Full Body Burden

by Kristen Iversen

  Crap, he thinks. Guess I have to change gears again. And now the stakes are back up. Randy knows that when you go in to fight an active plutonium fire, you’re going to get crapped up with radiation. You get hot.

  He takes a deep breath from his tank, clambers down the rest of the stairway, and pushes open the door, not knowing what to expect.

  Randy’s first thought is, What the hell are all these people doing in this room? There are people spilling out of the room into the hallway, some dressed only in common bib overalls. Everyone is panicked. It’s a confined space, and there is too much equipment and too many bodies. The air is filled with particulate from the fire extinguishers. He estimates visibility to be about six inches. He can barely make out anything in the chaos. A couple of workers are still trying to discharge a dry chemical fire extinguisher in the general direction of the flames.

  The criticality alarm is going off and the noise is deafening.

  “The fire’s in a glove box!” a worker shouts. Randy can’t see it. Building 371 is in deconstruction and decontamination mode, and the glove box that’s supposedly on fire has been tented off. Workers have constructed a shroud around it to keep all the contamination inside while they take it apart and try to decontaminate it. It figures, Randy thinks. The fire department has discussed the fact that there is a greater chance of something going wrong when workers are tearing things down than when the plant is in actual production. The pressure is on to get the place shut down fast and under budget. People are pushing hard to finish the mission. Sometimes they take shortcuts. Sometimes they make mistakes.

  This is a full-size glove box, as big as a refrigerator. And it’s a special glove box, called a “guillotine” box, designed with a spring-loaded trapdoor that’s set to slam down in the event of a fire or any unauthorized entry. Anyone or anything coming in through that trapdoor could be literally cut in half. A person could lose an arm or even be decapitated.

  No one informs Randy or Paul that the glove box is an armed guillotine box.

  The criticality alarm blares, red light throbbing, indicating that there is plutonium contamination in the air. Randy starts pulling people out of the room. “Get out of here now!” he yells. “Go! Go! Get out!”

  When the room is clear he convenes briefly with the other two firefighters in the exterior hallway. This time, he thinks, the shit has really hit the fan. He calls Paul, who is still manning the outside of the building, and fills him in. “It’s bad. I need more CO2 cans. I need more dry chem extinguishers. Fast.” He instructs one firefighter to stay in the hallway and the second to follow closely behind him.

  He goes back in. The room is a fog. He’s shocked that there are still workers in the room. “Get the hell out of here!” he shouts. But they seem to know where the fire is. “Here!” One points. “Here it is!”

  “Where?” Randy shouts. His voice sounds like Darth Vader’s. All the firefighters sound like Darth Vader when they’re wearing their respirators. It’s almost impossible to communicate clearly.

  “Over here!” the worker shouts again, his voice unimpeded by a respirator. Why isn’t he wearing a respirator? The workers are supposed to be familiar with the dangers of plutonium fires and the proper procedures to follow when they occur. If a plutonium button starts to glow, the worker grabs a coffee can and sprinkles a little magnesium oxide powder or sand to smother it. Anything more than that, they’re supposed to call the fire department and get out of there.

  The workers in this room, though, are scared. Something’s gone awry. And they haven’t evacuated like they’re supposed to.

  Randy still can’t see the fire. His vision is distorted from all the chemical particulate in the air. He goes around to the back of the glove box. “No, up here!” the worker yells at the front. Randy follows his lead but still can’t see it. “Get out!” he yells. “You guys get out of here!”

  He goes to the back of the glove box again. And there it is.

  The flames reach as high as three or four feet. And they’re a funny color, a kind of metallic blue that he knows is not a good sign. Not good for his body. Not good for his lungs.

  But he doesn’t have time to think about it. At any rate, he’s packed up and sealed about as tight as anyone could be.

  He examines the glove box. This particular one is a trash glove box, used to collect radioactive refuse from all the other glove boxes. Chemical wipes and all sorts of junk end up here. There’s no way to tell how much plutonium might be in there. A cut has been made high on the side, and it looks like a piece of metal has fallen off, creating a spark and igniting the trash.

