and elevated fire weather and fire risk is forecast for the coming week,” Polis’ news release stated.

Another new wildfire burning about 80 miles south, near Carbondale in Garfield County, forced evacuations across the community on Sunday, according to fire officials.

The Ranch at Coulter Creek fire sparked near a subdivision with the same name Sunday morning, north of Panorama Drive, according to an 11:24 a.m. post from the Carbondale & Rural Fire Protection District.

The Panorama subdivision, the Ranch at Coulter Creek and areas east of County Road 100 to Upper Cattle Creek Road were under mandatory evacuation orders Sunday, according to the Garfield County Sheriff’s Office.

Those evacuation orders were lifted at 5 p.m., sheriff’s officials said.

The fire had burned roughly 115 acres with no containment by 4:30 p.m., Carbondale fire officials said.

The new wildfires are burning northeast of three other major fires still active on Colorado’s Western Slope.

The Wright Draw, Turner Gulch and South Rim fires have collectively burned 26,381 acres, according to estimates from fire officials. The Sowbelly fire, which was fully contained on Friday, consumed another 2,274 acres in western Colorado.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

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He was heading north on Colo. 93, just short of its intersection with Colo. 128, when the driver shifted partially into the oncoming lane on July 22, according to Colorado State Patrol.

It was around 5:30 p.m. that Tuesday when August, of Northglenn, and his friend crashed head-on with an SUV. The car August was in spun off before hitting another SUV. The second SUV connected with August’s side of the car.

August was sent to Boulder Community Health while unconscious, said his mother, Amy Soto. She was about to head into an Orange Theory gym to teach a class when she heard from August’s friend’s father that the boys were in a crash. She said the friend’s father told her, “It doesn’t look good.”

“It was the worst call I’ve ever gotten,” Amy said. “As a parent, that’s like the biggest nightmare you can think of.”

August’s friend was sent to a hospital with minor injuries and is OK now, Amysaid. According to CSP, the two other drivers — neither of whose cars had any passengers — suffered minor to moderate injuries and were not sent to a hospital.

Amy immediately tried to get to her son. She got stuck in traffic on Colo. 93 trying to reach him — the road had been blocked because of the very crash her son was in. She got to the hospital but had to wait for the OK to see him.

At the hospital, a medical team put August into a medically induced coma. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury, bruised his lung and endured three spinal fractures, Amy said.

He was later transported to another facility , put on a ventilator, then slowly taken off it the next day. It wasn’t until about three days after the crash that August started to wake up — for only about a minute at a time, at first, his mother said.

He was unable to retain memories yet because of the brain injury. He was paranoid and in disbelief about what happened to him that Tuesday. But he was awake and slowly becoming coherent again.

One week after the crash, August was reading again, writing again, remembering again. By this Wednesday, Amy said, “he’s doing amazing.” August would even be able to ease his way back into school this fall, she said.

That does not mean, though, that recovery will be an easy process. He may look OK, Amy said, but TBIs affect what’s underneath. August’s personality hasn’t yet come back, she added.

TBIs can be debilitating when serious. Amy said August’s medical team said his injury landed between “moderate” and “severe.” It will take a year before his full road to recovery can be assessed; it will also take that long to gauge how full the recovery can ever be, she said.

However, he’s doing better than he could have been, Amy said.

“We are very blessed,” Amy said during only the third time she’s spent more than a moment away from August since 6:30 p.m. July 22. She’d taken one meeting with medical staff, been to the gym once for about 45 minutes and spoken to the Daily Camera.

“I could barely look at my phone,” Amy said of her time up until this Wednesday. “It’s been probably one of the most traumatic experiences we’ve had as a family.”

Besides those three brief times, she has lived, eaten and slept in that hospital room with August.

August, who is the second youngest in a family of five boys. August, who is a state-qualifying wrestler for Broomfield High School. August, who has played football, rugby, and track and field. August, who spends his winter mornings before school shoveling snow out of neighbors’ driveways. August, who, just two days before the crash, went on a fishing trip in the Leadville area with the same friend who was driving him home that night.

Amy said August has built a community around him that has shown out in droves to support him. “Every teacher, every person loves him,” she said. Friends’ mothers have dropped off food — August’s friends have offered to do the Sotos’ yard work. High school students are donating their own money, Amy said, to a GoFundMe meant to help the Sotos pay August’s medical bills.

