Earthquakes near Northern Colorado wastewater well decrease

DENVER — The ground around a northern Colorado wastewater injection well has been relatively quiet for more than two months, offering hope that a 10-month string of more than 200 small earthquakes might have subsided.

The bottom 450 feet of the 10,800-foot-deep well was plugged with cement last year, and that might be keeping the wastewater — a byproduct of oil and gas wells — from seeping into fractures and triggering earthquakes, researchers and regulators say.

The newly shortened well is back in operation, and researchers say no quakes greater than magnitude 1 have been measured in a 7-mile…