Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  Across the rock-strewn field of amber grass lies the Rocky Flats complex, surrounded by towers and lights and patrolled by security guards. One of those guards is Debby Clark, and she’s no longer a rookie. She’s been trained to deal with terrorists, but sometimes she has to yell at neighbor kids who hop over the boundary fence for a lark. The protesters, though, are something else. They make her angry. How could anyone be against defending the United States? They’re misguided, she thinks. They don’t understand what they’re doing. She doesn’t believe what the so-called environmentalists are saying. At Rocky Flats, everyone does their job, and workers depend on each other. They’re working to protect the country, to protect the very people who feel the need to protest.

  During the weeks and months that the Truth Force occupies the tracks, part of Debby’s job is to sit in a converted truck nearby—nothing more than a heated railcar, really—and watch the protesters. She and the other guards have equipment, including night-vision goggles, to help them keep a close eye on what’s going on. Some of the activists are students and she wonders if they’re smoking pot or exactly what they’re doing out there. There’s no place to pee or take a shower. There’s no privacy. She talks to them from time to time, but she has no patience for students who should be in class.

  One of the protesters is poet Allen Ginsberg, a founder of the Naropa Institute writing program in Boulder. Ginsberg is a frequent visitor at the home of Ann White, who now marches regularly with the protesters. Ann and her husband have a home in one of Denver’s more prestigious neighborhoods, and Ann enjoys watching Ginsberg in the mornings on their front lawn, doing t’ai chi in his beard and business suit and astonishing the neighbors.

  In an effort to “calm fear among local residents and to clear up the mystery about the work done at the plant,” Rocky Flats begins conducting public tours. The tour is intended to demonstrate how safe Rocky Flats is, and includes a look at Building 707, a “component manufacturing facility.” Building 707, the replacement facility for the building that was destroyed in the 1969 Mother’s Day fire, holds a storage vault containing several tons of plutonium. Tour participants, mostly curious local residents and members of the press, are outfitted with laboratory smocks and elastic-topped booties, and each person receives a respirator. The tour guide, a Rockwell employee, instructs the group to put on their respirators if an alarm sounds while they’re walking through the pressure-sealed corridors and air locks because a particle of plutonium the size of a grain of pollen, if inhaled or taken into the body, can cause bone or lung cancer, leukemia, or genetic defects.

  Despite the new openness, the public is not reassured. On June 16, 1978, when Rocky Flats is conducting a tour, Ginsberg sits on the railroad tracks with several others and reads his poem “Plutonian Ode” as a train approaches. Members of the local and national press are present when Ginsberg is arrested. As he is led off by an officer, the officer jokes, “We’re equipped to deal with terrorists, but we’re not equipped to deal with you people.”

  There are repeated arrests for trespass and obstruction of justice, and many activists, including Daniel Ellsberg, are arrested several times. A trial date is set.

  Rocky Flats decides to suspend public tours of the plant.

  THE ACTIVISTS’ trial takes place in Golden, in the old courthouse just down the road from the Colorado School of Mines. Golden, an old mining town, is a mix of college students, Denver yuppies, and old-style cowboys. The city carefully nurtures and markets its Old West image. An arch stretches across the main street, proclaiming WELCOME TO GOLDEN—WHERE THE WEST BEGINS. It’s just a few days until Thanksgiving, and the town has already begun putting up Christmas decorations.

  In the courtroom, thirty-one-year-old Judge Kim Goldberger is facing his first criminal trial. Seven Denver attorneys have agreed to volunteer their time to represent the protesters. The prosecuting attorneys, including two on loan from the DOE, are paid by the government. Several days are spent selecting the six-member jury, three men and three women. Expert witnesses are called; some are local, but many have traveled from out of state or from other countries, at their own expense.