August’s best friend, Josh Hanes, started the fundraiser imploring folks to “Support August Soto’s Road to Recovery.” By Wednesday — the day the two boys were supposed to be going to Florida for vacation — it had surpassed $14,000 in donations.

To support August, Amy will have to miss work for an extended period of time, she said. The fundraiser will help the family support August through his recovery process.

“I’m honestly blown away,” Amy said of the outpouring of support she has seen. “And I’m not one to ask for help.”

Now, August is focusing on two things, Amy said: going home and wrestling again. The medical team has told the Sotos he might be able to go home in a couple of weeks — though that has not stopped August from trying to bribe his visitors to get him out of there sooner.

Wrestling, though, may not be as simple. The family doesn’t know yet how August’s TBI will affect his ability to compete, but the prospect of being unable to wrestle scares him, Amy said.

That’s been particularly hard for the teenager. It’s been “since he was literally in diapers that he was on the mat,” his mom said.

For now, though, the Sotos are trying to keep things steady and prepare for the road to recovery and rehabilitation. They are not dwelling over whose fault the crash may have been, the cause or anything else besides August.

“Our goal is just to make his life as consistent as possible right now,” Amy said.

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The technology, called the Electron Beam Dust Mitigation system, uses electron beams to repel and remove space dust from surfaces, including spacesuits, solar panels, optical lenses and thermal blankets. The technology has demonstrated cleaning efficacy of up to 92% for those surfaces, and it could help mitigate dust hazards for space exploration, especially places like the Moon, which has lunar dust.

The team of researchers is part of CU Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics and founded a company called Space Dust Research & Technologies LLC. The company was one of 10 winners of NASA’s TechLeap Prizes in the Space Technology Payload Challenge. Their Electron Beam Dust Mitigation system was selected out of more than 200 applicants. The team will receive up to $500,000 and the opportunity to flight test their technology next summer.

“We are thrilled by the opportunity to build a flight-ready model of the Electron Beam Dust Mitigation technology to potentially benefit future lunar missions,” LASP researcher and company co-founder Xu Wang said in a release.

Dust mitigation is a major issue for NASA because it gets everywhere. Lunar dust, or dust on the moon, is extremely fine, abrasive and sharp, according to NASA, which makes it a bigger threat. The lunar dust, which is made from crushed rocks, can clog mechanisms, interfere with instruments, cause radiators to overheat and tear up spacesuits.

“EBDM has the potential to extend the life of rovers, landers, habitats, and other crucial assets on the lunar surface,” company co-founder and CU Boulder physics professor Mihaly Horanyi said in a release.

The goal of the NASA TechLeap Prize is to support future missions and reduce risk, according to its website. NASA wants to more quickly identify and develop technologies that could help solve critical space problems, such as lunar dust.

Daveon Javon-James Jackson was arrested shortly before 7 p.m. Saturday on suspicion of leaving the scene of a crash resulting in death, careless driving resulting in death, hit-and-run and failing to report a crash, Aurora Police Department spokesperson Joe Moylan said in an email to The Denver Post.

Aurora officers responded to the hit-and-run crash at 11:18 p.m. Friday near East Wesley Drive and South Dunkirk Street.

When officers arrived, they found a 16-year-old with serious injuries, police said. The teen had been riding a scooter in the bike lane when he was hit.

Paramedics took the unidentified 16-year-old to the hospital, where he later died from his injuries.

Numerous tips from the community helped officers identify the suspect vehicle — a blue 2014 Dodge Charger, Moylan said. From there, traffic and patrol officers were able to trace the car back to Jackson.

Jackson has not yet been charged, and no court date was available Sunday morning.

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The Krasheninnikov volcano sent ash 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) into the sky, according to staff at the Kronotsky Reserve, where the volcano is located. Images released by state media showed dense clouds of ash rising above the volcano.

“The plume is spreading eastward from the volcano toward the Pacific Ocean. There are no populated areas along its path, and no ashfall has been recorded in inhabited localities,” Kamchatka’s emergencies ministry wrote on Telegram during the eruption.

The eruption was accompanied by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake and prompted a tsunami warning for three areas of Kamchatka. The tsunami warning was later lifted by Russia’s Ministry for Emergency Services.

“This is the first historically confirmed eruption of the Krasheninnikov volcano in 600 years,” Olga Girina, head of the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team, told Russian state news agency RIA Novosti.

The Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program, based in the U.S., however, lists Krasheninnikov’s last eruption as occurring 475 years ago in 1550.

The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

The Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team said late Sunday that the volcano’s activity was decreasing but that “moderate explosive activity” could continue.

