Ed Cotter: On Hometown History, a Career, and Retirement

Ed Cotter retires this month after more than four decades of work with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Legacy Management (LM). 

Cotter’s story begins in the town of Norwood, located in the deeply rural area of southwestern Colorado. The area was bustling with industry when Cotter graduated from Norwood High School and headed to Colorado School of Mines to earn his bachelor’s degree in mineral engineering and mathematics. Cotter began his career with DOE and the Uranium Leasing Program (ULP) in March 1977 as a mining engineer contractor with Bendix Field Engineering Corporation. Bendix’s mining division, at that time, employed eight full-time staff.

“The early part of my career was absolutely incredible,” Cotter said. In addition to his work in ULP, Cotter surveyed in the exploratory boreholes drilled at numerous project sites in the western U.S., under the National Uranium Resource Evaluation program.

Due to the collapse of uranium mining, Cotter’s career changed directions in 1984 when he became a surveyor, focusing primarily on sites regulated by the Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act. This change led to Cotter working in a variety of capacities — primarily, as a surveyor or a project and team lead at numerous locations, including sites in Green River and Monticello, Utah; Belfield and Bowman, North Dakota; Kansas City, Missouri; and Denver, Colorado.

In the mid-1980s, Cotter became a part of the DOE environmental survey field team, carrying out investigations at the national laboratories and other DOE facilities. Cotter was part of the investigative team from the Idaho National Engineering Lab (INEL). He participated in the INEL investigations at several legacy sites, including the Hanford, Washington, site. At Hanford, Cotter and other team members had the highest security clearance and were allowed access to most areas. 

“I remember the Hanford staff being slightly miffed that we had a higher clearance than the permanent staff,” Cotter said. 

Later, DOE requested Cotter’s assistance on the INEL team in conducting an environmental characterization at the Rocky Flats site near Denver, Colorado.

From 1988 to 1991, DOE contracted Cotter to investigate environmental conditions at three military bases, one of which was Hickam Air Force Base on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaii. In Hawaii, he identified underground storage tanks that contained heating oil and kerosene used during WWII for base housing. Cotter remembers seeing homes and other base facilities with visible shrapnel damage, the result of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Cotter indicated that these visual images gave him a connection with history.

In 1992, Cotter was tasked with managing ULP, because he was the only staff member left on the contract with knowledge of the uranium program. 

“There was little uranium mining being done from 1984 into the 1990s,” he said.  

While there was plenty of policy and paperwork to be done into the mid-2000s, Cotter said he did have some interesting and rewarding field exploration experiences to balance out the time he spent in the office. This included leading a field reconnaissance team out to every lease tract to find and delineate the mining-related features left behind by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s original Mineral Leasing Program. 

Also, Cotter was instrumental in preservation efforts of one of the area’s historically significant sites, Calamity Camp, located on Calamity Mesa above the town of Gateway, Colorado. 

A lawsuit filed in 2008 by four environmental organizations temporarily halted ULP. Cotter said, due to the lawsuit, “I lived litigation for the next decade.” That litigation process came to an end in 2019, when the federal court dissolved the injunction, which allowed new uranium leases to be renewed again. 

Despite the litigation and program pause, Cotter always had field work to perform and annual mine site inspections to complete. 

One of those inspections included the Burro Mines Complex in San Miguel County, Colorado, where he experienced some extreme weather conditions. Cotter witnessed two of the three flash floods that hit this area between 2007 and 2014. 

In 2007, a storm hit the Burro Mines Complex, washing away four inches of pavement that floated into the adjacent river. Then, during a lunch break in 2014, a 30-minute storm produced a downpour of rain and quarter-sized hail, which created an extreme wall of water that washed sediment into the river adjacent to the Burro Mines Complex, the Dolores River. Cotter knew something had to be done to protect the river from future storms and prepared a white paper for DOE on possible remedies. One of these remedies was implemented, and Cotter worked through one last environmental assessment to address the flash flooding issue. After many federal, state, and local collaborations, the Burro Mines Complex reclamation work began in June 2021. 

Much has changed in the remote part of Colorado where Cotter grew up. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is his love for the area. A brief conversation with Cotter will not only reveal his huge breath of knowledge about uranium mining but also a deeply rooted love for the community, its people, and the natural beauty of the area.

When asked how Cotter plans to spend his time in retirement, he replied, “I plan to spend my time driving my Jeep in the back country and having picnics in beautiful places with my wife, Kathy.” 

“I have had a fabulous career with the various DOE contractors,” Cotter said in his closing thoughts. “I’ve gotten to do a wide variety of things, and I’ve gotten to go to many places that no other job would have allowed me to do. At times, it was the best job ever.”