Uravan...the Radioactive Town the EPA and Health Department Destroyed

I leave the McCormick and mavina mine behind me still contaminated for my trip inside [Applause] [Music] now I head down the hill into the Paradox Valley on my way to uravan [Applause] [Music] well finally made it here at EuroVan well technically this isn't really European this is the campsite that was uh made to kind of uh as in remembrance of the town that was destroyed by the Colorado Health Department and the EPA so uh it's a really nice place it's like free camping as far as I know it's free and uh yeah it's beautiful it's like you're right by the river here and then the actual town of where your van used to be is down that way and I'm going to go there uh tomorrow morning but uh tonight I'm just gonna Camp here relax take it easy and enjoy the scenery foreign also for reference since I went to the mavita mine uh normally this is supposed to be reading around you know 35 40 counts per minute and it's up to 280 290 right now so hopefully by tomorrow morning this will have uh come back down to background and shouldn't be a problem because I've taken this apart once before when this first happened a couple years back and cleaned it all and that worked but I found that it's actually easier just to let things Decay away until they're now until they're no longer detectable so that's what I'm gonna do this is a beautiful campsite and as I know it the rim rockers the people that used to live in EuroVan Colorado just down the way uh they uh got the state to buy this land and uh made it a park or a camping area and a park that they maintain and I believe it's just for the site of where they used to have their baseball diamond so every year the rim rockers come here and meet up and bring their children and their grandchildren and probably now their great-grandchildren to experience what they got to experience when they were growing up just a little taste of it at least for a day and just to see the beauty I mean I don't know how many of them actually moved to um nukla or uh somewhere else in the Paradox Valley but this is a very beautiful place and I'm glad that it's here and if you're ever cruising through this area and need to stop and rest I would say this is the perfect place to do it it is an extremely beautiful spot it's funny that I think most people believe that uranium mining would make an area uninhabitable make it like a toxic Wasteland but I mean look at this place this place is beautiful and there's plants growing here I mean there's people living by here also and I think people's fear really does them a disservice where because it makes it it's where they don't get to experience these places because of fear it's pretty amazing and this is far from a radioactive Wasteland but we're gonna go over to your event here real quick but I just want to come down here to the creek you can see it because it's it's awesome I love this type of stuff this is this is my thing also now it looks like this geiger counter is now back to background so all the contamination that was all over it right here is now gone well technically I guess it's still there but it's just uh decayed into something not quite as active as it was before so it's probably a bunch of lead 210 on here still but it's got a 22 year Half-Life so it's uh much harder to detect so I'm here at EuroVan I just went and walked this barbed wire fence a little bit just kind of get a reading with that radical 101 just just so I could kind of build like a little radiation map of the area you have places that I explore so let's uh keep going up there's like a road that goes up to like the burial site where they put all the stuff from the town underneath a bunch of rocks so I'm just going to keep taking that road all the way up so this is the site of where the mill used to be it used to be a a big Mill back here that would process all the uranium ore and so they tore that all down removed any of the buildings that were back here because this is all part of the Town side also over here was too and then down in this area as well and uh it's incredible that they uh you know destroyed a whole town over fear I mean because that's what exactly this was they didn't do it for there was Zero health concerns it's like you can go to places like Temple mountain and explore these uranium areas but yeah they got to have this one fenced off and say no trespassing even though there's nothing wrong with the land yeah maybe a little radioactive but that's indicative of this area because it has uranium deposits here this land would have been radioactive no matter what even if there is even if no mining had ever occurred here it still would have been radioactive because the uranium still would have been here so that's just funny it's just funny to me [Music] thank you so this behind me is the burial site for the town of uravan and underneath all these rocks these white and dark colored rocks here's all of the remains of that town because they thought it was so dangerous they had the bury it under all this stuff which is absurd so the other absurd thing that I found that was new since the last time I came out here is the sign so let's go check it out well this is a new uh signed to me so launching Landing or operating unmanned aircraft systems on any property owner or lease by the U.S department of energy office of Legacy Management is prohibited without expensive to specific authorization well since I am actually on County Road here this isn't owned by the department of energy there's a county road sign here let's go walk over to it right now so I can you know cya cover my ass or cover your ass as it is see I'm on County Road this is a County Road it is not a road that is leased by the department of energy or anything like that so I can take off fly over the property and do all that and still be within the letter of the law so that's what I'm going to do [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign 101 running while I'm driving on these roads because I can just drive by like over an area and it'll tell me that there's something active around here like you know more than normal so I just listened to the clicks and I know to just you know at least walk the road and see what I find out here I don't know if there'll be anything but just doing it anyway so we'll see nice place though oh yeah something definitely around here now I'm using this because this is going to be a little more sensitive at like finding stuff in a general area but to pinpoint something I have to use my my rad eye B20 so this is a good place to start that radicode 101 was very useful on this trip to EuroVan and because of it I could actually hear when the activity would shoot up and I'd stop look around I'd be able to find little pieces of kind of tight like this and so it has its uses I mean it's actually a very uh powerful little tool to have in conjunction with a regular uh geiger counter the one that can actually detect Alpha and beta radiation more readily because I can use that I use the radicode 101 to kind of get my area to look in but then I need the like the rad ib20 or something that has like a GM tube something that could detect alpha beta and gamma radiation to help me kind of pinpoint like where things are so it was very helpful [Music] [Music] foreign just following an old dirt road up from you know up the hill from EuroVan and just decided to check it out and to see where it led me and it's not a bad place to end up it's quite a view I mean yeah cool stuff I love exploring and finding new stuff like this new areas but uh haven't found any other like new minds or anything like that but I think uh I think they probably closed a lot of those mines up but I'm sure they're around here somewhere just kind of keep looking see what I find maybe I'll find nothing I mean I still had a really fun trip just exploring this place and camping at that campsite so I don't know if it does end right here what a cool place to end

Channel: Radioactive Drew

Views: 39,379

Keywords: uranium, uranium mine, mine, uranium ore, atomic power, nuclear, exploring, nuclear energy, danger, mining, Utah, Lisbon Valley, dangerous, radioactive zone, Colorado, Mi Vida, radiation, radioactive, radioactive drew, radioactivedrew, Colorado Plateau, Uravan, atomic history, camping, cooking

Id: WjW_YD0j2ro

Length: 14min 32sec (872 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 20 2022