Bill asked to be reassigned to guard duty.
He understands better than most the problems Rocky Flats has had with off-site contamination. “I work out there,” he tells people, “but I wouldn’t live out there.”
On this May day, the four men turn onto Indiana Street and reach the east entrance of the plant. Normally there’s a line of cars at the gate at shift change, but because of the holiday, it’s a short-shift day with minimum staffing. Bill glances up at the guard towers, where invisible figures watch over the six thousand acres of land bounded by strands of barbed-wire and No Trespassing signs. One might expect a top-secret nuclear weaponry facility to look like something out of a James Bond film—a fortress of gleaming metal and glass—but Rocky Flats is a cluster of shabby gray concrete buildings with a distinct government feel. Every building has a number. Every employee has a number.
The men pull up to the gate, ready to show their badges even though the guard usually recognizes their faces. But this time the guard waves them down. “Hold on, you guys,” he says, his face tense.
Stan rolls down his window. “What’s up?” he asks.
“There’s a fire at the 771 complex.”
Stan turns to Bill in surprise. That’s the plutonium line.
“Better hurry,” the guard says. “It’s a bad one.”
ON THIS particular afternoon, Willie Warling isn’t thinking about work. He’s headed down to the local bar for a beer. Maybe two. It’s a beautiful day and he has the day off. He could use the relaxation. He’s got a stressful job.
Willie works in the 771 complex—the Hell Hole, people call it. Chain link and razor wire surround the heavily guarded two-story building half-buried in a rocky gulch. It’s the core of the plant, where plutonium is molded and shaped before it’s sent to the Pantex facility in Texas to be put in bomb casings.
Willie didn’t start out working as a radiation monitor. He began at Rocky Flats as a janitor, worked a couple of years as a shop clerk, and then moved into what they called health physics. A radiation monitor’s job is to control contamination. Contamination on the surface of the skin can usually be scrubbed off, but if an alpha particle is inhaled or ingested, it lodges in the body and emits a high, localized dose of radiation. Internal alpha emitters like plutonium are more harmful per unit dose than gamma or X-ray radiation. The damage is permanent and ongoing. The lungs are especially vulnerable. Plutonium can ignite spontaneously when exposed to air, and as it burns, it turns into a very fine dust, similar to rust. This dust consists of intensely radioactive particles that remain in the air for long periods and are easily inhaled. Even a single particle of plutonium can lodge in the lungs and continuously expose the surrounding tissue. Cancer may result, although it can take years or even decades to manifest.
The weight of plutonium is measured in micrograms. A single microgram—that is, one millionth of a gram of plutonium—is considered by the Department of Energy (DOE) to be a potentially lethal dose. A needle in a haystack, a dot on the head of a pin, a flea in a cathedral. In 1945 the AEC defined the “tolerance level” for nuclear workers exposed to plutonium as one microgram. In other words, by the time you’ve reached your tolerance level, you’ve received a potentially fatal dose.
Willie’s job is to make sure the plutonium stays put.
He suits up for work every day in a Halloween costume of sorts: full-face mask, cap, protective clothing, rubber gloves—sometimes two or three sets of rubber gloves—and often a tank of supplied air. He makes sure the other employees suit up correctly. He tests them before they go in to work on the glove boxes, and he tests them before they go home.
The work gets hot in more ways than one. Willie sweats beneath his uniform, especially when there’s been a spill and he has to stay on duty for hours without a break. Sometimes it takes two or three weeks to clean up just one spill. And it’s a never-ending story of cleaning one thing up and something else going wrong. A valve leaks, a glove box leaks, a pipe breaks.
Willie works at Rocky Flats for almost a year before he begins to understand what is coming off the assembly line. When he does understand, he never speaks to his wife about it. Or his three kids. He never speaks to anyone about it. It’s important work. He wants to protect the secrets of Rocky Flats, just like everyone else. National security is at stake.
