People who break into abandoned missile silos near metro Denver will now face a new consequence on top of potentially fatal injuries — a $5,000 fee from the rescue teams that must go in after them.
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The Sable Altura Fire Department plans to start charging people who trespass and get trapped in the deserted nuclear complexes after an “unprecedented” rise in break-ins and rescues, Arapahoe County officials announced Thursday.
Crews with the Deer Trail and Sable Altura fire departments have rescued five people who broke into the sites and became trapped in the last two years, agency leaders said at a news conference.
Two of those rescues happened within a week of each other earlier this month and sent an 18-year-old woman to the hospital for carbon dioxide exposure after she was trapped in a silo for at least four hours.
Before that first rescue in Deer Trail two years ago, Sable Altura Chief Rich Solomon said he doesn’t remember another person getting trapped in the silos in his 25-year tenure with the department.
One factor law enforcement officials said may be contributing to the increase in trespassing is the rising popularity of urban exploration, or urbex — when people break into abandoned or derelict man-made structures.
“There are a lot of urban explorers that are on social media and the more that they publicize going through these abandoned buildings or missile silos, the more these kids want to do it,” Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Ginger Delgado said. “So our message is: Please don’t do it.”
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Colorado is home to 11 abandoned Titan and Atlas missile silo complexes, none of which are open to the public, and several of which are known to have toxic levels of carbon monoxide, contaminated water and soil, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The complexes are not only potentially deadly for the people who break in, but also for the crews who must go in after them, Sable Altura Division Chief Tara Monks said.
“When rescuers go down, we try to be as safe as possible, but they’re also going into the unknown,” she said. “By 50 to 60 feet down, communication is limited, radios don’t work, we’re going into places where we can’t talk to each other… We don’t know what we’re going into, and we always take a risk when we send somebody over the edge.”
The 18-year-old woman and two juveniles who were with her are facing trespassing charges for the July 8 break-in, according to the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office. A 28-year-old woman who was rescued from an underground shaft on July 14 and her 19-year-old companion are also facing trespassing charges.
The property owners have done everything possible to secure the sites, Solomon said, including installing fences and locks.
“I imagine that we all lock our doors at night and we trust that that’s safe,” he said. “But then if we woke up and found somebody crawling around in our basement in the name of urban exploration, we would probably feel violated and we would probably want that person charged. That’s what this is.”
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