  The goal of the Rocky Flats Truth Force is to increase public awareness that Rocky Flats should be closed or converted to non-nuclear work, as recommended by the Lamm-Wirth Report. Members of the Truth Force freely admit to camping out on the railroad tracks and to attempting to obstruct the activity of the weapons plant. But they plead not guilty to the criminal charge of trespassing. Attorneys for the activists base their defense on a little-known Colorado “choice of evils” law. The statute states that an illegal act is justified if it is done to prevent a greater, imminent evil or crime. For example, the law would allow an automobile driver to exceed the speed limit if the purpose was to save a life or escape immediate danger. The defense states that the activists are working to prevent a catastrophic event as well as make residents aware of potential health effects from environmental contamination. Trespassing is nothing in the face of what’s at stake.

  But Judge Goldberger begins by ruling that he, and not the jury, has the right to determine if the choice-of-evils defense is applicable, and he decides it is not. In denying the use of it, Judge Goldberger says, “The courts may not be used as political or legislative forums.” Gay Guthrie, the deputy district attorney, notes, “People are not to usurp the democratic process. People are not to be so arrogant to take yourself to a point to where you sit yourself down on another man’s property and say that what he is doing is so bad that I can infringe on his constitutional rights. This is rule by anarchy.”

  Although Judge Goldberger agrees to listen to several days of testimony from defense witnesses, he won’t allow the jury to hear the testimony. It’s filmed, however, in case he later rules it to be relevant. With the jury excused, the defense calls a number of experts to the stand to testify regarding the reality of radiation hazards imposed on local residents by Rocky Flats.

  The first witness is Dr. Karl Morgan, a professor of health physics at Georgia Tech, one of the top engineering and physics universities in the country, and an international authority on radiation-induced illness. Dr. Morgan had been hired by the Manhattan Project to be director of health physics at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he spent twenty-nine years determining the radiation limits for workers. His testimony takes up most of the first day. “There is no safe level of radiation exposure,” he says. “So the question is not: What is a safe level? The question is: How great is the risk?” There is no such thing, he states, as a “permissible” dose of radiation; the slightest quantity can be enough, in a susceptible human, to cause some form of cancer. Present safety standards are dangerously inadequate. People living near or downwind of Rocky Flats are subject to a greater risk than those in other areas, and the EPA has, in his estimation, failed to consistently enforce even its own inadequate safety measures. Rocky Flats should never have been located close to a large population, he says. The plant should be shut down or relocated in a remote place, “preferably deep inside a mountain.”

  Two more days of taped testimony follow, still with no jury present. Local scientists unanimously support Morgan’s statements. Dr. Edward Martell reports the results of his survey and confirms that high levels of plutonium have been found in soil far beyond the plant boundaries. Dr. John Cobb, professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Medical Center, testifies that the most significant danger comes from the residue from more than five thousand leaking barrels filled with plutonium—plutonium that has been picked up by the wind and blown as far away as Denver. One way to quantify the presence of plutonium is to determine the rate of decay of radiation as measured in disintegrations per minute. In 1973 the Colorado State Health Department proposed an “interim” standard for soil contaminated with plutonium, setting the maximum allowable concentration at 2 disintegrations per minute per gram of soil. The radioactive sand under the barrels measured at 30 million disintegrations per minute, 15 mil
lion times the state standard.

  All of the nuclear physicists and physicians who testify believe the plant is a public health hazard and must be closed or relocated.

  The prosecution then asks whether the potential dangers of Rocky Flats justify the actions of the defendants. Given the fact, Dr. Morgan says, that ordinary political means have failed to produce necessary change, he believes that nonviolent action is probably justified to publicize the problem—even though, he quickly adds, blocking the railroad tracks will not “miraculously” decontaminate the eleven thousand acres already polluted. Dr. John Gofman, from the University of California, Berkeley, states, “Protest is always justified when it is the only means to make a deaf government listen.”

  After eleven days of testimony, the trial is adjourned until after the Thanksgiving holiday.

