IN THE weeks and months that follow my surgery, I try to forget about Rocky Flats. My symptoms come and go, and I continue to see various physicians. When I mention to one doctor that I grew up near Rocky Flats and briefly worked at the plant, and I wonder if there might be a connection of some kind, he laughs. “You can’t worry about things like that,” he says.
And it isn’t cancer, after all. I should feel relieved.
What does it matter, anyway, where my symptoms come from? It could be anything. Allergies, viruses, flu, exhaustion, bad weather, a bad day at the office. Maybe it’s all in my imagination. The uncertainty is frustrating.
But my siblings share many of my symptoms. And it’s still there, the lingering feeling that this chapter wasn’t supposed to be part of my story, or my family’s story, or anyone’s story. Governments aren’t supposed to poison their own people.
We weren’t supposed to know about Rocky Flats during the production years, and now we are supposed to forget it ever existed.
ONE DAY, not long after I quit my job at the plant, I’m having lunch with a friend when she mentions a woman named Ann White. “You’d like her,” she says. “And she knows a lot about Rocky Flats.”
Ann White turns out to be a very energetic woman with gray hair and a quick smile. And she does know a lot about the plant. She’s long been involved with citizen groups that are concerned about ongoing contamination issues at Rocky Flats, and she tells me how she was arrested for protesting.
“They say they’re going to clean it up,” she says. “Cheap.”
When I worked at Rocky Flats, the DOE projected that it would take until 2065—nearly one hundred years from when my family moved to Bridledale—and more than $36 billion to clean up the nuclear waste. There was a question of whether they even had the technology to clean it up, and some non-DOE scientists talked about making the Rocky Flats site a “national sacrifice zone,” completely closed off to the public.
She told me how in 1996, the year after I quit Rocky Flats, Mark Silverman, the DOE manager at Rocky Flats—whose voice I had known well from the crackling loudspeakers over my head at work—had acknowledged to her and a group of citizens that Rocky Flats was facing a crisis. Tons of plutonium were unsafely stored in proximity to more than two million residents. He talked about an Accelerated Site Action Plan (ASAP) that would include a 130-acre cement cap over the high-security, highly contaminated processing areas. By 2010, he said, most of the major buildings would be demolished and plutonium would be consolidated and sealed behind thick layers of concrete.
“They’re just going to cover it up?” I ask.
“Apparently so,” Ann replies. “Parts of it, anyway.”
“By 2010?”
Ann nods. “Can you believe it?”
I think about what might be under that cement cap. The Infinity Rooms, for one thing.
Infinity Rooms—called that because the radioactivity is so high it can’t be measured by standard equipment—are so profoundly contaminated after four decades of pit manufacturing that no one can access them without “extraordinary safety measures,” including full-body suits and oxygen tanks. Workers have to wear body suits and respirators just to peek in the door. With a total area of 4,500 square feet—about the size of a professional basketball court—they are scattered throughout three separate buildings. Back in 1968, one of the rooms was welded shut, a worker’s tools left inside, like an abandoned workers’ cave at the bottom of a mineshaft. Except this cave was lethal—forever. Infinity Rooms are legendary in plant gossip.
Then there were the “Pac-Man” rooms, named after the video game because they “gobbled up” and stored contaminated equipment from around the site. A worker had to go through four separate airlock chambers to enter a Pac-Man room. There were the barrels of radioactive waste—roughly a thousand of them—awaiting shipment to other federal facilities. There was Building 371, which had never functioned properly and operated for only two years before it was shut down due to safety issues. In Building 371 there were seventeen different Infinity Rooms on three floors—2,200 square feet of plutonium-contaminated space.
“They’re hoping we’ll just forget about it,” Ann says. “If we can’t see it, it can’t be real, right?”
STANDLEY LAKE was a magnet for me and my siblings when the afternoons were long and sleepy, and we could sit in the tall grass and watch the water ripple and dance as if it were tapped by invisible fingertips. We felt small in the face of the lake and the long fields leading up to the blue foothills and the gray hulking mountains beyond. The mud along the water’s edge was thick and pungent and clung to our skin and clothes like mottled glue.
