Howdy, Colorado, and welcome to a holiday-week edition of The Temperature, where this week we are covering the whos, whats, whens, wheres, whys, hows and cows of health and climate news.

Here’s a fun if obvious fact: We are in peak season for fireworks injuries. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, two-thirds of all fireworks injuries in the United States last year occurred in the weeks surrounding July Fourth. Last year also saw 9,700 people treated in emergency rooms for fireworks injuries and eight deaths.

We say this not to put a damper on your holiday plans, but as a friendly, caring reminder: Sparkle safely this week. Your extremities will thank you.

Now, let’s launch — carefully! — into the news this week like a Roman candle. Boom, here we go.

John Ingold

Reporter

TEMP CHECK

HEALTH

Lutheran Medical Center prepares for its big move

The art is hung. The toilets flush. The X-ray machines are (mostly) assembled.

One month from today, Intermountain Health’s Lutheran Medical Center in Wheat Ridge will shut down its current location and move 3 miles west to a brand new facility, the first major hospital relocation in Colorado in years.

At 6 a.m. Aug. 3, the current location — at West 38th Avenue and Wadsworth Boulevard — will stop accepting new patients. A fleet of about 20 ambulances will begin running loops transporting patients already in the hospital to the new campus, which is just off Interstate 70 near the interchange with Colorado 58. The hospital is expecting to move about 180 patients, in a choreography that will be timed down to the minute.

The conductor leading this dance will be Casey Bogenschutz, whose title — director of strategic initiatives — severely undersells both the strategy and initiative the job requires.

On a recent day, Bogenschutz led The Sun on a tour of the new hospital, weaving through a maze of corridors and rooms, some with signage still TBD. The new facility has 226 patient rooms, roughly the same as the current hospital. That’s 226 rooms that need to be stocked, beds to be positioned, television and electronic white boards — for displaying information to patients — to be connected.

Outside each patient room there currently hangs a list attached with blue painter’s tape of all the items needing to be placed inside. Bed, check. Toilet paper, check.

The rooms, themselves, are a significant upgrade over the current hospital’s. For one, they have a nifty sliding supply cabinet that nurses can pull out to restock from the hallway without disturbing patients. But that feature serves another purpose: If the patient inside the room has a nasty, contagious bug, it keeps staff from having to load up on protective gear just to refill the tissue boxes.

The innovation is one sign of COVID’s fingerprints on the new hospital. Here’s another: Every room can be converted into a critical-care room if needed.

“An outcome of the pandemic is we need the flexibility to take care of really sick patients everywhere,” Bogenschutz said.

The facility has also been designed with other modern afflictions in mind. Doors connect all the rooms for trauma patients, allowing a doctor treating people from a mass-casualty incident such as a mass shooting to move quickly from patient to patient.

More than that, Bogenschutz said the new hospital has been organized for efficiency. Scanners are positioned nearby the patients who will need them. The room numbering is orderly and intuitive, allowing a nurse to know exactly where they are in the hospital at any time. There’s an organized flow as patients move from one treatment area to the next.

This, Bogenschutz said, is the best argument for building a new hospital, instead of simply renovating the old one.

“It doesn’t have the adjacencies that are required in the industry,” she said of the current hospital. “You make it work, but when you upgrade you can build things the way you want them.”

Look for more on the big move in the coming days on ColoradoSun.com.

