Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  THE CHORUS of people calling for relocation of the plant grows. Representative Pat Schroeder (D-Colorado) is very vocal about moving Rocky Flats away from Denver for public health and civil defense reasons. Other politicians agree. The Colorado Medical Society unanimously calls for the removal of plutonium operations at Rocky Flats. The group Physicians for Social Responsibility calls Rocky Flats a “creeping Chernobyl.” The DOE, on the other hand, is pressing for expansion of the plant, based on production quotas and waste storage requirements, but even the governor—who seems to have been reluctantly convinced of the necessity of weapons production—is opposed to that.

  Under political pressure, the DOE agrees to do a study on the future of Rocky Flats, focusing primarily on worker safety and upgrading facilities. Pat Schroeder insists the study be conducted by independent experts. “I have yet to see an agency study itself and turn itself in,” she says. Indeed, rather than focus on risk and potential health effects, the results of the DOE study emphasize the economic loss Denver would suffer if Rocky Flats were relocated. Moving plutonium operations would result in a loss of 3,500 jobs and a payroll of more than $40 million, and moving the entire plant would mean a loss to the general Denver metro area of six thousand jobs and millions of dollars. Colorado fears the bomb, but can’t live without it.

  If Denver wants to keep Rocky Flats for economic reasons, then perhaps the best thing is to give people a good emergency warning system. But the Radiological Emergency Response Plan continues to be locked in debate. Officials can’t agree on what type of accident could actually occur and, if something does happen, what they should tell people to do. Should evacuation centers be established? If so, officials argue, should people be able to bring their pets? The proposed plan begins by stating that “the actual danger posed by the plant is very small,” but in the event of a radioactive emergency, residents will be instructed to remain indoors, close all windows and doors, and turn off circulation systems. People who have been outdoors will be told to take a shower and change clothes. There are no instructions for full-scale evacuation.

  Dr. Carl Johnson, who has filed an appeal in his lawsuit against the county board of health, feels that the response plan is completely inadequate. A radioactive plume, he says, is similar to a dust storm, and plutonium is likely to lodge in windowsills, bricks, and cracks in wood. “It’s not just a matter of a sort of gaseous cloud passing overhead that will soon dissipate,” he says. “We’re talking about particles that drop to the ground and remain dangerously radioactive.… Even getting in a car and rolling up the windows may be safer than staying indoors.” He also believes the government’s levels for acceptable plutonium dose exposures are far too high and would result in a rise in radiation-related cancer and spontaneous abortions.

  Felix Owen, director of information services for Rockwell, says there is no reason for anyone living around Rocky Flats to fear for their health. Not only is an accident very unlikely, he says, but small amounts of plutonium have only “negligible” effects on human health. “I personally feel low-level radiation is overemphasized,” he says. “We live in a sea of radiation. Man has built an immunity to it. The human body is already developing defense mechanisms against it.”

  However, Johnson states, “Very little of Colorado’s normal background radiation comes from alpha-emitting plutonium. People in this state are just not usually exposed to inhaling alpha-radiating particles unless they live around a facility like Rocky Flats. Low-level radiation from internal sources is particularly dangerous; we certainly have no natural immunity to it.” The emergency plan, he feels, should be based on the premise that all of Denver might have to be evacuated should a radiological accident occur.

  The plan never moves beyond the drafting stage and is never fully tested, due largely to lack of support from Rocky Flats. Niels Schonbeck, the biochemistry professor and member of the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, later notes, “My impression is that the public is without a clue as to what they would do in the face of an accident at Rocky Flats.… [To implement an effective emergency response plan] would alarm an otherwise uninformed public.” The government stance seems to be that educating the public about what to do in the event of an actual radioactive emergency would only result in panic and confusion.