I return to the lake even though the tall grass no longer makes me feel small. My sisters and brother do, too. Maybe it reminds us of a happier, peaceful time. The lake no longer looks the same; the surrounding pastures are now filled with housing developments, and an RV campsite and boat dock stand where once I galloped my horse.
Everything has changed.
One afternoon my brother, Kurt, who still lives near Arvada, is walking along the lake’s edge with his wife, Cindy. Their two golden retrievers run and leap ahead of them, happy to be off their leashes. Kurt reaches down and grabs two sticks and throws them, one by one, out into the water.
“Uh-oh,” Cindy says. “Here comes trouble.”
A patrol boat pulls up with two men inside. They have a bullhorn. “Get your dogs out of the water,” a voice calls.
“What?” Cindy laughs. She turns to Kurt. They’ve always walked along the lake and let the dogs play in the water.
“Now,” the man demands. “Get your dogs out of the water now.” He means it.
Kurt calls and the dogs come swimming back, noses high, front paws paddling. They climb up on the bank and shake themselves thoroughly, drops flying.
“Keep your dogs out of the lake. No one gets in the lake,” the man barks. The boat turns to go back.
“Wait!” Kurt yells. “Why?”
The boat turns slightly. The man drops the bullhorn. “It’s drinking water,” he yells. “No one can get in the water.”
“What?” Kurt looks around. Several speedboats are making big circles on the lake. “People are waterskiing. And swimming.” He laughs. They’re worried about a few dog hairs getting in the drinking supply?
“You can ski in the middle of the lake, or you and your dogs can swim in the middle of the lake, but you can’t wade in or kick up any sediment,” the man says.
“Why?” Kurt asks.
“Because it’s drinking water,” he replies.
Kurt turns to Cindy. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Lake officials—as well as the DOE, the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE), and even the EPA—are counting on people not to question their logic.
The fact is, there’s plutonium in that sediment.
Kurt doesn’t trust anything about Rocky Flats. He’s started delivering pizzas at night for a little extra income for his family. One of his co-workers is a previous Rocky Flats worker. “I have nothing left of my life,” he tells Kurt. His arms are covered shoulder to wrist with tattoos, an attempt to hide the scars he says he carries from being scrubbed down with steel wool after contamination “incidents” at Rocky Flats. His health is poor and he’s living on pizza delivery paychecks and tips.
Kurt’s surprised. Most of the Rocky Flats workers he knows about are the parents of his friends. Many of them have died. But this guy is much younger.
MANY STUDIES have been done on Rocky Flats over the years. In 1996 a Boston University epidemiologist, Richard Clapp, found a disproportionate rate of lung and bone cancers in areas around Rocky Flats. There was good reason, he concluded, to continue to survey the incidence of cancer and other diseases in exposed communities and to monitor public health.
But no health testing or medical monitoring has ever been done for people living near Rocky Flats, although it has been done elsewhere
in the United States. In 1989 a class-action lawsuit by residents living near the Fernald uranium processing facility near Cincinnati, Ohio, settled for $78 million and established the Fernald Medical Monitoring Program, providing comprehensive monitoring of the health of roughly 9,500 people. Another class-action lawsuit, brought by former workers at Fernald, ended in August 1994 with a $15 million settlement plus lifelong medical monitoring for workers.
Following Clapp’s study, in 1998 the Colorado Cancer Registry of the CDPHE released a report asserting that there was no evidence of adverse health effects directly attributable to the plant in residential areas near Rocky Flats compared to other parts of the greater Denver area. Some citizens were relieved. Others questioned the methodology, especially given the fact that contamination from the fires at Rocky Flats, and the 1957 fire in particular, blanketed the broader Denver metropolitan area. A radiation health specialist, Bernd Franke, noted that the report was meant to “calm people down for public relations purposes.”