  Randy still can’t find the source of the fire. His partner hands him a dry chemical fire extinguisher and he gets it in place and engages the flames.

  It has no effect.

  Randy glances down at the floor of the tent, and what he sees almost stops him in his tracks. There are eight empty fire extinguishers down there. That’s ridiculous, he thinks. How can that be? Workers are trained to use one fire extinguisher, maybe two at the most. If one doesn’t work, they’re supposed to back out and immediately call the fire squad.

  He appreciates the fact that they tried to contain the fire. But eight canisters? What were they trying to do? My God, he thinks. Everything has gone wrong with this fire.

  The criticality alarm blares so loudly he can’t hear his radio. He can barely see his hands in front of his face.

  Go easy, he tells himself. Go easy.

  His partner hands him another can. This time Randy knocks the flames down slightly. He pollutes the air even more with dry chemical—visibility is almost zero—but it’s all he’s got to work with.

  There’s no time to waste, but he decides to use a new technology the firefighters have just received—a thermal imaging camera clipped to his belt. Everything in the glove box is shrouded in a dry chemical fog. He leans deep inside the box and starts taking pictures. He pulls out, checks the camera, leans back in and shoots again. Finally he sees the genesis of the fire, deep at the back of the glove box and buried in trash. There are filters inside, encased in wood, and the wood is smoldering and burning. No matter how much dry chemical he uses, he’s not going to be able to put that out.

  “The dry chem’s not making it!” he yells. He grabs a pipe pole and starts digging, trying to grab the material and pull it out of the box. It’s unbearably hot. The material is heavy. Randy leans into the glove box again and again, working as quickly as possible. He knows there’s plutonium in there. How much, he doesn’t know.

  He thinks about using water. There’s no water line established, of course, because water isn’t supposed to be an option. Randy knows they used water on the Mother’s Day fire, but that was a last-ditch effort to save the plant—and the city—from an all-out nuclear holocaust. And he’s heard that there was a chain of unlikely events that made the situation come out a lot better than it probably should have. He’s heard stories that a fire engine hit a power line and knocked out the power, which helped the firefighters and kept the roof intact.

  If that roof had melted, he thinks, Colorado Springs would now be the capital of Colorado.

  Will he, too, get a lucky break?

  He can’t get this fire under control. The dry chem isn’t working, and there’s no water line. His radio is silent. There’s no communication coming down from above.

  It’s unclear what he should do. He’s running out of time.

  Outside the building, where Paul is trying to monitor Randy’s actions, they’re setting up a full-scale decontamination station.

  Randy checks his tank. His air is low. The two firefighters assisting him are also running low. They’re hot, the air is full of vapor from the dry chem, and they need fresh tanks of air.

  “Paul!” Randy barks into his radio. “The dry chem isn’t working. Can we use water?” He says it again with more emphasis. “Can we use water, Paul?”

  There’s a long pause, and then the word comes down. “Yes,” Paul says
. “We’re bringing a line in now.”

  The moments pass interminably. Finally a firefighter appears at the bottom of the stairs. They establish the line and the standpipe, and then snake the line into the glove-box room. Randy keeps pulling pieces of trash, radioactive and otherwise, out of the glove box, while the man behind him holds the water line. “Just knock it gently,” Randy says. “Put a little water on the burning charcoal. Real slow.” Suddenly he pulls out a plastic liter bottle. “That’s not good,” he mutters. Plastic liter bottles are used to store plutonium-laced liquids.

  The water seems to be working. The two men are rapidly gulping air, going through one tank, then another. The room is intensely hot, the work physically and emotionally draining, and it’s taking longer than expected. Randy can’t read his partner’s face behind the mask, but he knows they’re both nearing exhaustion.

  “We need another crew!” Randy yells into his radio. “We need someone to spell us. It’s getting pretty difficult in here.”

