The Poisoned Pen of Fort Lyon Prison

"We'd go to chow, and when we came back, we'd have to wipe our beds clean," Coats says, shaking his head. "The place was terrible. I feel everybody was exposed."

According to DOC officials, the inmate accounts overstate the degree of potential airborne exposure they faced. Asbestos isn't like radioactive waste; it's a stable, fibrous mineral with superior heat resistance and insulation properties, which is why for decades it was widely used in everything from brake pads to roofing shingles. The primary danger it poses comes from inhaling the fibers from friable (crumbling or pulverized) asbestos; actual removal is often more hazardous than "managing in place." The VA had managed much of the asbestos at Fort Lyon by encapsulating it or leaving it alone, and the state's plan was to do the same.

The DOC's DeFelice, who arrived at Fort Lyon two years after Coats, is skeptical of claims that routine renovation work exposed inmates to asbestos. The ceiling pipes in the cellhouses are covered with fiberglass insulation, he notes, with asbestos underneath. As long as nobody was cutting through the fiberglass, the asbestos would not have been released. "Not all of the insulation has asbestos under it," he says. "I personally did a glove-bag test in one building, and the asbestos on the pipe was hard, hard material. The stuff I encountered was not that friable."

DeFelice also discounts claims of exposure during drywall work; the DOC hired private contractors to do asbestos abatement early in the renovation process, he says. But the DOC's own consultant, Gobbell Hays, refers cryptically in its report to "varying levels of asbestos abatement" by the DOC and "a minimal amount" on some housing units done by the VA years ago. Inmates had already been moved onto the campus in 2002 while the DOC abatement was under way, and two of the asbestos contractors hired by the state were fined for violations of proper procedure by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. One of those contractors, Occupational Health Technologies, protested that DOC staff interfered with the abatement process, denying access to critical areas and letting inmates and other contractors work in places that hadn't been cleared for use.

"We were told that we were to stay out of areas...where asbestos was suspected of being present," OHT director Thomas Antonson wrote to a state inspector. "The Department of Corrections was utilizing convict labor to help defray demolition and construction costs.... I walked out in frustration because I felt we were being prevented from completing our contract as it was written."

Antonson said that a DOC supervisor had asked that one of his employees be replaced because he was "wearing his respirator and possibly causing alarm among the convict laborers.... What was unknown to me was the indifference to Regulation 8 by the DOC." Regulation 8 is the state's lengthy set of procedures for proper asbestos management, removal and disposal.

Some of the first prisoners to arrive at Fort Lyon were housed in Building Seven, one of the large hospital buildings by the parade ground. A 2003 state health inspection, made after inmates had already been living there several months, found several rooms with inadequate lighting, insufficient ventilation, damaged floors and ceilings, bedsheets used as restroom doors and more bunks per room than the law allowed.

As Fort Lyon expands, Building Seven is slated to hold up to 250 prisoners. But right now it's unoccupied — because there are still outstanding asbestos problems there that need to be addressed. According to last year's Gobbell Hays inspection, the most serious areas include thousands of feet of pipe insulation in "good to poor condition," and contaminated soils and dislodged asbestos materials in crawl spaces.

DeFelice and other DOC officials interviewed by Westword couldn't explain why inmates were moved to Fort Lyon before basic asbestos abatement processes were completed. "I can't answer that," says Lou Archuleta, the DOC's assistant director of prisons, who was the fifth of six wardens at Fort Lyon. "The decisions were made elsewhere. One of the things I found out in the year I was there is that asbestos is everywhere. You can still buy materials off the shelf that contain asbestos. But we put in a process so that if you get a leak, if something happens, all work stops until we check it. I think we've learned that we've got to do this differently than the way we were doing it before."