A Vetem Survey Of A Former Munitions Foundry Site At The Denver Federal Center

The present Denver Federal Center in Lakewood, Colorado, was a center for production of small<br>arms and artillery ammunition during World War II and was then known as the Denver<br>Ordnance Plant. When munitions manufacturing ended, some of the buildings were converted to<br>other uses and some were removed, A massive building, thought to be a foundry, just east of<br>Building 20 at the Denver Federal Center, was removed just before the end of the war.<br>Remaining subsurface parts of the building are buried under a clayey loam soil. High-resolution<br>images we recently made using data recorded by the very early time electromagnetic (VETEM)<br>system clearly show some buried parts of the building or objects that were in the building. Many<br>of the subsurface structures produced exceptionally strong signatures that we think were caused<br>by large, relatively shallow buried electrically conductive objects. We find, however, that the<br>correlation between the VETEM images and magnetic data is not high, suggesting that some of<br>the highly conducting objects may not have metal in them. The former foundry site affords an<br>excellent opportunity to evaluate the performance of the VETEM system and other geophysical<br>instruments because of the location and conditions.