  Rocky Flats continues to grow in order to meet production quotas. Back in March 1980, officials announced the completion of Building 371, a $215 million plutonium processing building intended to replace Building 771, the site of the 1957 fire. Designed to last twenty-five years, Building 771 is now thirty years old and, in the words of General Edward Giller of the AEC just after the fire in 1969, is an “old, outmoded, and increasingly hazardous operation” that must be replaced. “The present facility,” he said, “is deteriorating due to the severely corrosive atmosphere inside the glove box lines.… The corrosion causes equipment and glove boxes to fail, resulting in spills or leaks of contaminated materials into the working areas.” Nearly a decade has passed since then, with 771 still in full swing.

  Manager Jack Weaver is assigned to oversee the new Building 371. There are problems, though. In Building 771, everything is on one floor. Building 371 is three floors and contains seventy-seven miles of pipes for processing plutonium, from the ground floor to the basement and sub-basement. During construction, Weaver and his crew find cracks in the concrete walls and other problems.

  Building 371, despite the best efforts of Jack Weaver’s crew, never quite works right. Equipment and filters malfunction. Plutonium is lost in the system. In Weaver’s first inventory of the facility in April 1983, he reports that 25 percent of the plutonium in the facility is snagged in the piping or ducts. Building 771, on the other hand, is unable to account for only 2 to 3 percent of its plutonium, according to its twice-yearly inventories.

  Two years after Building 371 begins operations, Rockwell shuts it down for safety and security reasons. It never reopens. Full production resumes in Building 771, now referred to by the media as “the most dangerous building in America.”

  In March 1982, Bruce Shepard, a Colorado Springs developer and administrator at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), recommends abolishing the Rocky Flats Advisory Notice, which has been in effect since 1979. The notice required that homeowners within a ten-mile radius of the plant be informed of plutonium contamination and emergency response procedures before buying a home with FHA mortgage insurance or any other HUD assistance. Other local developers support his efforts, believing that it has had a negative effect on property values and home sales.

  HUD lifts the requirement. Someone buying a home in Bridledale will no longer have to sign a piece of paper as my parents did. The developers involved in rescinding the Advisory Notice have invested in at least two housing developments near Rocky Flats.

  MY MOTHER reluctantly puts our house on the market. A real estate agent in bright lipstick and pantyhose appears and puts a sign at the end of the driveway. “I don’t know where we’ll go,” my mother says, “but at least I won’t have this house hanging around my neck anymore.” She stays inside and rarely answers the phone. She sits at the dining room table, lighting one cigarette after the other, gazing out the front picture window.

  But the house doesn’t sell. Month after month it sits on the market and no one comes to look. We paint the fence and have the curtains cleaned. Even the animals are on their best behavior. No one calls.

  “It’s Rocky Flats,” says the real estate agent. “People are nervous to buy in this neighborhood.”

  “Nonsense,” my mother snorts. It’s just family luck, she’s sure. Or the blundering real estate agent. “Your dad always said not to trust women agents,” my mother muses as the agent click-clacks in her high heels down the driveway to her car. “Maybe I should have believed him.”

  The neighborhood is changing. Everyone’s gone: the packs of kids who swam in the lake and irrigation ditches, who ice-skated on the pond and galloped their horses around the perim
eter of Bridledale and Meadowgate, who roared their minibikes up and down the street—all are off to college or vo-tech school or working at the supermarket or waitressing. Randy Sullivan is working as a bouncer in a bar. Even the turkey farm is gone, the land turned into open space as part of a legal settlement.

  Karma knows she will leave home. She packs a duffel bag and asks Mom to drive her and her friend Laurie out to the freeway. Our mother slides behind the wheel of our old green station wagon with her usual fortitude and grace. She doesn’t have a second thought about allowing her youngest daughter to hit the road. Just as she put us out the back door and didn’t allow us to come back until dusk when we were small, she expects each of us to stand on our own.

  The girls throw their bags in the back and count the dollars between them. When they reach I-70, Mom pulls over to the side of the road. The girls get out, swing their duffel bags over their shoulders, and Karma reaches into her pocket for a quarter. “Tails, east, heads, west,” she says. She flips the coin into the air and catches it in her palm.