The eruption occurred after a huge earthquake struck Russia’s Far East early Wednesday, an 8.8-magnitude temblor that caused small tsunami waves in Japan and Alaska and prompted warnings for Hawaii, North and Central America and Pacific islands south toward New Zealand.

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Shots were fired near an Aurora apartment complex in the 1000 block of Cimarron Circle shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday, according to a news release from the police department.

When officers arrived, they found two women had been shot, Aurora police said in the release.

A 26-year-old woman died from her injuries at the scene, police said. Paramedics took the second victim, a 30-year-old woman, to the hospital with life-threatening injuries.

The Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office will identify the 26-year-old victim.

Investigators believe the shooting started as a domestic violence incident and that the people involved knew each other.

Police are working to identify a suspect who left the scene of the shooting before officers arrived. As of Sunday morning, no suspects had been publicly identified and no arrests had been made.

Denver police are investigating two separate shootings that wounded four.

Three people were shot near Sixth Avenue and Knox Court in the city’s Barnum neighborhood, Denver police said Sunday in a 4:23 a.m. post on social media.

All three victims are expected to survive, but no suspect information was available Sunday morning.

Another person was shot in Denver’s Union Station neighborhood, near 19th and Little Raven streets, according to a 1:40 a.m. post from the police department.

Information on the extent of the victim’s injuries was not available Sunday morning. No suspects have been publicly identified or arrested.

Anyone with information about the shootings is asked to contact Metro Denver Crime Stoppers at 720-913-7867.

Denver officers are also investigating an unrelated homicide in the 2200 block of Glenarm Place, according to a Saturday evening statement from the police department.

Additional information, including how and when the victim died, was not available Sunday morning.

The victim will be identified by the Denver Office of the Medical Examiner. 

This is a developing story and may be updated.

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Aurora officers responded to the crash on northbound I-225 near Parker Road at about 11:15 p.m. Saturday, according to a news release from the police department.

Paramedics took one victim, an unidentified 62-year-old man, to the hospital, where he later died from his injuries, police said.

He will be identified by the Arapahoe County Coroner’s Office.

The man was attempting to cross the highway’s northbound lanes from east to west in heavy traffic when he was hit by a vehicle and run over by a second, police said.

Both drivers remained on scene after the crash.

Investigators do not believe speed or alcohol were factors in the crash.

Northbound I-225 was closed for roughly 2 hours overnight during the crash cleanup and investigation, reopening at about 2 a.m. Sunday, police said.

This is a developing story and may be updated.

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July 20, 2012: A gunman opens fire in a movie theater in Aurora, killing a dozen people and injuring 70.

Dec. 14, 2012: A mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, kills 20 first-grade students and six educators.

More than two dozen gun laws in Colorado have reshaped firearm ownership — and added barriers

March 20, 2013: During the Colorado legislative session following those incidents, then-Gov. John Hickenlooper signs three landmark gun laws: a 15-round limit for firearm magazines, a universal background check requirement and a new fee on gun buyers to pay for the checks.

Sept. 10, 2013: Two Democratic state senators are recalled by voters in a campaign by gun-rights advocates who are furious about the gun legislation. A third resigns later in the year.

November 4, 2014: Republicans win control of the state Senate, breaking Democratic trifecta control of both legislative chambers and the governorship. The party holds the Senate through 2018.

June 12, 2016: A gunman kills 49 people at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, in what at the time is the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

Oct. 1, 2017: In Las Vegas, a gunman fires on a crowd of fans at an outdoor country music concert, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds.

Feb. 14, 2018: A former student kills 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook.

Nov. 6, 2018: Colorado Democrats win a majority in the state Senate and regain trifecta control of state government as Gov. Jared Polis also wins election.

April 12, 2019: Polis signs the extreme risk protection order bill into law. Commonly known as the red-flag law, it allows judges to order the temporary confiscation of firearms from people suspected to be a danger to themselves or others.

March 22, 2021: A gunman kills 10 people at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder.

2021 legislative session: Colorado lawmakers pass, and Polis signs, five new gun laws: setting storage requirements for firearms, expanding background checks and adding disqualifying misdemeanors, establishing the state Office of Gun Violence Prevention, setting requirements for reporting lost or stolen firearms, and allowing local jurisdictions to pass more restrictive gun laws than the state.

May 9, 2021: A gunman opens fire on a birthday party in Colorado Springs, killing six people and then taking his own life.