Section by John Ingold | Reporter

MORE HEALTH NEWS

• Colorado launched a website this week to help improve the state’s mental health system. Let’s imagine you are working on developing and implementing policies to improve mental health care in Colorado. (Or maybe you don’t have to imagine because you’re actually doing this right now.) You’ll want data to know where people are accessing services most and where gaps exist, right? Well, the state has now made it easier to find that data with the launch of the Behavioral Health Administration’s Performance Hub. Tatiana Flowers walks you through what’s available in the new data portal right now and what’s coming in the ensuing weeks.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Good food and stable housing have huge effects on health. So Colorado Medicaid wants to cover those, too. This may seem obvious, but if you want to have good health, you’ll need to eat good food and live in a stable place. But it has taken a shockingly long time for folks in the health care world to come around to seeing their work intertwined with stuff beyond the clinic — and to create programs reflecting that. As Jennifer Brown explains, though, this is starting to change, with Colorado’s Medicaid program now working on a plan to begin covering some housing and food costs for its members.
  — The Colorado Sun
• Colorado now has the worst outbreak of bird flu among dairy cattle in the country. More dairy herds in Colorado have been infected with bird flu in the past month than in any other state in the country, and the state’s outbreak shows little sign of slowing down. Now standing at 27 cases since April — the state confirmed another one after this article was published — Colorado is poised to become the national leader in total cases of avian influenza among dairy cattle.
  — The Colorado Sun
• UCHealth’s hospital in Greeley earns national recognition for social responsibility. UCHealth Greeley Hospital ranked third in the country for social responsibility in a new analysis by the Lown Institute, a health care think tank. The institute compiles its rankings using traditional metrics around the value and outcomes of care but also includes data on racial inclusivity, pay equity and other health equity measures.
  — Greeley Tribune, Lown Institute

CLIMATE

Can we stick a fork in confusing compost rules?

Is it safe to compost everything again?

Colorado’s recycling-minded residents who have previously reveled in the right to toss forks, plates and bags in their composting bin are hearing rumblings of good news this week. But a new state law is not a complete game-changer, recycling advocates warn, until the composting companies are fully on board with the changes and consumers are more diligent about sorting.

On July 1, a new Colorado law went into effect saying utensils that claim to be compostable — made of cornstarch base or other green compounds that decompose — must be certified by a third party and labeled as such on Colorado store shelves. The idea is to reassure companies that handle city-collected compost bins that everything in the bins is in fact biodegradable and can be safely mixed into the compost-cooking piles doing their magic at the handling complexes.

Previously, consumers have done such a poor job keeping never-degrade plastics and dangerous glass out of composting bins that the compost companies rejected loads and changed the rules of what they would take. Plastic bags were gumming up the wheels of machinery, broken glass made dirt piles unsafe, and too much plastic and coated paper was never breaking down.

The city of Denver now tells residents with green composting bins that only food and yard waste can go in, no more tossing paper plates and napkins and pizza boxes and hoping for the best.

The state law, Senate Bill 253 from 2023, doesn’t tell Denver or other cities how to handle their stuff. But it does give them room to change their rules back to being more consumer-friendly, said Kelly Leviker of CoPIRG, a major nonprofit promoter of recycling.

“This law should make it quite clear to folks what is compostable and what is not compostable,” Leviker said. “And so hopefully this will start to lay the groundwork for local industrial composters to, once again, start accepting more compostable goods.”

One part of the rules went into effect Jan. 1, and the rest this week, Leviker said. The labeling requirement says old-style plastics are not allowed to use the compostable or biodegradable tags. Truly compostable materials will have green coloring in the packaging and be marked in a way that a composter can be confident if they see those goods mixed into their loads.

How does the average Colorado resident have any control over what a national packaging company does?

“If we find those (mislabeled) goods in Colorado, then you can go to the state of Colorado’s website and you can report them, and they will not be able to be sold in Colorado,” Leviker said.

Sounds intriguing! We’ll have more on the new composting rules, and Denver’s reaction to them, in the next week at ColoradoSun.com.