But on this Mother’s Day, Willie isn’t thinking about work. He’s thinking about having a beer.
THE SPARK in the glove box grows. The two utility operators on shift are busy attending to another area. The spark feeds on the steady supply of oxygen from the ventilation system and bursts into an intense flame. The Plexiglas window on the glove box suddenly begins to burn, releasing hot, noxious gases. The lead-lined rubber gloves catch fire. The Benelex shielding—considered nonflammable—ignites. Fire fills the glove box and moves into the next in line. It snakes quickly, quietly through the linked glove-box lines of both Building 776 and Building 777.
At 2:27 p.m., a building heat detector finally triggers an alarm at the Rocky Flats fire station. Three firefighters are on duty: two men by the name of Skull and Sweet, and their captain, Wayne Jesser. A minute later, one of the utility operators returns to Building 776 and smells smoke. He is the first and only man to pull an alarm.
WILLIE WARLING is about to take a sip from his third beer of the afternoon when the bartender approaches. “Your wife is on the phone,” he says.
“What?”
“Your wife.” The bartender looks away.
Willie walks behind the register and picks up the receiver.
“Mom?” he asks. He can’t remember exactly when he started calling her that. It must have been somewhere along the line between all the kids.
“Something’s wrong,” she says. “You need to come home.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your manager called. They’re having a problem.”
He drives home. It could be anything. Things happen all the time.
His wife meets him at the door. “He said to call back right away,” she says. “Hurry.”
Willie calls. His supervisor’s voice is tense. “I need you to come in to work. We need you right now.”
“Well.” He pauses. This is a surprise. “I don’t know whether I should come out there.”
“Why is that?”
Willie clears his throat. “I should tell you I’ve had a couple of beers.”
“We need you now, Willie.”
He looks over to see if anyone is listening. “They always told us not to go to work if we’ve had any beer, any alcohol or drugs or anything,” he says. “I don’t know if I should come in.”
“Listen, Willie,” says the supervisor. “We need you. You come on out here right now.”
“All right.” Willie hangs up the phone. “I’m going into work, Mom,” he says. “I should be home soon.” Suddenly he feels sober.
THE THREE firemen jump into the fire truck and roar to the west side of the building. Sweet stays in the truck. Skull and Jesser climb into their protective suits, pull on their hard hats, strap on oxygen tanks, and head into the building. Dense black smoke fills the room. Flames shoot a foot and a half above the top of the glove-box line. The men can’t see well enough to move forward. They look down at their feet and try to follow the emergency evacuation markings painted on the floor, ducking to avoid the hot, glowing beads of lead dripping from the radiation shielding above.
They’ve been trained not to use water on plutonium. Each man grabs a canister of liquid carbon dioxide and together they try to shoot down the flames.
It doesn’t work. Jesser grabs two more CO2 canisters off a second line and they try to shoot down the fire again. It has no effect.
The men hastily retreat to rethink their strategy. They burst through the doors into the fresh air and pull off their equipment. A couple more workers have arrived, and Skull and Jesser are checked for radiation.
They’re blazing hot.
“You can�
��t go back in there. You’re contaminated,” the radiation monitor shouts. Jesser can’t tell who’s behind the mask. Is that Willie Warling? he wonders.
“We’ve got to,” Jesser yells. He jerks off his mask.
“You’re hot, sir,” the radiation monitor yells. “Screaming hot. You’ve got plutonium all over you. Put that mask back on and don’t take it off again.” The monitor is breathing hard. He can feel the heat coming from inside the building, right through his coveralls, and he’s standing outside in the wind. He can’t imagine what it’s like inside. And there’s smoke, black smoke, coming out of the stack of Building 776. Black smoke isn’t supposed to come out of those filters.
BILL AND Stan arrive at the guard center at Building 21. The skeletal guard crew is in a state of panic. “A couple firefighters are down there,” a guard says. “And they’re hot. Already. They can’t go back in.”