2022 legislative session: Lawmakers pass a law banning the open carrying of firearms within 100 feet of a polling place.

November 19, 2022: A shooter kills five people and wounds 22 others at Club Q, a LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs.

2023 legislative session: Lawmakers pass, and Polis signs, four new gun laws: establishing a three-day waiting period to purchase a firearm; making the minimum age 21 to purchase a firearm; expanding who can file an extreme risk protection order petition; and banning the sale, possession and creation of unserialized firearms, or so-called ghost guns.

2024 legislative session: Lawmakers and Polis enact seven new gun laws: setting new training requirements for concealed-carry permits; setting new requirements for storing firearms in a vehicle; adding a new tax on firearms, ammunition and certain parts (subsequently adopted by voters 54%-46%); adding new state licensing for firearm dealers; expanding authority for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to investigate firearm-related crimes; adding a new merchant code to track sales of guns and ammunition; and banning the carrying of firearms, including those that are concealed, in government buildings, near polling places and in educational institutions.

2025 legislative session: Lawmakers pass, and Polis signs, seven gun laws: making the theft of a firearm a felony, regardless of the weapon’s value; setting the minimum age at 21 to purchase ammunition in most circumstances; adding new requirements for gun shows; increasing enforcement capabilities for the Department of Revenue related to firearms dealers; adding permitting requirements for the purchase of certain semiautomatic firearms; creating a voluntary do-not-sell list for firearms; and establishing requirements for the Department of Public Safety to seek additional grant money for the state’s response to mass shootings.

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Two of the three PUC members voiced support in a hearing Wednesday for Xcel’s application to join the Southwest Power Pool’s Markets+, a so-called day-ahead market being formed by the Arkansas-based transmission organization and about 30 organizations.

The commission will issue a written order.

The new marketplace will allow Xcel and other utilities to buy power a day ahead, aimed at keeping electricity flowing more efficiently and cost-effectively. Xcel’s joining a day-ahead market is considered a step toward moving to an organized wholesale market, which a state law requires Colorado transmission utilities to do by 2030. The motivation is to coordinate resources across the region, get more renewable energy on the grid to cut greenhouse gas emissions and meet growing demands for electricity.

However, Megan Gilman, the commissioner who opposed Xcel’s application, contended the utility failed to show, as required by PUC rules, that the benefits of joining Markets+ outweighed the costs. She voiced concerns that the cost of joining the day-ahead market, seen as a temporary step, could delay or derail Xcel’s move to an organized wholesale market.

An organized wholesale market is a centrally managed organization that facilitates the buying and selling of electricity and other services across a region. A 2021 PUC report said utilities’ full participation in that kind of market or a regional transmission organization could produce savings of $230 million annually.

About 60% of the nation’s electric power supply is managed by regional organizations, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. However, most of that is in the East.

PUC Chairman Eric Blank said he is focused on the potential of saving millions of dollars per year as the purchase and transmission of power become more coordinated across the region.

“For me, incurring these small losses in the near term potentially creates an opportunity to save orders of magnitude more per year,” Blank said. “Although we’re a long, long way from realizing this level of savings, it seems worth trying to me.”

But Gilman noted the law requiring transmission utilities to eventually join a more centralized market allows for waivers. She said Xcel could cite the costs of joining the day-ahead market as a reason for seeking a waiver.

“The company expressed intent to hold that against the economics of joining a (regional transmission organization),” Gilman said.

Xcel, Colorado’s largest electricity provider, said in documents filed with the PUC that the costs of participating in Markets+ will include $2 million for the first phase of starting the organization; $14 million annually for operations for the first five years, then $10 million per year; and an estimated $13 million to $15 million for Xcel to integrate its systems with the marketplace.

The conservation group Western Resource Advocates said in a statement filed in the case that testimony showed Xcel’s costs would exceed net benefits by $30 million through 2032 and cumulative benefits wouldn’t surpass cumulative costs until 2039. For the company’s customers to reap any benefits, Xcel would have to stay in Markets+ through 2038, the group said.

“This means the company would also presumably have to delay the 2030 requirement to join an (organized wholesale market) by nine years,” Western Resource Advocates said.

The PUC staff said Xcel’s application didn’t meet the requirement that joining the marketplace is in the public interest because the company couldn’t show that the expected benefits would outweigh the costs. The staff noted that Xcel witnesses conceded during a hearing that joining Markets+ and recovering the costs for technology upgrades “will result in increased production costs through at least 2038.”