  There’s no response. He’s not sure anyone’s heard him. Finally the new operations chief shows up in a face mask and regulator, with a fresh crew behind him. The entire firehouse crew, as a matter of fact. This is what firefighters call “dumping the house.”

  By the time they arrive, though, the fire is essentially out.

  Randy orders his exhausted crew out of the building, with instructions to fill their air tanks before they start up the stairs and head for decon. “We have a long way to hump out,” he shouts. “Top off your tanks.” But they don’t listen. They just want out. As the two men head up the stairs, Randy hears the men’s personal air alarms go off. They’re anxious to get out and think they’ve got enough air to get up the stairs, or they want to leave more air for the new crew. “Crap,” Randy mutters. “It’s like herding cats.”

  Nonetheless, he keeps going until he’s sure the fire’s out. He looks around the room. It’s a mess. Dry chem and water and God knows what. Visibility is still poor. But at least the fire is under control. The new crew can begin to clean things up. As a captain, Randy is always the first in and the last out, and now it’s time for him to get out. He takes pride in protecting his crew. He waits until his last guy is up the stairs, and then he begins the climb.

  Abruptly his own air alarm goes off. He looks down at his air tank gauge. It’s red.

  He keeps going. He reaches the top of the stairs and bursts out of the building, where a radiation monitor hands him a fresh respirator. He breathes deeply. A staging center for decontamination has been set up right in front of the building. They’re trying to keep everything contained. Randy’s crew is already getting scrubbed.

  He’s told that most of his crew likely suffered not much more than alpha radiation. But his case is different. He was in that room for a long time, with all that dry chemical in the air. Plutonium and other contaminants bond to airborne material. And plutonium particles are microscopically small. It doesn’t take much to cause a problem. Even though he was wrapped up as tightly as possible, he’s got internal contamination.

  He takes off his gear, peels off his clothes, and steps into the decontamination room wearing nothing but his boxers and a respirator. The radiation monitor passes a wand closely over his entire body.

  “You’re pretty hot, sir.” The man steps back a little.

  “How hot?”

  “Your skin contamination is high. High, high, high.”

  This is not good, Randy thinks. Definitely not good. It’s a warm afternoon but he’s shivering.

  The radiation monitor leaves and Randy hears voices in the other room. A doctor emerges. “I’m sorry,” he says. “We can’t do you here, Captain. Your counts are too high to decon you here.” Only basic decontamination could be done at the site of the fire. He’ll have to be taken up to the decon room at the medical building, a special trailer for decontamination consisting of one big room with three separate chambers behind glass doors. The room is filtered, with a shower and a cot in case a contaminated employee has to spend the night.

  Randy shivers and waits. Some of the men from his own crew, freshly scrubbed and decontaminated, come into the room. They truss him up in tiebacks, pull gloves on his hands, and tape him up so that no part of his body is exposed. He is isolated and quarantined within his own skin. The mood is somber and no one speaks. An ambulance pulls up. They put him on a gurney, roll him into the back, and drive him, red lights flashing, to the medical building.

  Once again Randy is stripped down, but this time all he gets to keep is the respirator. A special medical team shows up, a team with long experience working with contaminated people in Building 771. A doctor stands by with a DTPA syringe, which Randy and his co-workers know as “the big honking needle.” DTPA, or diethylene triamine pentacetic acid, is a chelating agent that isolates internal contamination from radioactive materials—plutonium, americium, or curium—and binds with the radioactive material or poison and then passes it from the body in urine. DTPA can’t reverse health effects caused by the radioactive material, but it helps decrease the amount of time it takes the radioactive poison to leave the body. He gets scrubbed from head to toe with a bleach solution until he feels raw all over. The radiation monitor checks him again. He’s still hot. Screaming hot, especially around the belly, from having leaned repeatedly into the glove-box door.

  They scrub, check, scrub, check, scrub, check. This goes on for nearly three hours. Randy hears the doctors talking about his radiation counts in the other room. Then they come in again and scrub him some more.