“How big is this fire?” Stan asks.
“Can’t tell. Big.”
“Who’s in there?”
“Not sure. The first responders are hot—they went in to check it out and weren’t in full suits. The Health Physics guys won’t let them back in.”
“Who else is going in?” Bill asks.
“We’re waiting for backup,” the guard says. “Everyone’s out. No one’s here.”
Stan demands, “So who else is going in?”
“No one. We’re calling people in. We can’t even get ahold of people. It’s a holiday, remember?”
“You’re calling off-duty guys?” Stan asks.
“Yeah. And we’re trying to get more Survive-Air tanks from other districts. We need equipment.”
“Are you joking?” another guard asks. “We don’t have that kind of time.”
Bill and Stan glance at each other. They have no special training other than the basic fire training that all guards receive—essentially, how to use a fire extinguisher.
“I guess that means us,” Stan says. Bill nods. They suit up in full bibs, taping the bottoms of their coveralls to their booties with duct tape, and grab a couple of masks and air tanks.
Bill’s mind is racing. He knows what can happen with this kind of fire. He saw it back on September 11, 1957, when the first big fire at Rocky Flats occurred. It’s all still vivid in his mind.
BACK THEN he was only twenty-five, and it was his fourth year as a guard at Rocky Flats. On that day, too, he arrived at the gate as usual, ready to walk his route in Building 91. “Bill, wait,” the guard said. “Don’t go to 91. They need you in Building 771 [then called Building 71].” The plutonium processing building.
“What’s up?”
“Fire.”
Bill suited up with one of the firefighters. His coveralls weren’t the right size, and he used so much duct tape across the bottom of his pants that later it ripped all the hair off his legs. They got to the building. Everything looked fine from the outside.
“Where do we go?” Bill asked.
“Down that hatch.” A supervisor pointed. “Just follow that fire hose down into the building. Two guys already went down, but we don’t know what happened to them.”
Bill and his partner climbed down into the passageway. They followed the hose to where the tunnel branched off in a Y. On instinct they followed the path to the right, opened a door, and walked into a wall of fire.
They closed the door.
“You scared?” his partner asked.
“No.” Bill shook his head. He was good at keeping his emotions in check.
The men backtracked to the Y-point, where they met the other two men. “It’s out!” the men cried. “We got it.”
But they didn’t get it. It was like a fire in a haystack, cool on the outside but a furnace within. This fire, too, had started in a glove box, in a plutonium skull, a thin casing left over from the mold for the molten metal. As with the later fire, there had been no alarm—heat-detecting sensory equipment was disabled when it slowed production.
The fire couldn’t be stopped. Firefighters turned on the exhaust fans—an inadvertent mistake—which fanned the flames and carried hot gases into the main air exhaust system. The fire raged through the first bank of filters and then, suddenly, threatened all the filters that stretched across the roof, called the plenum. The roof and the entire complex were at risk.
The men knew not to use water on a plutonium fire. The risk of the blue flash of a criticality, or nuclear chain reaction, was too great. There would likely be no explosion—simply the blue flash signaling a surge of neutron radiation fatal to everyone in the immediate vicinity. But they were desperate. They began using water. For a moment it seemed to work. Then suddenly the air pressure dropped. There was silence, and then a deafening blast. Bill was rocked by the explosion. The force twisted the plenum’s steel frame, destroying most of the filters, and blew the lead cap off the 152-foot smokestack. Flames shot more than two hundred feet above the rim. And the fire continued. For thirteen hours, unfiltered radioactive smoke poured out of the 771 smokestack—smoke filled with plutonium, americium, beryllium, acids, cleaning solvents, and other toxic contaminants. Bill was coated head to foot with plutonium—“crapped up,” the workers called it—and one ear in particular required a vigorous scrubbing, even though he’d been wearing a mask and respirator. But he received the most contamination during the subsequent cleanup. Months and months of cleanup.