Considering the costs, staffers said it would be reasonable for the commission to deny the application. If the application is approved, the staff recommended monitoring the costs, reliability of the market and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to determine whether Xcel’s continued participation in the marketplace would be warranted.

In the public interest?

“We believe this decision was not in the best interests of ratepayers, grid reliability, or the state’s clean energy goals. And legally, the decision does not appear to be based on the law or the Commission’s own rules, and we will be asking the Commission to reconsider,” Brian Turner, regulatory director at Advanced Energy United, said in an email.

The industry group believes a better path for Xcel Energy would be to join Extended Day-Ahead Market, or EDAM, which is operated by the California Independent System Operator. The organization manages the operation of the electricity transmission grid across California and is also involved in a marketplace across 11 Western states.

The extended day-ahead market is set to launch in 2026, according to the California operator’s website. A report by the Environmental Defense Fund in June said Xcel Energy could save an average of $13.2 million a year if it joined EDAM instead of the Southwest Power Pool’s Markets+. One reason is more availability of renewable energy.

Turner said a bill is moving through the California legislature that would transfer the governing structure of the California Independent System Operator to a separate organization. The current board of directors is appointed by the California governor, but that would change if the legislation passes.

Joining forces with the California operator would give Xcel Energy broader access to cleaner forms of energy, Turner added.

Blank said the push by some parties to steer Xcel Energy to EDAM rather than the other marketplace would make integrating systems across Colorado difficult. Others suggested that Xcel forego participating in a day-ahead market altogether and plan for joining a regional organization.

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association is Colorado’s second-largest electricity provider. The Westminster-based utility is in the process of joining the Southwest Power Pool’s regional transmission organization.

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Burnham Yard, a former train depot linked to the Broncos as a potential site for a new football stadium, is not part of the 46-year-old Denver Radium Superfund Site, but it sits across railroad tracks from at least one property with existing contamination.

And at least one nearby parcel purchased earlier this year by business entities connected to the Broncos was once part of the Superfund site, according to a 2014 report from the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment.

Santa Fe Yard, which will be the future home of the Denver Summit professional women’s soccer team, is in a similar situation. That site sits across Interstate 25 from land that has ongoing mitigation for radium contamination and is part of the Superfund site. But the former railyard does not have any known radium underground.

Environmental experts, however, say the proximity to a radium Superfund site would not be a danger to the teams or their fans. Radium is a radioactive element that is found in nature, including underground in Denver, and, if mishandled, it can cause human health problems, including cancer.

“I can say definitively people would be safe at Broncos games,” said Thomas Albrecht, a chemistry professor at the Colorado School of Mines.”No Spider-Mans or Hulks.

“If they plopped a stadium on the ground right now, even a permanent employee would be fine. I would not fear it at all.”

Radium is easy to detect and there are proven ways to remove it, Albrecht said. And multiple federal, state and local environmental agencies would be involved if any radium was detected where the Broncos might want to build.

“The beauty of radioactive elements is radiation can’t hide,” he said. “It’s extremely easy to detect and it’s easy to detect in high precision.”

Radium remediation is expensive because waste material must be hauled long distances to approved landfills. But figuring out who would be responsible for any contamination lingering around Burnham Yard is to be determined, especially since the Broncos have never confirmed they are eyeing the railyard as the team’s future home.

“They may decide they don’t want the expense,” Albrecht said. “That’s a completely different issue. They’re completely capable of putting the stadium there and cleaning it up.”

The Denver Radium Superfund Site was designated by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979 after spoils from the National Radium Institute and other radium mining, processing and disposal sites that operated in Denver around the turn of the 20th century were found scattered around the city.

Once the EPA declares a site as a Superfund, the agency has the authority to clean up contamination and pursue reimbursement for that work.

“In the early part of the 1900s, they didn’t have environmental standards and just threw out the waste,” said Benjamin Rule, the EPA Region 8 remedial project manager for Denver Radium Superfund Site.

While those radium businesses were shuttered by the mid-1920s, their radioactive waste has lingered in the city for more than a century.

The main health risk associated with the former radium businesses is residue from radium-226, a radioactive element that breaks down to form radon gas, which causes lung cancer with long-term exposure, according to a 2023 EPA report about the Superfund site.

The Denver Radium Superfund Site is unusual in that it is not confined to one location within the city limits. Instead, it stretches from Cheesman Park near the city’s center to the Overland Golf Course in southwest Denver.

