The Poisoned Pen of Fort Lyon Prison

Coats admits that he was known as a chronic complainer at Fort Lyon. He filed several grievances and was put in the hole his last week there. He says he's just grateful to be out of the place.

"They'll tell you to your face that if you keep talking about the problems they're having out there, you won't get parole," he insists. "You won't get the halfway house. Guys are scared. They want to go home. I don't blame 'em."

History Lesson #3

In the summer of 1867, work began on a new Fort Lyon to replace the flooded post. The latest (and final) location was a few miles east of Las Animas. Some of the original adobe structures along "officers' row" still stand today on the grounds of the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility, although time and the elements have had their way with them.

The new, improved post was soon visited by its first military vet in need of medical care. After an illustrious career as a trapper, guide and soldier, an ailing Kit Carson settled on a farm in nearby Boggsville. He came to the fort to seek the services of the post surgeon and ended up dying there of an aneurysm at age 59.

Troops from Fort Lyon continued to play a supporting role in the Indian wars, but the real fighting was elsewhere, with George Custer's Seventh Cavalry. In 1868, Custer hunted down William Bent's old friend Black Kettle, who'd pushed for the treaty with the whites and survived the Sand Creek Massacre. The Cheyenne chief died with dozens of his people in Oklahoma, in the Battle of Washita River.

A few months later, the Army decided it no longer needed a fort in southeastern Colorado. Two years after it opened, Fort Lyon was abandoned again.

Grossly Contaminated

In the spring of 2004, W. Thomas Bain, an industrial hygienist who works for the air-pollution-control division of the state health department, visited Fort Lyon twice in the course of three weeks. Bain was responding to inmate complaints that they were being forced to remove asbestos and threatened with disciplinary write-ups — which could affect their parole prospects — if they refused.

One inmate said that he'd worked in crawl spaces under staff housing for days at a time trying to fix steam-pipe leaks, a job that involved cutting through asbestos insulation covering the pipes. "I had white powder all over my clothes from cutting the asbestos," he wrote. "Before I started, I asked my boss if he would give me something to protect my eyes and nose and mouth when doing this job. I also told him I didn't no [sic] anything about asbestos. He told me it would not hurt me, just get under the house and get the job done."

The same inmate claimed he was ordered to dump debris from a pipe trench, including asbestos, out by some fish ponds, where the DOC's correctional-industries division raises koi and operates a pheasant farm.

The inmate's supervisor told Bain that the story was hogwash. No prisoners had been involved in any asbestos removal, he said, and no one was ever threatened with write-ups for refusing work. But Bain's subsequent investigation found asbestos debris piled exactly where the inmate said it would be. Donning protective gear, Bain attempted to enter the crawl space where the inmate had worked but decided to stay out after determining that the soil below the house was "grossly contaminated" with asbestos; stirring it up could "result in a substantial release of fibers into the occupied portions of the house."

Bain talked to the prison's "life safety officer" — who, it turned out, didn't have adequate training in asbestos issues and didn't know how to interpret asbestos inspection reports. It was the officer's house, he learned, that had the badly contaminated crawl space Bain had declined to enter. Bain also discovered that staffers' children had been playing around utility tunnels where asbestos debris had been dumped and that the debris had been raked across a yard by a prisoner. Deeming the contamination to be a major spill, Bain ordered that 160 square feet of dirt near the utility tunnel be sealed off to prevent access and further release of asbestos fibers.

"For all practical purposes...the Fort Lyon Correctional Facility did not have an asbestos program sufficient to prevent exposure," Bain wrote in his report. He recommended that the prison halt all inmate work on buildings until the DOC could hire an experienced asbestos coordinator.

Fort Lyon did not hire Montoya for another two years. In the meantime, prisoners continued to work on routine maintenance, and the problems kept multiplying. A Gobbell Hays team that arrived in the fall of 2004 to deal with the cleanup of the previous spill found DOC staff trying to apply a sealant over tainted soil in a crawl space of another house. The crew wore protective suits and respirators but had failed to seal the area effectively. The original spill area, which was supposed to have been sealed off with plastic sheeting, had been exposed again by wind and weather. And continuing steam leaks from aging pipes had damaged asbestos-laden walls and insulation in another location.