  Judge Goldberger has not allowed the jury to hear the testimony of expert witnesses, which he’s deemed irrelevant, but after the recess he allows some of the defendants to make statements directly to the jury. The prosecution—including attorneys from the DOE—incessantly interrupts. Truth Force member Roy Young, the Boulder geologist, takes the stand. “I was on those tracks not to commit trespass but to prevent random murder on the population of Denver.”

  “Objection, your honor!”

  “Objection sustained.”

  “And if I thought,” Young continues, “that by staying on those tracks … I could close the plant tomorrow, I would be willing to stay there for the rest of my life.”

  “Objection, your honor!”

  “Objection sustained.”

  Skye Kerr, a twenty-three-year-old registered nurse and student at the University of Colorado, speaks of her training at Boston Children’s Hospital and the long-term effects of radiation-caused cancer and leukemia. “It [cancer] happens years later,” she says. “You can’t see or feel or touch radiation, but it’s as real as a gun.”

  “Objection, your honor!”

  “Objection sustained.”

  “I felt the only thing I could do,” she continues, “was to bodily put myself on the tracks. I knew that laws much, much higher [than trespassing] were being broken.”

  “What kind of laws?”

  “Laws of human life. You know, violations of rights you have as a human being.”

  “Objection, your honor!”

  “Objection sustained.”

  Finally Marian Doub’s mother, Nancy, takes the stand. She describes the night she was arrested with her daughter. “We went out on the tracks,” she explains to the jury, “and walked up the tracks in the dark, with our flashlights, singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’ It was a very moving experience, standing next to my daughter. It’s not the usual thing you imagine for mother-daughter activity. It meant a lot to be standing beside my daughter.” She pauses to collect herself. “You know, it shouldn’t be just the young people who are worried about this. It’s not fair to give them that burden. So I was glad to be there.”

  In his closing remarks, chief defense attorney Edward Sherman appeals to the jury as “the conscience of the community.” On the other hand, prosecuting attorney Steve Cantrell argues that this case is merely “a case of simple trespass. We are not here to change the policy of the U.S. government.”

  The judge reads the instructions to the jury, reminding them of the fact that the choice-of-evils defense does not apply. The jury is to disregard the emotional appeals of the protesters and consider “only, and nothing but, the formal charges of obstruction of traffic on a public right-of-way and trespass against U.S. government property.”

  After five hours of deliberation, the jury says it cannot reach a decision. Judge Goldberger excuses them for the evening. The jury returns in the morning and deliberates for another five hours. Their verdict: all defendants are guilty on charges of trespassing, but innocent of obstructing traffic. Each protester faces a maximum fine of five hundred dollars or six months in jail.

  The jurors explain that they sympathize with the defendants but, under the instructions of the court, could not acquit them of trespassing. One juror passes a note to the defendants: “My support and prayers are with you all.” A reporter tries to interview a juror and the juror stumbles midsentence, leaving the courtroom in tears. Another juror pulls aside defendant Jack Joppa and says, “We all support you and your cause.”

  By evening, Patrick Malone and his fellow pirates are back in the tepee on the tracks.

  CONTAMINATION LIES hidden like land mines not only in the windswept landscape of Rocky Flats but in the bodies of the people who live there. In November 1978, Dr. John Cobb of the University of Colorado Medical Center, in conjunction with the EPA, reports that lung and liver tissue taken during autopsies at local hospitals from the bodies of 450 people who lived near Rocky Flats contains plutonium. Further analysis confirms the presence of plutonium-239, the “fingerprint” of weapons-grade plutonium produced at Rocky Flats. Dr. Cobb hypothesizes that plutonium is present in the reproductive organs as well, where it could affect sperm and show up in future generations as cancers and deformities.