The year 1999 marked the end of a decade-long study commissioned by Governor Roy Romer and administered by the CDPHE. Because the court documents from the FBI raid were—and still are—sealed, and no actual testing or monitoring of the health of individuals had been performed, the report depended primarily on available records, research and analysis of past releases of radioactive materials and chemicals, and “dose reconstruction,” a method that involves calculating how much plutonium might have been released from the plant and how people might have been affected, including the potential for an increased risk of cancer. Even relying on these methods, the Rocky Flats Historical Public Exposures Study discovered shocking levels of contamination.
The study identified plutonium and carbon tetrachloride as the most significant contaminants from the plant. Further, between 1,100 and 5,400 tons of carbon tetrachloride, a solvent used for cleaning and de-greasing, were released. Other contaminants included beryllium, dioxin, uranium, and tritium. People who lived near the plant and led “active, outdoor lifestyles” had the highest level of exposure to airborne plutonium. (The study itself focuses on “ranch workers,” but this would have applied to children playing outside, too—and children are even more vulnerable than adults.) The largest amounts of plutonium released from Rocky Flats into surrounding neighborhoods and communities came from the 1957 fire and, in the late 1960s, from a waste-oil storage area—the leaking barrels. Soil sampling showed that the highest offsite plutonium concentrations in soil were mostly east of the plant. My old stomping ground. People were exposed to contaminants by drinking water and ingesting vegetables and meat and through skin contact, but, the report explained, those exposures were found to be significantly smaller than exposures from breathing plutonium.
With respect to water, the study found that plutonium and tritium were the key radioactive materials in water samples from Walnut Creek and Woman Creek, both of which flowed off-site from Rocky Flats. The two creeks eventually flowed into local reservoirs that supplied, or continue to supply, drinking water to several local cities. As a result of this contamination, in 1997 the city of Broomfield built a new drinking water supply, and Great Western Reservoir was no longer used for city drinking water.
Standley Lake, however, continues to provide drinking water for local communities, and the lake is used extensively for recreation. Woman Creek—the creek where I kissed Adam so long ago—flows directly from the Rocky Flats site into Standley Lake. In 1996, partly due to public protest, Woman Creek Reservoir was built to try to stem the flow of Rocky Flats contaminants into Standley Lake. No attempt was made, however, to clean up the already existing contaminants.
The report stated that most of the plutonium from Rocky Flats was in a form that wouldn’t readily dissolve in water, and thus tended to sink to the bottom of the streambeds of Walnut and Woman Creeks and into the sediment of Standley Lake. The DOE stated that drinking water contained only “trace elements” of contamination and that “average contamination levels … have never exceeded drinking water standards or relevant health guidelines, even for plutonium.” The report conceded that residents using Standley Lake for recreational purposes “might incidentally ingest sediment and water that contains, or previously contained, site-related contaminants,” but blandly asserted that such contact “is not expected to be detrimental to one’s health” and concluded that there is “no apparent public health hazard.” The report did note, however, that further study was needed regarding risks to the public from environmental plutonium exposure, giving as an example the plutonium deposited in the silt of Standley Lake.
There’s good reason not to kick up that sediment. You wouldn’t know it, though. There are no signs mentioning the presence of plutonium in Standley Lake.
The main risk of inhaled plutonium, the study noted, was cancer of the lung, liver, bone, and bone marrow. Nonetheless, the study stated that the risk of getting cancer was minimal, and that all remaining contaminants in the air, water, and soil beyond plant boundaries did not exceed safe levels established by the government. Of the $8.7 million of federal funds used for the study, more than $1 million was spent on public relations to reassure people that they had nothing to worry about. This included guest newspaper columns and letters to the editor written by a public relations firm and signed by health department officials, as well as “polishing the speaking styles” of health department consultants and setting up talks and luncheons with local community groups.