  “Heads,” Laurie says. “West.”

  “West it is,” Karma agrees.

  Mom turns the car around and waves as the girls trudge up to the shoulder of the highway to catch a passing truck. In an instant, Karma is gone.

  My life feels rudderless. I’m grasping at straws, looking for an invisible god. I meet a boy named Andrew at the university and he stops by the English department, gets my class schedule, and waits for me after my Chaucer class. Six months later, while we’re driving down a Boulder street in my red VW bug, he proposes. I choose a wedding dress off the rack at the mall and there’s hardly enough time to send out invitations. The ceremony takes place at a small community church in Boulder, and the reception is held at our tiny duplex with our two cats locked in the bathroom. My new husband and I are barely old enough to drink the champagne at our own wedding.

  In December 1983, our house finally sells at a bargain-basement price. The house my parents designed and built, filled with Scandinavian knickknacks and secondhand Italian furniture, leaky pipes, and a flea-bitten bear rug, the house weathered by a steady torrent of found cats, wayward dogs, mean Shetland ponies, fast-reproducing hamsters, hardy mice, parakeets always making a break for it, and a goat just passing through, is gone. The horses are sold or given away. My mother leases a small apartment in Arvada and packs up as many boxes as she can fit into one of the bedrooms. Most things she has to sell or give to the thrift store. She and my brother take one pet with them, a grumpy gray cat named Colby. The apartment feels cramped and dark, with orange carpet and an avocado kitchen. My mother works full-time and takes night classes to become a hospice nurse while Kurt finishes high school. Two weeks before graduation, Kurt is suspended from school for a senior prank that earns the respect of all his friends. He and his buddies paint brightly colored polka dots on the “temporaries”—the long wooden trailers parked behind the school building to accommodate overflow students, trailers that became permanent long ago. In a final salute, the boys ring the flagpole in front of the school with radial tires. When the security guard catches them, Kurt’s friends run, leaving him suspended on top of the pole.

  The principal threatens to deny graduation and hold him back. Our mother vigorously defends him. It’s decided that Kurt will graduate, but can’t attend the graduation ceremony.

  That’s all right with Kurt. On graduation day he crawls up into the heating duct above the gym and scoots across the ceiling on his belly. When the ceremony begins, he lights small firecrackers and drops them on his unsuspecting compatriots in crime as they walk across the stage.

  He’s caught again. The principal withholds his diploma for weeks. “That Kurt,” my mother says with a tinge of pride. “I just don’t know what to do about him.”

  Karin leaves to take classes in music at the state college and dreams of being in a rock band. Karma is still hitchhiking. No one’s heard from her; no one knows where she is. My father is no longer in our orbit.

  THE DOE isn’t unaware of problems at Rocky Flats. An earlier study of plutonium operations details, among other things, “poor quality instruments, improper use of radiation monitoring equipment and faulty record keeping, concerns over antiquated fire detection and alarm systems, waste shipping and storage problems, and poor communication of safety and health matters up and down the organizational structure.” There is “little indication” that work was performed according to federal requirements. But little has changed. And the government will continue to press Rocky Flats to make bombs for at least another decade.

  In response to the discovery of leaking pondcrete, two officials from the Colorado Department of Health, accompanied by two engineers from the EPA, try to inspect Rocky Flats for violations of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), passed in 1976, which governs disposal of hazardous waste. So far the EPA and the Colorado Department of Health haven’t been very successful in strong-arming Rocky Flats. They can’t even get data about what’s being released into the environment. Rockwell is not happy to see them. The men are told they’re endangering national security by trying to conduct an inspection and are refused entry to certain areas.

  In the fall of 1988, however, the stakes change when a DOE official himself gets contaminated. On September 29, three people—a special inspector from the DOE and two Rocky Flats workers—are inspecting a room in Building 771. They walk into a room with several bins filled with contaminated tools and clothing next to an air vent. A sign telling the workers to put on respirators has been covered up by a cabinet. The alarm suddenly goes off, and a lab test confirms they’ve all been exposed to plutonium.