The site covers 65 individual properties that the EPA subdivided into 11 areas, known as operable units. That’s because the EPA broke the site into geographic areas that followed the South Platte River and the rail lines through Denver, Rule said.

Only one of those 11 operable units remains under direct EPA oversight — groundwater beneath the Overland Golf Course at 1801 S. Huron St., which is about a mile from Burnham Yard. It would not impact any development at the former train depot, said Branden Ingersoll, a spokesman for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division.

But two parcels near the potential stadium sites have designations that could limit development and land use. The EPA, as well as the city and state health departments, would be involved in any remediation and development decisions surrounding those properties with lingering contamination.

Atlas Metals & Iron, a scrap metal and recycling company at 1100 Umatilla St., sits directly west of Burnham Yard, separated by a set of railroad tracks. Between 1991 and 1993, 89,000 tons of contaminated material were removed from the property, but contaminated soil remains, Ingersoll said.

The radium in the soil is not dangerous to people as long as Atlas maintains its parking lot and its buildings’ floors, which serve as a cap to hold back the contamination, Rule said.

Atlas has a covenant with the EPA and the state health department to maintain the cap, and the site undergoes a review every five years.

In the most recent five-year report, published in 2023, the EPA noted that Atlas recorded increased radon levels in 2018 and 2020 after installing a new heating and cooling system, but those levels returned to normal after the company modified its system and repaired a radon-mitigation system.

Under the covenant, Atlas Metals must receive approval before seeking building permits or a change in land use. It also must notify the state if the property is sold to someone else, according to the covenant.

No ties have been established between the Broncos and Atlas Metals, but the scrapyard would be next door to any future stadium or entertainment district if the Broncos choose to relocate to Burnham Yard.

While Atlas Metals chief executive officer Mike Rosen declined to comment for this story, the EPA report noted that Rosen “is impressed by how his company has been able to succeed with a solid reuse of a Superfund site. He believes that there has been great collaboration with the CDPHE and the EPA throughout the cleanup process.”

The remarks illustrate how private businesses are able to work with government agencies to make land safe for people.

Patrick Smythe, a Broncos spokesman, said the team’s owners continue to study all stadium options, which include staying where Empower Field at Mile High is located and reviewing additional sites in Lone Tree and Aurora.

Another parcel acquired this year by a business entity linked to the Broncos — 1241 to 1245 Quivas St. — was part of the radium Superfund site but has been cleaned. There are no radium concerns on the property, Ingersoll said.

Burnham Yards also borders another area that was part of the Superfund cleanup — an alley between Mariposa and Lipan streets that runs from Fifth Avenue to Sixth Avenue. That site was remediated after 2,800 tons of soil were removed, according to online reports. There are no development restrictions, Ingersoll said.

There is no apparent connection between the Broncos and any addresses around that alley.

The property closest to the future National Women’s Soccer League stadium is the Home Depot at 500 S. Santa Fe Drive, which is across I-25 from where the stadium and associated entertainment venues will be built.

The Home Depot’s radium situation is almost identical to the one at Atlas Metals — as long as the parking lot remains paved and no one digs into the ground, the radium is contained, Rule said. The Home Depot also has a covenant with the EPA to contain the radium and undergoes an inspection every five years.

Still, Rule said he reached out to the new soccer team’s ownership once the stadium location was announced to explain the nearby Superfund sites and the EPA’s role.

“Santa Fe Yards are not technically on Superfund property and it’s not a direct concern,” he said. “But Home Depot is just north on I-25.”

Before a stadium can be built at either location, extensive environmental surveys will be conducted to make sure there is no radium or other contamination left behind from former industrial uses. Federal and state laws require it.

“The EPA carries a big stick,” said Andrew Ross, the Denver health department’s senior environmental administrator with environmental land use and planning.

Banks involved in financial loans tied to the properties also would want any contamination removed to avoid liability, Ross said.

“We’re here to help developers through these processes,” Ross said. “It’s on the developers to figure it out.”

The residents in the La Alma Lincoln Park neighborhood next to Burnham Yard are excited about potential redevelopment that would make good use of an old railyard, but they also are aware of all the potential environmental hazards surrounding the site, said Nolan Hahn, president of the neighborhood association.

“There’s always a concern that when you disturb the soil in the area that you can release toxic materials,” Hahn said. “We just want to make sure it is done in a way that doesn’t put us in more danger and respects the people of the neighborhood.”

Denver Post staff writer Jessica Alvarado Gamez contributed to this report.

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