Section by Michael Booth | Reporter

MORE CLIMATE NEWS

• Where does SCOTUS block on agencies leave Colorado environment goals? The U.S. Supreme Court spent the past few weeks building major roadblocks to federal agencies like the EPA carrying out Democratic-favored rules on air and water pollution, among other policies. So where does that leave Colorado, which has big ozone, water and public lands problems but is also seen as a national leader in trying to rein in pollution and promote renewable energy? Michael Booth reports on the impacts here.
• June heat was brutal for hopes of normal mountain water conditions. Colorado has seen an average water year so far, but looking ahead, climate experts say much of the state could fall into drought conditions and struggle to find relief, Shannon Mullane reports. Colorado’s very average snowpack has officially melted away from all 115 federal snow monitoring stations in the state. Precipitation was at exactly 100% of the 30-year median. Heat, however, has been on the rise. 
• Xcel says it needs more customer money to fight wildfire dangers. Xcel is asking Colorado regulators for the right to charge electricity customers more for basic wildfire protections such as more video monitoring of power lines during storms, burying power lines in sensitive areas, and more. Mark Jaffe reports the big-dollar requests come at a time when Xcel is defending itself against massive lawsuits from families who lost homes in the Marshall fire, officially attributed at least in part to a sparking Xcel power line.
• Colorado homeowners fighting looming wildfires with better data. “So I put in my address,” Jim Remley says, “and up came this thing that basically says that within the next 30 years, this property has a 25.7% chance of being destroyed or damaged by wildfire. I’m 81 years old. And you start thinking that you’re living in a high-risk neighborhood. And it’s not because of gangs. It’s not because of gunfire. It’s natural stuff that you can’t really control.” Kevin Simpson takes us to Highlands Ranch, where data crunching is showing more and more homeowners how vulnerable they are.

CHART OF THE WEEK

One of the delights of this job is that it allows you to really tunnel down into the rabbit holes that your brain wants to fall into anyway, which is how I came to find myself on the website of the USDA Economic Research Service after writing the aforementioned story on bird flu in dairy cattle while sitting in a Starbucks and watching the baristas go through gallon after gallon of milk and then Googling to learn that the average Starbucks store can use as much as 35 gallons of milk per day and there are about 500 Starbucks stores in Colorado, which means those stores require roughly 2,500 dairy cattle just to keep them in the froth each year, the size of one entire large dairy, and, omigosh, how is that sustainable and is the agricultural system about to buckle under the weight of all those cows and SHOULD I HAVE GOTTEN OAT MILK IN MY LATTE INSTEAD?!?

And then I discovered something really interesting.

The chart above shows two fascinatingly diverging trends. On the one hand, the United States actually has a lot fewer dairy cattle than it did decades ago — about 20% less than in 1970. On the other hand, those cows are producing a lot more milk — average milk production per cow has increased nearly 150% since 1970.

The USDA studied this and concluded that the increase is happening most especially in cows that are in large, nonorganic dairies, which, because of industry consolidation, a much higher percentage of cows are. Better selective breeding, better equipment, better feed and better production workflow all contribute to this astonishing rise in a cow’s ability to produce milk.

On top of that, my anxiety that latte-loving Americans are driving an increase in dairy consumption was misplaced. Don’t blame the ’Bucks. It’s all about cheese.

Consumption of fluid milk is declining in the United States (though consumption by adults in non-dairy beverages like tea and coffee is up). But per capita cheese consumption is higher than it’s been in at least 20 years.

So there’s a snapshot into the world of milk production. Soy cheese, anyone?

Section by John Ingold | Reporter

Welp, here I am finishing up this newsletter while sitting in another Starbucks drinking another dairy latte. Habits are hard to break, but I now know to spare a thought for the cows and farmers who make my Wednesday morning routine possible.

Thank you for letting us be part of your Wednesday routine. We just appreciate the heck out of you.

Have a good Fourth, and we’ll see you back here next week.

— John & Michael

The Colorado Sun is part of The Trust Project. Read our policies.

Corrections & Clarifications

Wrong dragonfly!

The science-minded folks at Butterfly Pavilion made a rare mistake when they told us last week what kind of dragonfly they are breeding in-house to help restock a rare Colorado species. An astute reader (thank you!) pointed out the difference, and the pavilion was eager to correct the science: The pavilion is helping to revive the Hudsonian emerald dragonfly, a native of Colorado and other western states. The Hine’s emerald dragonfly mentioned last week is actually a Midwestern flier, centered on Illinois. The Midwestern version needs help, too, though, as U.S. Fish and Wildlife considers it among the “most endangered dragonflies in the U.S.” Good luck, all dragonflies! Eat those West Nile mosquitoes!

Notice something wrong? The Colorado Sun has an ethical responsibility to fix all factual errors. Request a correction by emailing corrections@coloradosun.com.