  Rocky Flats workers are accustomed to occasional misplaced or missing signs, dosimeter badges that don’t work or have been zeroed out, little slips and mishaps that make for a strong sense of camaraderie and no small amount of gallows humor. But the inspector from the DOE is more than a little annoyed. He files a report detailing “very serious” violations at the plant that leave “no margins for safety,” and criticizes “slow and unskilled” work by radiation monitors. He writes that radiological monitoring equipment is “unchecked, out of service, or out of calibration,” and that there is “haphazard” posting of warning signs. Among his laundry list of other problems is the note that “attitudes are complacent.”

  On October 7, 1988, the DOE closes Building 771, at least temporarily. Production is scheduled to resume within weeks. Incensed, the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, the citizens’ watchdog group appointed by Governor Roy Romer and Representative David Skaggs, calls a public meeting in Westminster, a community adjacent to Arvada, on October 25. Officials from Rocky Flats and the DOE agree to show up and answer questions. More than four hundred people jam the room.

  Earl Whiteman, a slender, soft-voiced man who serves as the DOE’s manager of Rocky Flats, begins with an informational slide presentation. He briefly describes the contamination incident that led to the closure of Building 771.

  “Shut it down!” someone yells from the back. Another voice chimes in. “Shut it down!”

  The building is shut down, Whiteman explains calmly. It was shut down in response to the September 29 incident. Beginning November 30, the incinerator must be shut down as well, the result of a court order following a successful lawsuit by the Sierra Club, and remain closed until February 28, 1989.

  The crowd boos. “Shut it down for good!” someone yells.

  “Tell the truth!” another person calls. The phrase is picked up by others in the crowd. “Tell the truth! Tell the truth!” The room is filled with shouts.

  Jim Wilson, chairman of the Rocky Flats Environmental Monitoring Council, calls for everyone to settle down. We don’t need a fistfight, he entreats, because “there are babies in the room.”

  Hilda Sperandeo, a sixty-one-year-old schoolteacher from Arvada, stands up to speak. Her husband died of cancer several years earlier. They never knew what was going on at Rocky Flats. She’s no
t sure if her husband’s illness was associated with Rocky Flats or not. “We just thought it was a factory,” she says. “All they do is lie to you. They don’t care about anything but making bombs.”

  Whiteman tries to reassure the crowd that the danger from the plant is minimal, and the amount of plutonium that contaminated the three people on September 29 was minimal as well.

  “How much plutonium was involved?” someone asks. “How much exactly?”

  Whiteman concedes that the exposure was ten times the amount normally found in the plutonium processing areas at Rocky Flats, and because the bins were near an air vent, radioactivity might have spread throughout the entire building.

  Questions turn to the radioactive boxcar refused by the governor of Idaho. “What’s in that boxcar?” someone asks.

  Like other boxcars, Whiteman explains calmly, the railcar holds 140 drums of waste. Each fifty-five-gallon drum is permitted by DOE regulations to contain up to 200 grams of plutonium. Production at Rocky Flats generates one boxcar per week.

  The crowd erupts. It’s a well-established fact that a millionth of a gram of plutonium in the body can cause cancer. Further, biochemist Niels Schonbeck stands and declares that 200 grams is twice the amount capable of causing a serious nuclear accident, based on information that Rocky Flats itself has released to the public. Harvey Nichols, the University of Colorado biology professor who studied the pollen and snow around Rocky Flats, agrees. If a small amount of moisture gets inside one of those barrels, he says, an explosion could be triggered.

  Just like the rallies at Rocky Flats, a low murmur moves through the crowd. Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats. Close Rocky Flats.

  Not everyone chimes in. Workers from the plant are in the crowd as well. Just before the meeting ends, a man stands and says he is one of the three people who were contaminated on September 29. He refuses to give his name. “I think the whole incident has been blown way out of proportion. I think it is a safe place to work.” There is sporadic applause.