The study did not change anything. Despite ongoing requests from Colorado citizens for further health testing and monitoring, the DOE and CDPHE say that due to population changes, low levels of exposure, and the fact that no disease can be attributed solely to plutonium, it is not feasible to perform an epidemiological study of residents around Rocky Flats.
EACH YEAR my siblings and I return with our families to our mother’s house in Arvada for the holidays. It’s just days before Christmas in 2004, and we’re preparing for our usual Christmas Eve family gathering. Sean and Nathan, who have always been tall for their age, nearly reach my shoulders. My mother has ordered lefse—no lutefisk, thank goodness—and a chocolate Yule log with all the trimmings, and we discuss where to buy the turkey now that Jackson’s Turkey Farm is long gone. Ever since I worked at Rocky Flats, I can’t help but think of pondcrete when I see the white, gelatinous lutefisk that my mother loves. I don’t mention this to her; that’s one joke she probably wouldn’t appreciate.
My mother’s townhouse is beautifully decorated for the holidays. She loves parties and holidays and extravaganzas. There’s a big wreath on the door, and evergreen boughs are strewn across the fireplace mantel. Holiday potpourri simmers in a pot, and Christmas carols blare on the stereo. She’s had her hair done up in blond curls and she wears a bright red sweatshirt with sequined appliqués of Santas and reindeer, mostly for the grandchildren, I think. On Christmas Eve she’ll don a more tasteful pair of slacks and a red cashmere sweater with a matching necklace and earrings.
Some Christmas Eves, my father slips in quietly with a box of chocolates in hand and joins us silently for dinner. He rarely speaks and never stays long. His exits are as stealthy as his entrances. We’re not even sure why he comes.
It’s been years since that’s happened. My father now lives in a small untidy apartment, a mausoleum of unwashed dishes and crumpled clothing, old newspapers, books with worn covers, and an ancient television with no knobs.
I stand in the kitchen in front of the oven, pulling cookies out on hot baking sheets and rolling them in powdered sugar. I don’t know that this will be our last real Christmas together as a family. The years ahead will bring a host of health problems for my mother, including Alzheimer’s. Her health will decline so quickly we will hardly know how to deal with it.
But on this day she is cheerful and chatty and looks radiant. The phone rings. She answers it in the other room. I hear her voice go on for a moment or two and then she comes into the kitchen, receiver in hand, with a meaningf
ul look in her eye. “It’s your father.”
“Oh, thanks, Mom,” I say, more than a little sardonically. I still carry the image of him from my childhood: neglectful and neglecting, neglected himself, no doubt, this man who never showed me much affection or attention.
What is a daughter’s responsibility to a father? Is a child obligated to love, care for, and respect a parent in the face of indifference? Indifference that is perhaps more devastating than conflict or anger? He has been absent, tormented, darkly destructive, angry, sometimes threatening. I am invisible to him, yet my father looms so large in my memory and imagination that I can’t seem to knock him loose from my head or my heart.
“Take it,” my mother says, handing me the phone. “You should talk to him.”
I take the phone and say hello flatly.
“Kris!” His voice sounds overly loud and a little forced. “How are you?”
“Okay.”
We have nothing to say to each other, I think. We don’t even know each other.
He wants to meet for coffee.
“I don’t know—”
“Go,” my mother says. She seems to have radar and picks up the faintest details of any phone conversation in the house. She waves both her hands in the air, as if shooing me away like a fly. “Go. Go!”
“All right.”
We agree to meet at a Starbucks just south of Arvada. “Just for a few minutes,” my dad says. “I’ll be driving my cab. I’m on shift.”
I arrive first. I’m late, but I know he’ll be later. That’s a time-honored tradition in our family. We’re always late. Five minutes pass, then ten. I order a coffee for myself and sit down. Another ten minutes pass. Maybe, I think, he’s not going to show up.
There’s a time-honored tradition of that, too.
Eventually a sun-worn yellow cab pulls into the parking lot, moving slowly, carefully. My father climbs out. He holds his hand up against the sun and pushes against the door of the coffee shop. “Kris?”
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