  There’s talk about whether or not his entire body should be shaved. Hair can sometimes be a trap for radioactive particles. “At least I’m a Cherokee,” Randy jokes. “Not much body hair.”

  He escapes being shaved. Finally they stop scrubbing. But it’s not over yet. Now they begin to try to measure internal contamination more specifically and determine how much soluble plutonium is passing through Randy’s body. Insoluble deposits in lymph nodes, the liver, or the bone—plutonium that stays in the body—are very difficult to measure or detect. Randy gets a nasal swipe and lung count, then has to provide fecal and urine samples.

  When Randy finally gets back to the fire station, it’s past dinnertime. He calls his wife. It’s been a long day, and it will be a few more hours before they’ll let him go home. He worries, as always, whether or not he’s bringing any radioactivity home with him.

  The tests for internal contamination will go on for weeks and months, and he’ll need to bring in fecal samples regularly. The other guys joke with him about it. “You get to do the Cool Whip container thing!”

  “Yeah,” he says. It’s like being a member of a special Rocky Flats club. He thinks back to how the day began, with the warm morning sun and a breakfast burrito. “This turned into a whole full-blown thing, didn’t it? A damn big deal.”

  Later, when he’s interviewed by DOE officials, Randy learns that the glove box he’d been leaning into was a guillotine box, poised to mechanically spring and sever anything that intruded—a hand, an arm, or a head. Why hadn’t it operated properly? No one seems to know. Why wasn’t he informed? Apparently the workers were panicked trying to control the fire.

  “That disturbs me,” he remarks to Paul. He tries not to think about it.

  ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2005, Tamara Smith Meza returns from church with her husband and is talking on the phone with a friend. She’s had to cut back on her teaching, of course, but at her last checkup her doctor gave her a clean bill of health. Three years have passed since the brain tumor. Both she and her husband are relieved.

  Suddenly a sharp, searing pain shoots through her head. Tamara gasps. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she says to her friend, “but my head hurts so bad I think I better go. I gotta go.” She hangs up the phone. “David!” she yells. “David!” He rushes into the room to find her kneeling on the living room floor, touching her head and then looking at her hands as if she were looking for blood on her fingers. She begi
ns to cry, and then vomits. “I can’t feel my left side!” she cries, and then passes out.

  David picks her up and lays her on the couch. He calls 911. He hangs up the phone and sees that Tamara has stopped breathing. He can’t see any vital signs. He clears her airway and starts doing CPR, and continues until the ambulance arrives.

  The tumor has returned. Tamara has surgery again. This time the side effects are more severe: she has trouble with walking, balance, and memory. But she recovers.

  Four months later, a third brain tumor appears. The first tumor grew in the memory region of her brain, the second in the speech and language section, and the new tumor is in the cavity left by the removal of the first tumor.

  Tamara Smith Meza’s surgeries and health problems make it impossible for her to continue teaching. She and her husband return to Colorado and buy a house just a few minutes away from the house she grew up in, where her parents still live.

  Sometimes people ask her if she thinks Rocky Flats might have affected her health or caused her condition. She doesn’t think too much about it. She’s focused on her treatments, on her diet, on her relationship with her family and with God. But Tamara’s husband, David, does think about whether Rocky Flats might have had something to do with it. There’s no way to prove it, of course. It’s all invisible, unseen, unverifiable.

  Silence is an easy habit. But it doesn’t come naturally. Silence has to be cultivated, enforced by implication and innuendo, looks and glances, hints of dark consequence. Silence is greedy. It insists upon its own necessity. It transcends generations.

  Silence is almost always well-intentioned. What parent hasn’t scolded their child? We don’t talk about things like that. Just look the other way. Keep your thoughts to yourself. This is just for our family to know. You can forget this ever happened. Let’s not upset anyone. If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

  The cost of silence and the secrets it contains is high, but you don’t learn the price until later. Secrets depend upon the smooth façade of silence, on the calm flat water that hides the darker depths.