  The study is halted, however, before Dr. Cobb has a chance to fully analyze his results or begin testing reproductive organs. Begun in 1975, it ends after Reagan takes office in 1981 and James Watt becomes secretary of the interior. Hundreds of frozen sex organs from people who lived near Rocky Flats are sent to freezers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they will remain for nearly fifteen years. The presence of plutonium in the bodies is undisputed, but whether it’s enough to cause cancers or genetic defects is never determined. The organs are finally sent to Colorado State University in 1994. When data is finally published, the executive summary is rewritten by the government to reflect more favorably on Rocky Flats.

  A quiet epidemic shadows the highly touted safety record for workers at Rocky Flats. James Downing, a maintenance machinist who worked in the glove boxes in the plutonium processing buildings, sustained first- and second-degree burns on his hands during a plutonium fire on January 6, 1961. He inhaled an undetermined amount of plutonium during a glove-box fire nine years earlier. The long, lead-lined gloves he wore while working on glove boxes often ripped, and his hands and arms were contaminated. During his time at Rocky Flats, he was injured or exposed at least forty-eight times. On November 28, 1978, he dies of esophageal cancer at age forty-four.

  At a court hearing following Downing’s death, the former manager of radiation at Rocky Flats admits that forty-eight is not considered a large or unusual number of accidents for an employee at Rocky Flats.

  Downing is just one of the first of many employees to pay for their employment with their lives.

  Potential homeowners had been asked to sign a waiver for years, but in 1979, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) establishes a legal requirement that anyone buying a home in the vicinity of Rocky Flats with FHA mortgage insurance or any other HUD assistance must be informed of plutonium contamination in the area. They must sign something called the Rocky Flats Advisory Notice, which says: “This notice is to inform you of certain facts regarding the United States Department of Energy Rocky Flats Plant which is located within ten miles of your prospective residence. You should be aware that there exist within portions of Boulder County and Jefferson County, Colorado, varying levels of plutonium contamination of the soil. However, according to the information supplied by the Department of Energy, the soil contamination in the area in which your prospective residence is located is below the limits of the applicable radiation guidance developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).”

  Many local homebuilders and business owners are upset, and some believe that sales and property values may suffer. A spokesperson for the Rocky Flats Monitoring Council notes, “Very few residents know about Rocky Flats. The problem is, how do you tell them certain things without creating a panic situation?” A Rockwell spokesman tells the press, “We [Rockwell and the DOE] try to stay out of local politics.… The pu
blic is confused about Rocky Flats, and I have to lay that directly in the laps of the local media.”

  FOR YEARS I have prepared for my father’s death. There are all the DUIs, the fender benders, the nights of waking up late to hear him stumbling in the foyer. The night he comes home with a broken jaw after some fracas with a police officer. The late nights I race down from college—sometimes with Mark—to be with my mother when he pounds on the door. They have separated, more or less, and Dad is living in an apartment in old Arvada. My mother changes the locks on the house and finds solace in long hours at work, and white pills and red wine when she gets home. Kurt is still living at home, and he watches and tries to intervene—sometimes physically—as the situation deteriorates. One evening he and my mother come home late to find that Dad has broken into the house and is lying unconscious on the bearskin rug, sick with alcohol poisoning, his distended abdomen churning. They rush him to the hospital.

  “Why,” I ask my brother, “does he keep breaking in? Why does he keep coming around?”

  Kurt shrugs. “I guess he can’t give up the idea of his marriage to Mom,” he says. “He wants to be part of the family.”

  Maybe he wants help, I think. But he’ll have nothing to do with rehabilitation programs or therapy. None of us knows what to do. I don’t know how I will feel about my father’s death when it happens, but it always seems imminent.

  Partly through Mark, I have become interested in yoga and meditation. Yoga seems to help my neck, which often pains me, and meditation gives me a sense of calm. I start taking a meditation class at a local church one night a week that is led by a woman with a low, soothing voice, and I feel peaceful just being in the room with her.

  One night, just as we are beginning our session, the class is interrupted by a voice in the hall. I hear my name. A young woman peeks in. “Is there a Kris here?”

  Everyone exchanges glances. “I guess that’s me,” I say.