How much radioactive and toxic material escaped into the environment? No one knew, or will ever know, for sure. The 1957 fire was so hot it melted the top of the ten-story exhaust stack and destroyed the radiation sensors. The explosion blew out more than six hundred industrial filters and a four-year accumulation of uranium and plutonium nitrate and oxide. The filters had not been replaced since Rocky Flats began operation in 1953.
The blast was thunderous, but the radioactive plume it produced was silent as it floated over the cities of Arvada, Golden, and Wheat Ridge, and then passed on to the north side of Denver and beyond.
There was one lucky break: the freak explosion from the volatile combination of water and plutonium cut off the power and shut down the fans that were fueling and driving the fire. A potentially apocalyptic event for the Denver metro area was avoided.
Official estimates of how much plutonium was burned or released in the 1957 fire varied widely, from 500 grams to as much as 92 pounds of plutonium or more. By comparison, Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, used fewer than 14 pounds of plutonium. Beginning in a production area, the fire had spread through the venting system, destroying most of the filters—flammable filters that were supposed to protect the public. The explosion and resulting plume were caused by volatile gases mixing with plutonium dust caught in the filters. The plume exposed countless people in and around Denver to plutonium.
The government adamantly maintained that residents were not at risk, and that a criticality did not occur.
The day after the fire, a small notice appeared in the newspapers. A spokesman from the AEC stated that “spontaneous combustion” had occurred in a processing line, although he declined to describe exactly what had happened. There was no mention of the destroyed filters and sensors or the deadly plume of smoke. It was the Cold War. No one asked questions.
The AEC repeatedly told the press there was no danger of a nuclear explosion at Rocky Flats. There was no danger to surrounding areas, populations, crops, or livestock from the Rocky Flats plant operations. When pressed for more information by reporters, the AEC said, “Further information regarding the function of the plant would be of value to unfriendly nations, and cannot be disclosed under security regulations.”
Elements such as strontium-90 and cesium-135 never occur except in the case of a nuclear chain reaction. Based on soil and water testing completed decades later that detects the presence of these elements, some experts—despite the government’s insistence that there has never been a criticality at Rocky Flats—believe that a criticality accident producing various fission products may have occurred on Se
ptember 11, 1957.
TWELVE YEARS have passed since that terrible, secret fire. Now, on May 11, 1969, it feels like it’s about to happen all over again.
“You ready?” Stan asks.
“You and me,” Bill says. “Let’s go.”
When they arrive on the east side of the plutonium processing building, it looks quiet and clean, at least from the outside. There’s a loading dock with doors on each side, and a set of double doors that leads into an interior hallway. The men pull on their masks and strap on their air tanks. “CO2 only,” Bill says. “No water.”
Stan nods. They open the door, move into the hallway, and enter the main production area.
“Holy cow.” Stan stops in his tracks. Usually as bright as a supermarket, the room is nearly pitch black. A few emergency lights glow dully. The only noise comes from the fans, feeding a fire he can feel more than see. “I can’t even see my hand in front of my face,” he mutters.
Smoke rolls toward them in waves. Bill sees the orange glow and moves closer. It looks like the flames are shooting up over the glove boxes. One, two, three glove boxes—no, all of them. He knows the look of this kind of fire. It reminds him of forest fires he’s seen in films—high, fast-moving flames—but the color is different. It’s the distinct, unearthly brilliance of burning metal.
“What is that?” Stan yells.
“Plutonium. Probably the magnesium carriers, too.”
The heat is intense. Stan feels it through his mask. “It’s not just plutonium,” he yells. “It’s the plastic. The shielding. It’s the Benelex around these glove boxes.”
“Benelex doesn’t burn.”
“It’s burning! Why is it burning?”
“The Plexiglas, too,” Bill shouts. “The Plexiglas is on fire.”
It takes a lot of radiant heat to make something like that flammable, Stan thinks. This fire has been going on for a while.
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